lies
behind all otherness, not destroying, but fulfilling. "We know not why
it is," says St. Catherine of Genoa, "we feel an internal necessity of
using the plural pronoun instead of the singular." Perhaps it was that
she saw in a purer and clearer light what we only half feel in the
obscurity of our grosser hearts.

But if God knows our knowing, and feels our feeling, not merely by a
similitude but in itself, it is not because He is transcendent and
"personal," as we understand the word, because He is immanent and
"superpersonal," whatever that may mean. But it is just because
revelation tells us that in God there are three selves or Egos, for each
of whom the experience (i.e., the thought, love, and action) of the
other two exists, not merely similar, but one and the same--the same
thinking, loving, and doing, no less than the same thought, love, and
deed--that we can believe in the possibility of our personal
separateness being at once preserved and overcome in that mysterious
unity.

That God is love; and that love, which as an affection, produces an
affective unity between separate persons, can as the subsistent and
primal unity produce a substantial and ineffable union of which the
other is a shadow, is a view towards which revelation points. That the
mere affection of love, the moral union of wills, is an insufficient
unification of personalities is implied by the fact that love always
tends to some sort of real union and communication; and still more, that
it springs from a sense of inexplicable identity.

It is almost a crime in criticism to deal with such a multitude of deep
problems in so brief and hasty an essay. But if we have roughly
indicated the main outlines of the author's position, we shall have done
as much as can be reasonably expected of us; though it is with great
reluctance that we pass over many points, and even whole chapters,
bristling with interest.

Perhaps the most important feature of the book is the prominence it
gives to the difficulties and insufficiencies of idealism. With those of
realism we are all familiar enough, but so far, idealism has been looked
at one-sidedly as evading, if not solving, some of the antinomies of the
earlier philosophy, while its own embarrassments have been condoned in
hopes of future solution. The solution has not come, and now the hopes
are dead or dying. What we need is a higher synthesis, if such be
possible for the human mind, or else a frank admiss