This is no dreaming, but an interpretation of man and nature necessitated by the undeniable facts of life. The finite does not exhaust man's capacities, it cannot even satisfy them. He was made for something vaster. He is ever seeking the boundless, the infinite. Hence the most positive, the most scientific of philosophers, Mr. Herbert Spencer, believes that there is one supreme emotion in man, utterly indestructible, the emotion of religion; and what is religion but the yearning I have described for communion, not with the world, vast and entrancing as it is; not with humanity, admirable, even worshipful in its highest estate; but with that which transcends them and all things, the enduring reality which men call Divine? Spencer and Emerson are at one. Nothing but the Infinite will ultimately satisfy man.
Such are the thoughts awakened by the music of this poet's song, which haunts one with a sense of the mystery of the illimitable. I do not read it as a confession of agnosticism, save in the sense in which all philosophers are ready to admit that our knowledge of the ultimate reality of existence is as mere ignorance compared with what we do not, and cannot, know of it. I read it rather as a profession of the higher theism, or, if you will, of the higher pantheism, for it is immaterial how far we go in maintaining the Divine immanence, provided we safeguard the sovereign fact of individuality and abstain from all confusion of the human personality and the Divine.
There is prevalent a most erroneous impression that the Divine immanence and personality are two irreconcilable conceptions, and that to assert that the All is a person or an individual is at once to limit its universality. Such is not the case, as an analysis of the conception of personality will show. The philosophic term "person" is utterly indifferent to the ideas of limitation or illimitation. Its essential significance, its distinguishing note, is that of self-sufficiency or self-subsistence, prescinding entirely from all considerations of limits or their absence. Thus a stone, a plant, a brick is an individual, because each is self-contained and is sufficient for the constitution of itself in being, and were they endowed with intelligence they would be further distinguished by the honorific title of _person_. Man is a _person_, because a subsistent, self-sufficing individual, furthermore endowed with reason. _A fortiori_ is the All a person, because if the Supreme is not self-sufficing, then nothing or nobody is. Hence we have to point out in reply to the strictures of the opposite philosophic school that so far from infinitude being an obstacle to individuality or personality, the Infinite alone, in the strict sense of the word, can be called a person, because in the Infinite or the All alone is absolute self-sufficiency realised. From the very fact, then, of the omnipresence of the Divine, because--