und, the still Waste, the Unity where no man dwelleth. Then it is
satisfied in the light; then it is one: it is one in itself, as this
Ground is a simple stillness, and in itself immovable; and yet by this
immobility are all things moved."

It is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good
pleasure; but our own nature and personality remain intact. It is
plain that we could not see God unless our personality remained
distinct from the personality of God. Complete fusion is as
destructive of the possibility of love and knowledge as complete
separation[249].

Eckhart gives to "the highest reason[250]" the primacy among our
faculties, and in his earlier period identifies it with "the spark."
He asserts the absolute supremacy of reason more strongly than anyone
since Erigena. His language on this subject resembles that of the
Cambridge Platonists. "Reasonable knowledge is eternal life," he says.
"How can any external revelation help me," he asks, "unless it be
verified by inner experience? The last appeal must always be to the
deepest part of my own being, and that is my reason." "The reason," he
says, "presses ever upwards. It cannot rest content with goodness or
wisdom, nor even with God Himself; it must penetrate to the Ground
from whence all goodness and wisdom spring."

Thus Eckhart is not content with the knowledge of God which is
mediated by Christ, but aspires to penetrate into the "Divine
darkness" which underlies the manifestation of the Trinity. In fact,
when he speaks of the imitation of Christ, he distinguishes between
"the way of the manhood," which has to be followed by all, and "the
way of the Godhead," which is for the mystic only. In this overbold
aspiration to rise "from the Three to the One," he falls into the
error which we have already noticed, and several passages in his
writings advocate the quietistic self-simplification which belongs to
this scheme of perfection. There are sentences in which he exhorts us
to strip off all that comes to us from the senses, and to throw
ourselves upon the heart of God, there to rest for ever, "hidden from
all creatures[251]." But there are many other passages of an opposite
tendency. He tells us that "the way of the manhood," which, of course,
includes imitation of the active life of Christ, must be trodden first
by all; he insists that in the state of union the faculties of the
soul will act in a new and higher way, so that the personality is
resto