serts the
transcendence of God. "God is in the creatures, but above them." "He
is above all nature, and is not Himself nature," etc. In dealing with
_sin_, he is confronted with the obvious difficulty that if it is the
nature of all phenomenal things to return to God, from whom they
proceeded, the process which he calls the birth of the Son ought
logically to occur in every conscious individual, for all have a like
phenomenal existence. He attempts to solve this puzzle by the
hypothesis of a double aspect of the new birth (see below). But I fear
there is some justice in Professor Pearson's comment, "Thus his
phenomenology is shattered upon his practical theology."]

[Footnote 246: Other scholastics and mystics had taught that there is
a _residue_ of the Godlike in man. The idea of a central point of the
soul appears in Plotinus and Augustine, and the word _scintilla_ had
been used of this faculty before Eckhart. The "synteresis" of
Alexander of Hales, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas,
was substantially the same. But there is this difference, that while
the earlier writers regard this resemblance to God as only a
_residue_, Eckhart regards it as the true _Wesen_ of the soul, into
which all its faculties may be transformed.]

[Footnote 247: The following passage from Amiel (p. 44 of English
edition) is an admirable commentary on the mystical doctrine of
immanence:--"The centre of life is neither in thought nor in feeling
nor in will, nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or
wishes. For moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all
these ways, and escape us still. Deeper even than consciousness, there
is our being itself, our very substance, our nature. Only those truths
which have entered into this last region, which have become ourselves,
become spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive and unconscious, are
really our life--that is to say, something more than our property. So
long as we are able to distinguish any space whatever between the
truth and us, we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the
desire, the consciousness of life, are not yet quite life. But peace
and repose can nowhere be found except in life and in eternal life,
and the eternal life is the Divine life, is God. To become Divine is,
then, the aim of life: then only can truth be said to be ours beyond
the possibility of loss, because it is no longer outside of us, nor
even in us, but we are it, and it