concerned, God and Man. Our mistake is in not discriminating between their
respective functions, and putting Man in the place of God. In our everyday
life we do this by measuring the power of God by our past experiences and
the deductions we draw from them; but there is another way of putting Man
in the place of God, and that is by the misconception that the
All-Originating Spirit is merely a cosmic force without intelligence, and
that Man has to originate the intelligence without which no specific
purpose can be conceived. This latter is the error of much of the present
day philosophy and has to be specially guarded against. This was perceived
by some of the medieval students of these things, and they accordingly
distinguished between what they called Animus Dei and Anima Mundi, the
Divine Spirit and the Soul of the Universe. Now the distinction is this,
that the essential quality of Animus Dei is Personality--not A Person, but
the very Principle of Personality itself--while the essential quality of
Anima Mundi is Impersonality. Then right here comes in that importance of
the Personal Factor of which I have already spoken. The powers latent in
the Impersonal are brought out to their fullest development by the
operation of the Personal. This of course does not consist in changing the
nature of those powers, for that is impossible, but in making such
combinations of them by Personal Selection as to produce results which
could not otherwise be obtained. Thus, for example, Number is in itself
impersonal and no one can alter the laws which are inherent in it; but what
we can do is to select particular numbers and the sort of relation, such as
subtraction, multiplication, etc., which we will establish between them;
and then by the inherent Law of Number a certain result is bound to work
out. Now our own essential quality is the consciousness of Personality; and
as we grow into the recognition of the fact that the Impersonal is, as it
were, crying out for the operation upon it of the Personal in order to
bring its latent powers into working, we shall see how limitless is the
field that thus opens before us.