CHAPTER XII.
Man and Infinity.
It is the perennial honor of Sweden’s greatest philosopher, Christofer Jacob Boström, to have satisfactorily explained the extremely difficult and complicated question with which our last chapter concluded. He has shown that man, exactly on the supposition that he is an eternal part of God’s being, requires and must go through an evolution in time. According to Boström, religious intuition has found the truth that man is an eternal idea in God, a living member in His organism. But Boström has also understood and considered the difference implied in thinking of man as a member in God’s organism and in thinking of this member as living its independent life. In the former case man possesses the same qualities as God; in the latter, these qualities with corresponding limitations.
For an illustration of how all limited beings are incorporated in an absolute personality, Boström likes to fall back on the numerical system. Spiritual beings form a series, as it were, of lower and higher entities, where the latter contain the former pretty much as higher numbers contain the smaller. Boström distinguishes between positive and negative attributes, and means by the former those attributes without which the being cannot be thought, and which it therefore in one sense contains. So for instance in the number ten, all the previous numbers are positive attributes because ten cannot be thought without them, which, however, does not imply identity with either of the lower numbers. On the other hand all the following numbers are negative attributes to the number ten because this may well be thought without them. It contains them only if it is considered as one point in the numerical system, in which case it has them all as attributes. Thus, still referring to the number ten, this may be considered complete within itself without considering the higher numbers, whereas if we wish to comprehend it fully we must see it as a link in the numerical system. Ten would not be the half of twenty without the latter, and so on. The existence of the higher is after all required for that of the lower as fully as the existence of the lower is necessary to that of the higher.
Because each entity is higher according as it has a larger number of the rest as its positive and a smaller number as its negative attributes, it follows that the highest entity, or Deity, has no negative attributes but only positive ones, which of course is the true meaning of the expression that God is the most perfect being.
As a lower being is more perfectly defined when considered included in a higher, this fact must be the reason why all finite, rational beings in their evolution try to assert themselves in the higher beings, up to the highest, by whom they finally obtain their full scope and in whom only they live their complete life.
But if Boström had lived to study the modern cytology he would have found a more adequate comparison within man’s organism, and one that perhaps in several respects would have modified his conception of the world of divine ideas.
God is related to man as man is, not to the cell, but to the lower units of which the cell is composed. Between God and man there is at least one other organism that we know of, namely humanity. But if we overlook this and for simplicity’s sake imagine the relationship as that of man to cell it should be evident from what has been previously said that man is and must be something else to God than he is to himself.
To God he is what the cell is to man, a living part in His organism, and in this capacity he possesses all the perfect qualities of that organism. Living his independent life, man is in the same position as the cell in his own being, when the cell is thought of as living the life it is confined to by its less perfect organism.