Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/337

This page needs to be proofread.

name them, and the relations of these two are again the relations of two that are contrasted as mutually related Selves. So far, we have what may be called a trinity of Selves (if one is fond of the traditional but, to my mind, essentially trivial amusement of counting the “persons” in the Absolute). But now if this organism of interrelated Selves is afresh viewed with relation to what we have called the Absolute Will, we have a further function whereby the Absolute as Knower (viz., as Thinker, as Experiencer of the data that fulfil the ideas, and as Seer of the fulfilment) is consciously contrasted with the Absolute as Will, or as Love. For the Absolute as Knower knows the Absolute Will as the determining factor merely, whereby the world of the Knower himself gets its wholeness, and so its unity; while the Absolute Will is attentive to precisely such arrest of the “unreal possibilities” of our former account — to precisely such wholeness of the divine Experience — as shall individuate, and so complete, the data which are experienced, and the world wherein the Thinker conceives, and the Seer views, the fulfilment of the Absolute Knowledge in the data which are experienced.

Here, if you will, are four contrasting aspects or functions whose presence, whose contrast, whose relation, whose unity, appears to be essential to the Absolute. I say “if you will,” because at least these contrasts appear, while our mere enumeration pretends neither to completeness nor to absoluteness. These are conscious functions. They are not finite functions. The unity of the Absolute is not merely