Page:Appearance and Reality (1916).djvu/552

 I will merely add here that for me a person is finite or is meaningless. But the question raised as to the Absolute may, I think, be more briefly disposed of. If by calling it personal you mean only that it is nothing but experience, that it contains all the highest that we possibly can know and feel, and is a unity in which the details are utterly pervaded and embraced—then in this conclusion I am with you. But your employment of the term personal I very much regret. I regret this use mainly not because I consider it incorrect—that between us would matter little—but because it is misleading and directly serves the cause of dishonesty.

For most of those who insist on what they call “the personality of God,” are intellectually dishonest. They desire one conclusion, and, to reach it, they argue for another. But the second, if proved, is quite different, and serves their purpose only because they obscure it and confound it with the first. And it is by their practical purpose that the result may here be judged. The Deity, which they want, is of course finite, a person much like themselves, with thoughts and feelings limited and mutable in the process of time. They desire a person in the sense of a self, amongst and over against other selves, moved by personal relations and feelings towards these others—feelings and relations which are altered by the conduct of the others. And, for their purpose, what is not this, is really nothing. Now with this desire in itself I am not here concerned. Of course for us to ask seriously if the Absolute can be personal in such a way, would be quite absurd. And my business for the moment is not with truth but with intellectual honesty.

It would be honest first of all to state openly the conclusion aimed at, and then to enquire if this conclusion can be maintained. But what is not honest is to suppress the point really at issue, to desire the personality of the Deity in one sense, and then to