f God. According to this theory, God
comes to Himself, attains full self-consciousness, in the highest of
His creatures, which are, as it were, the organs of His self-unfolding
Personality. This is not a philosophy which commends itself specially
to speculative mystics, because it involves the belief that _time_ is
an ultimate reality. If in the cosmic process, which takes place in
time, God becomes something which He was not before, it cannot be said
that He is exalted above time, or that a thousand years are to Him as
one day. I shall say in my fourth Lecture that this view cannot justly
be attributed to Eckhart. Students of Hegel are not agreed whether it
is or is not part of their master's teaching.[183]

The idea of _will_ as a world-principle--not in Schopenhauer's sense
of a blind force impelling from within, but as the determination of a
conscious Mind--lifts us at once out of Pantheism.[184] It sets up the
distinction between what is and what ought to be, which Pantheism
cannot find room for, and at the same time implies that the cosmic
process is already complete in the consciousness of God, which cannot
be held if He is subordinated to the category of time.

God is more than the All, as being the perfect Personality, whose Will
is manifested in creation under necessarily imperfect conditions. He
is also in a sense less than the All, since pain, weakness, and sin,
though known to Him as infinite Mind, can hardly be felt by Him as
infinite Perfection. The function of evil in the economy of the
universe is an inscrutable mystery, about which speculative Mysticism
merely asserts that the solution cannot be that of the Manicheans. It
is only the Agnostic[185] who will here offer the dilemma of Dualism
or Pantheism, and try to force the mystic to accept the second
alternative.

There are two other views of the universe which have been called
pantheistic, but incorrectly.

The first is that properly called _Acosmism_, which we have
encountered as Orientalised Platonism. Plato's theory of ideas was
popularised into a doctrine of two separate worlds, related to each
other as shadow and substance. The intelligible world, which is in the
mind of God, alone exists; and thus, by denying reality to the visible
world, we get a kind of idealistic Pantheism. But the notion of God as
abstract Unity, which, as we have seen, was held by the later
Neoplatonists and their Christian followers, seems to make a real
world imposs