In by far the greater number of cases, that is to say, the problem arises simply and solely from the questioner's failure to dissociate _personality_ from _materiality_; a "person" suggests to him a tangible, visible, ponderable form, with arms and legs and organs of sense--and when he has reflected sufficiently to understand that such a description cannot apply to God, he concludes that _therefore_ God cannot be personal. The next step is usually that, having seen this visibly outlined Deity disappear _parmi les nuages_, he passes into absolute unbelief; for somehow an impersonal "Power," while it may possibly inspire awe, cannot move us to worship, cannot present to us a moral imperative, cannot, above all, either claim our love or give us its affection. It is really the identical difficulty, stated a little { 76} more pretentiously, which the "rationalist" author of _The Churches and Modern Thought_ presents to us by remarking that in all our experience that which makes up personality is "connected with nerve structures," so that we cannot attribute such a quality to "a Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure." "I know of no answer," he quaintly adds, "that could be called satisfactory from a theistic standpoint." [1] It is evident that Mr. Vivian does not remember the famous passage in the _Essay on Theism_ where John Stuart Mill explains that "the relation of thought to a material brain is no metaphysical necessity, but simply a constant co-existence within the limits of observation," and concludes that although "experience furnishes us with no example of any series of states of consciousness" without an accompanying brain, "it is as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment." [2] According to Mill--hardly a champion of orthodoxy--there is no reason in the nature of things why "thoughts, emotions, volitions and even sensations" should be necessarily dependent upon or connected with "nerve structures "; so that Mr. Vivian's argument palpably fails.
But what about this popular notion which identifies personality with materiality, and { 77} therefore denies the former attribute to God? One would think that even the most circumscribed experience, or reflection on such experience, must suffice to dispose of such a misapprehension; let us use the most obvious of illustrations for showing where the error lies. We have only to imagine one of those everyday tragedies that make a short newspaper paragraph--say, the case of a man passing a house in process of erection, and being killed on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled--his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: _with_ these he was a person; _without_ them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute _human_ personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the _Divine_ Personality is a contradiction in terms? If we can validly affirm in the Deity qualities corresponding to those which in human beings we call consciousness, intelligence, etc., we shall obviously be compelled to assign personality to Him; the question is, Have we sufficient grounds for making such an affirmation?