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SIX MAJOR PROPHETS

physical Absolute satisfies neither of these cravings, for it is too impersonal to help anybody and too general to explain anything.

In his chapter on "Absolutism and the Dissociation of Personality"[1] he generously offers his aid to the idealistic monists who have difficulty in conceiving how the One became the Many and why the individualistic minds included in the Universal Mind should be so antagonistic. Schiller suggests that it is an analogous case to the dissociation of that celebrated Boston lady "Miss Beauchamp" into several secondary personalities. But he admits that it is "a little startling at first to think of the Absolute as morbidly dissociated or even as downright mad", especially since in the case of the Absolute there is no outsider, like Doctor Morton Prince, to put the parts together again.

Many years before he had said[2]

The conception of a Deity absorbed in perfect, unchanging and eternal bliss is a blasphemy upon the Divine energy which might be permitted to the heathen ignorance of Aristotle, but which should be abhorred by all who have learnt the lesson of the Crucifixion. A theology which denies that the imperfection of the world must be reflected in the
  1. In "Studies in Humanism."
  2. "Riddles of the Sphinx," p. 431.

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