of God. How it is that he has been charged with denying the personality of God and the Divine Christ can only be accounted for by the fact that his own express statements have been carelessly slurred over. The idea that his system finds no place for a personal God, or that it is logically opposed to the conception of a personal God, can only have arisen from a failure to grasp the real logical character of his system of philosophy. Though Kant and Schelling started in a manner from the Ego, their view did not involve the idea of a logical dialectic of the Infinite, as with Hegel. They did not attain to a logical knowledge of what even the personality of man really meant; the result was that neither of them developed a true logical conception of a personal God. In justice we ought to note, Fichte's conception of a personal God was so far logically developed that his 'idea of the Godhead' was 'an I that through its determination of self is the determination as well of all that is not self.' Hegel, however, attained to what they missed, because he completed the concrete notion of Kant into an absolute system of concrete logic. If Kant had worked out his transcendental philosophy instead of remaining content with his transcendental logic or his Critique of Pure Reason, he might have found out his mistake.

It is remarkable how even philosophers in this and every age have stumbled at the terms 'finite notion,' 'finite I,' and 'empirical Ego.' Finite notions are nothing but parts of the one absolute concrete notion: they are particular elements of universal Being, for a universal without particulars is pure nullity. A full exposition of a finite notion is necessarily a logical exposition of the absolute Notion,

and is therefore essentially concrete, at once objective and subjective. It is at once finite and infinite in the unity of pure reason, for the logical exposition of a finite category (Notion) necessarily rises to infinitude. As a rational whole it implies personality. It is the same with the Finite I. Every man is an I, and as such, he is in his essential nature a rational being. He is an 'I,' especially because of his conscious relation to the Infinite I, and that because there is no other possible Infinite than a being that is infinite in thought. It is the same with the notion of an empirical Ego. The empirical is what, on one side, depends on many contingent circumstances, though there is on the other side a non-contingent, and so far, a non-empirical element in all contingent events and forms of being. While there is in man a divine non-contingent principle, many contingent circumstances surround his birth, life and death. However, in spite of all contingency, man is an I, an Ego. Indeed, without contingency man as I, as Ego, as personality, could never have existed. Contingency is an essential principle in all finite existences, for it implies change. Let anyone try to realize to himself a world without change in man, animal, vegetable, water or air. It would be a mindless world. Such a world is impossible. As it is, however, personality is morally above the external control of contingency. Man can die rather than yield to the immoral, and die like Christ. Man, then, as an I, an Ego, a Person, is the living embodiment of the unity of finite concrete notions and the infinite concrete notion. A thorough investigation of the finite categories leads necessarily to the metaphysical notions of God, with proof, even in the necessity of it, necessarily also of the existence of

God. And these, surely, are pregnant findings, crucially critical, too: not without a light from them in which what to Hegel was Notion, Category, God -all are express.' All of which bring into consciousness the true conception of Personality.

A

CHAPTER VII

THE EGO

SOUND philosophy begins and ends with the logical exposition of the Ego.

In his book What Is Thought? Dr. Hutchison Stirling makes it quite clear that Hegel had two beginnings in his mind-one, Ego, the other Being in its purest abstraction. The former Hegel kept too much in the background, while the latter is well to the fore. Though not explicitly stated, we find that Hegel regards the I or Ego as the term of greatest intension, the most concrete Notion, and Being as the term of greatest extension, the most abstract notion, meaning thereby, neither more nor less than what nothing means. In one sense they absolutely include each other. It is, however, of the highest importance distinctly to see that the I is the term of both greatest intension and greatest extension, for in it the extremes, or the most abstract and the most concrete, meet, and fully include each other, though few have recognized this essential unity. Being, to him, is not something outside the I, but is simply the poorest thought in the I itself. In one sense Hegel was quite right in beginning his logic with the most abstract Notion, and in following up the dialectic logical development of thought to the most concrete Notion, the I. Hegel names this movement of logical thought, the progress of the Notion to its

exposition.' At first we are at a loss to know what he means, for both his Notion and Dialectic are as yet unexplained. He ought, however, to have made his beginning from the I, as the concrete Being of the Infinite I, more clearly explicit, and this he could have done, because the process through which he attained to this knowledge must have been clear to himself before he commenced to write his logic. If his readers were to understand, to lay bare this process was all-important. Dr. Stirling's chief aim in What is Thought? is to bring the idea of Ego, the I, boldly and fully to the forefront. His (Dr. Stirling's) philosophy is not a mere abstract form, but the absolute concrete form (as a critic of Stirling said). His criticism of Kant from the standpoint of Personal Idealism, is true and well put, but in What Is Thought? Stirling does not advance beyond individualism.' On this Stirling says, ' My individualism is the individualism of the absolutely personal God whom Christ has vindicated into concretion from abstraction by the assumption of humanity.' 'And he who rejects such a philosophy has some reason to fear for the security of his Theism.' This point his reviewers generally have missed, and so have failed to see the force of his criticism of Kant's analogies in reference to the principle of causation. For much the same reason they have failed to see his doctrine of contingency in his criticism of Schelling, and the irresistible light it sheds on the unreason' which Schelling refers to as being in the world. He shows the vast importance of Hegel's seemingly contradictory statement that the unessential is essential.' It can scarcely be doubted when fairly looked at, whether from the Divine or the Human side (for the one contains the other), that the Ego, being of the greatest intension and extension, is in itself infinite.