3. _Divine Personality._--I have used the word personality as expressing the nature of God. But let me not be misunderstood. I well know we can not conceive clearly of an infinite, unconditioned personality. Deeply considered, it seems nothing short of a contradiction in terms. All I insist on is this: In our view of the nature of God, the choice is not between personality and something _lower_ than personality, viz., an _unconscious force_ operating Nature by _necessity_, as the materialists and pantheists would have us believe; but between personality as we know it in ourselves and something inconceivably _higher_ than personality. Language is so poor that we are obliged to represent even _our_ mental phenomena by physical images. How much more, then, the Divine nature by its human image! Self-conscious personality is the highest thing we know or can conceive. We offer him the very best and truest we have when we call him a Person; even though we know that this, our best, falls far short of the infinite reality.
4. =Cause in Nature.=--We have thus far spoken only or principally of self-consciousness, but the same precisely is true of another essential attribute of personality, viz., _free-will_. Every one admits causative force or forces operating in Nature. Science has shown that all the different kinds of force are but different forms of one omnipresent energy. Now, looking abroad on Nature from the outside, this omnipresent energy seems to modern science as simply resident, inherent in matter itself, and therefore as operating unconsciously and by necessity. But the question occurs, "Whence did we get the idea of force, energy, _causation_?" I answer unhesitatingly: We get it not from without by observation of Nature, but from within through consciousness; not from the outside view, but from, the inside view of phenomena. We can not conceive of phenomena without force, of effects without cause, because we are intensely conscious of being ourselves through our wills an active cause of external phenomena. If we were merely passive observers, not active causers of changes in the external world, then these external phenomena would seem to us merely to shift and change and succeed each in a certain order. We might note the order and determine the laws of sequence, and thus form a science; but it would never enter into our minds to imagine any causal or dynamical nexus between them. In the mind of such passive observer, but not doer--thinker, but not worker--would be completely realized the only thorough-going and consistent materialistic philosophy, i. e., a philosophy in which, like Comte's, cause and force have no place--are in fact banished as a superstition from science. But the clear consciousness of essential energy, of causative force within, the certainty that we ourselves, through our wills and by the conscious exertion of force do determine changes in the external world, compels us to attribute all changes to causative force of some kind, and naturally enough, until the interference of science, to a personal will like our own. Thus by a necessary law we project our internal states into external Nature.