contend for it in another, and to do one’s best to ignore the chasm which separates the two. Once give up your finite and mutable person, and you have parted with everything which, for you, makes personality important. Nor will you bridge the chasm by the sliding extension of a word. You will only make a fog, where you can cry out that you are on both sides at once. And towards increasing this fog I decline to contribute. It would be useless, in such company and in such an atmosphere, to discuss the meaning of personality—if indeed the word actually has any one meaning. For me it is sufficient to know, on one side, that the Absolute is not a finite person. Whether, on the other side, personality in some eviscerated remnant of sense can be applied to it, is a question intellectually unimportant and practically trifling.
With regard to the personality of the Absolute we must guard against two one-sided errors. The Absolute is not personal, nor is it moral, nor is it beautiful or true. And yet in these denials we may be falling into worse mistakes. For it would be far more incorrect to assert that the Absolute is either false, or ugly, or bad, or is something even beneath the application of predicates such as these. And it is better to affirm personality than to call the Absolute impersonal. But neither mistake should be necessary. The Absolute stands above, and not below, its internal distinctions. It does not eject them, but it includes them as elements in its fulness. To speak in other language, it is not the indifference but the concrete identity of all extremes. But it is better in this connection to call it super-personal.
We have seen that Reality is one, and is a single experience; and we may pass from this to consider a difficult question. Is the Absolute happy? This might mean, can pleasure, as such, be predicated of the Absolute? And, as we have seen in the pre-
