ne quiet sentence of Mr. Chesterton's: "Where there is a purpose,
{84} there is a person." If Mr. Spencer's "Infinite and Eternal Energy,
from which all things proceed" is purposive, that is equivalent to saying
that God is what we mean by personal.

But ought we not to have shown first of all that He is conscious? No,
for the greater includes the less, and purpose is unthinkable apart from
consciousness. In saying this we are aware that a philosopher like
Eduard von Hartmann speaks of "the wisdom of the Unconscious," of "the
mechanical devices which It employs," of "the direction of the goal
intended by the Unconscious," etc., etc.; but this, we are bound to say,
is to empty words of their meaning. To intend, to direct anything
requires at least that the one so doing should be conscious of what it is
he is doing. And consciousness, intelligence, directivity are
constituents never found apart from personality. But, we are told, "the
choice lies, not between personality and something lower, but between
personality and something inconceivably higher." [5] We reply that we
have already made the acquaintance of this idea of a "super-personal"
Deity, and found that for all practical--_i.e._, religious--purposes the
super-personal is simply the impersonal under another name.[6] And when
we remember that the "inconceivably higher than personal" ultimate
Reality of the agnostic possesses neither {85} consciousness, nor will,
nor intelligence, we simply fail to see how a Power lacking these
attributes could be even personal, to say nothing of its being _more_
than personal. Be this, however, as it may, the decisive fact remains
that we are persons, and therefore personality is the highest category
under which we can think; and if we, the children of the Eternal, are
endowed with personality, it is sufficient for us to know that a cause
must be at least adequate to produce the effects that have flowed from
it. Nothing can be evolved but what was first involved. On this ground
alone, whatever else God may be, He is at least personal; and that is all
we were anxious to establish.

That is all--but it is also all-important; for it cannot be too
emphatically insisted that without a personal God religion simply ceases
to be. It is a strange and delusive fancy on Professor Hudson's part,
and that of a good many people, that "the religious emotions" will
survive the de-ethicising, depersonalising of the Deity, and that men
w