And when the philosopher deals with personality in this high, this supreme sphere, he will submit that the truth of personality is subordinate to the truth of spirituality. He will argue that by sticking too closely and fixedly to personality we are running a risk of bringing down the divine to the level of the human. If, with Dante, he can say that in its very heart the Light Eternal
'Mi parve pinta della nostra effige;'
he will undoubtedly add with Dante
'Oh quanto è corto 'l dire e come fioco
Al mio concetto;'
or, with the first philosophical theologian who interpreted the experience of Christian life, he will rise from the historical Jesus to the inward witness of the Spirit.
[1] The legal use of the distinction between 'real' and 'personal' is only partly 'logical,' and largely retains traces of the larger logic of life and history. Yet, roughly speaking, personal property is what we can, so to speak, carry on our backs or in our pockets.
[2] See Spinoza, Cogitata Metaph., Pars II. cap. 8: 'Nec fugit nos vocabulum (Personalitatis scilicet) quod theologi passim usurpant ad rem explicandam: verum quamvis vocabulum non ignoremus eius tamen significationem ignoramus: quamvis constanter credamus, in visione Dei beatissima Deum hoc suis revelaturum.' For Hegel, it may be noted, Person, so far as he uses the term at all, bears its restricted legal and juridical sense. A person is a free intelligence, which realises that independence by appropriating an external thing as its sign and property. It probably belongs therefore to a world in which people count rather by what they have than by what they are; the world of law where rights and duties tend to oppose each other. This is not the highest kind of world for human beings.
[3] This one may call the Platonic ideal of the State, where Equity rules supreme in the incarnate spirit of wisdom,—a guide adapting its measures to circumstances, not tied down to the inflexible letter of one law in an incoherent and imperfect code. See the Politicus, p. 294; Phaedrus, p. 275; and compare Aristotle's Wise man whose conduct is not κατὰ λόγον but μετὰ λόγου.
[4] See e. g. Encyclopaedia, § 475.