In those sentences where the infinite Person is spoken of as limited and unlimited, &c., it is evident that there is a play upon words, and that they apply to different qualities in the personality. It is not said, of course, that the number of his faculties is limited and unlimited; or that his self-complacency is boundless and constrained; or that his act is conditioned and unconditioned. Nor are these seeming paradoxes stated to puzzle and disturb. They are written to express a great, fundamental, and all-important truth, which seems never once to have shadowed the minds of the Limitists,—a truth which, when once seen, dispels forever all the ghostly battalions of difficulties which they have raised. The truth is this.
That Being whose limitations, conditions, and relations are wholly subjective, i. e. find their whole base and spring in his self; and who is therefore entirely free from on all possible limitations, conditions, and relations, from without himself; and who possesses, therefore, all possible fulness of all possible excellences, and finds the perennial acme of happiness in self-contemplation, and the consciousness of his perfect worth; and being such is ground for all other possible being; is, in the true philosophical sense, unrelated, unconditioned, unlimited. Or, in other words, the conditions imposed by Universal Genius upon the absolute and infinite Person are different in kind from the conditions imposed upon finite persons and physical things. The former in no way diminish aught from the fulness of their possessor's endowments; the latter not only do so diminish, but render it impossible for their possessor to supply the deficiency.
The following dictum will, then, concisely and exactly express the truth we have attained.
Those only are conditions, in the philosophical sense, which diminish the fulness of the possessor's endowments.
An admirable illustration of this truth can be drawn from some reflections of Laurens P. Hickok, D. D., which we quote. "What we need is not merely a rule by which to direct the process in the attainment of any artistic end, but we must find the legislator who may determine the end itself"...
Whence is the ultimate behest that is to determine the archetype, and control the pure spontaneity in its action.
"Must the artist work merely because there is an inner want to gratify, with no higher end than the gratification of the highest constitutional craving? Can we find nothing beyond a want, which shall from its own behest demand that this, and not its opposite, shall be? Grant that the round worlds and all their furniture are good—but why good? Certainly as means to an end. Grant that this end, the happiness of sentient beings, is good—but why good? Because it supplies the want of the Supreme Architect. And is this the supreme good? Surely if it is, we are altogether within nature's conditions, call our ultimate attainment by what name we may. We have no origin for our legislation, only as the highest architect finds such wants within himself, and the archetypal rule for gratifying his wants in the most effectual manner; and precisely as the ox goes to his fodder in the shortest way, so he goes to his work in making and peopling worlds in the most direct manner. Here is no will; no personality; no pure autonomy. The artist finds himself so constituted that he must work in this manner, or the craving of his own nature becomes intolerable to himself, and the gratifying of this craving is the highest good."
We attain hereby a mark by which to distinguish the diminishing from the undiminishing condition. A sense of want, a craving, is the necessary result of a diminishing condition. Hence the presence of any craving is the distinguishing mark of the finite; and that plenitude of endowments which excludes all possible craving or lack, is the distinguishing mark of the infinite and absolute Person. In this plenitude his infinity and absoluteness consist; and it is, therefore, conditional of them. Upon this plenitude, as conditional of this Person's perfection, Dr. Hickok speaks further, as follows:—
"We must find that which shall itself be the reason and law for benevolence, and for the sake of which the artist shall be put to his beneficent agency above all considerations that he finds his nature craving it. It must be that for whose sake, happiness, even that which, as kind and benevolent, craves on all sides the boon to bless others, itself should be. Not sensient nor artistic autonomy, but a pure ethic autonomy, which knows that within itself there is an excellency which obliges for the sake of itself. This is never to be found, nor anything very analogous to it, in sensient nature and a dictate from some generalized experience. It lies within the rational spirit, and is law in the heart, as an inward imperative in its own right, and must there be found.... This inward witnessing capacitates for self-legislating and self-rewarding. It is inward consciousness of a worth imperative above want; an end in itself, and not means to another end; a user of things, but not itself to be used by anything; and, on account of its intrinsic excellency, an authoritative determiner for its own behoof of the entire artistic agency with all its products, and thus a conscience excusing or accusing.