resulting in life, is, as Patmore points out in words curiously
reminiscent of those of Boehme, at the root of all existence. All real
apprehension of God, he says, is dependent upon the realisation of his
triple Personality in one Being.

Nature goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity in
animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and material atom owing its
being to the synthesis or "embrace" of the two opposed forces of
expansion and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a single
entity but in virtue of its being thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
and in humanity and natural life this takes the form of sex, the
masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten sex
spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of sex,
but its fulfilment and power, as the electric fire is the
fulfilment and power of positive and negative in their "embrace."

The essay from which this passage is taken, _The Bow set in the Cloud_,
together with _The Precursor_, give in full detail an exposition of this
belief of Patmore's, which was for him "_the burning heart of the
Universe_."

Female and male God made the man;
His image is the whole, not half;
And in our love we dimly scan
The love which is between Himself.[16]

God he conceived of as the great masculine positive force, the soul as
the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the
"mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source
of all life and joy.