is we; we ourselves are a truth, a
will, a work of God. Liberty has become nature; the creature is one
with its Creator--one through love."]

[Footnote 248: No better exposition of the religious aspect of
Eckhart's doctrine of immanence can be found than in Principal Caird's
_Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, pp. 244, 245, as the
following extract will show: "There is therefore a sense in which we
can say that the world of finite intelligence, though distinct from
God, is still, in its ideal nature, one with Him. That which God
creates, and by which He reveals the hidden treasures of His wisdom
and love, is still not foreign to His own infinite life, but one with
it. In the knowledge of the minds that know Him, in the self-surrender
of the hearts that love Him, it is no paradox to affirm that He knows
and loves Himself. As He is the origin and inspiration of every true
thought and pure affection, of every experience in which we forget and
rise above ourselves, so is He also of all these the end. If in one
point of view religion is the work of man, in another it is the work
of God. Its true significance is not apprehended till we pass beyond
its origin in time and in the experience of a finite spirit, to see in
it the revelation of the mind of God Himself. In the language of
Scripture, 'It is God that worketh in us to will and to do of His good
pleasure: all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to Himself.'"]

[Footnote 249: Eckhart sees this (cf. Preger, vol. i. p. 421):
"Personality in Eckhart is neither the faculties, nor the form
(_Bild_), nor the essence, nor the nature of the Godhead, but it is
rather the spirit which rises out of the essence, and is born by the
irradiation of the form in the essence, which mingles itself with our
nature and works by its means." The obscurity of this conception is
not made any less by the distinction which Eckhart draws between the
outer and inner consciousness in the personality. The outer
consciousness is bound up with the earthly life; to it all images must
come through sense; but in this way it can have no image of itself.
But the higher consciousness is supra-temporal. The potential ground
of the soul is and remains sinless; but the personality is also united
to the bodily nature; its guilt is that it inclines to its sinful
nature instead of to God.]

[Footnote 250: Eckhart distinguishes the _intellectus agens_ (_diu
wirkende Vernunft_) from the passive (_l