above but in their relationship, their contrast, and their mutual implication. I make nothing of the number four. One might prefer to count them as two or as three, or, for all that I can see, as more than four functions, by laying especial stress upon one or another of various possible contrasts, or by uniting two or more under one name. As I say, I care nothing for a mere count of the “persons of the Godhead.” Three or twenty, — it matters little or nothing to philosophy. But the essential thing is, that, whenever you count, at least the essential facts involved in this enumeration of contrasts appear, in some form, to exist, however many units you choose to regard it as convenient to distinguish. Now, since these contrasting and mutually implicated conscious functions exist, it seems at least fair to say that any one of these functions consciously finds in the others, or in any other you please, its own contrasting other Self, namely, that without which it is not what it is, while the other is still, as aspect, distinct from it. In this sense, one can then say, the Absolute Unity of Consciousness contains, involves, includes, not merely finite types of self-consciousness, not merely finite contrasts of Self and Other, but the contrasts and the consciousness of its own being as Thinker, Experiencer, Seer, and as Love, or Will, and all of these as essentially interrelated aspects of itself as Unity. In this, which I take to be the only defensible sense of the doctrine, I regard the Absolute Unity as essentially inclusive of various interrelated forms of Absolute Self-Consciousness. The Unity transcends these forms
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