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Updated: May 14, 2025
The result was what must be called the older religious view of the world a view which saw personal and super-personal agency at the heart of things. This primitive interpretation of the world we shall be led to criticize, but, in so doing, we shall be the servants of truth and of a more adult spirituality.
Such a super-personal Absolute or Whole, to quote Dr. Ballard's penetrating criticism, "is devoid of just those elements which for human experience constitute personality. To our power of vision it matters nothing whether we say that the ultra-violet rays of the spectrum are super-visible or invisible. The pertinent truth is that they are not visible.
Even Herbert Spencer, with his idea of the imperceptibility of the super-personal, of the final cause of all things, is still a living proof of the fact that man can trace the mechanism of causality back to its last consequences and, as Spencer does, even derive consciousness and sensation from that which is without sensation, and yet not necessarily proceed so far as negation of a living God, even if he persists in his refusal to perceive in general the ultimate cause of things.
It is when people no longer know what to do with a Deity, he continues, that they transfer His part to the universe "which is, properly speaking, only a decent way of getting rid of Him." A totality of being is not the same as a personal God, but the very contrary. Nor is it any consolation to be told that this totality, though not personal, is "super-personal."
So, too, that which is not 'merely' personal is not really personal. If the Absolute of philosophy be the super-personal, it is not, in plain truth, personal at all." Now, a God who is not what we mean by personal can be of no help to us in our religious life.
We reply that we have already made the acquaintance of this idea of a "super-personal" Deity, and found that for all practical i.e., religious purposes the super-personal is simply the impersonal under another name.
Of itself Sens is very engaging. We can easily understand the fact of the late Mr. Hamerton having made his first French home here. In the memoir of her husband, affixed to his autobiography, Mrs. Hamerton gives us particulars, not only of individual, but of super-personal interest.
We propose, therefore, to address ourselves to the fundamental question the question of questions the being of a subsistent intelligence and a supreme moral will, responsible for man and all things, whom we in our own tongue name God, though it were more reverent to think and speak of the awful truth with Emerson, as the "Nameless Thought, the Super-personal Heart". We are to treat of theism, the philosophical, not the theological, term to designate the truth that the universe owes its existence to infinite Power and infinite Mind, and that morality is a fact because that Power is moral also.
The silence grew too long. With a shrugging effort she surmounted herself and looked again toward the alien figure looming unconcerned in the gloom. A warm, super-personal sense of friendliness came upon her. Her intellect awoke to inquiries. She began to question him of his days away, and soon he was talking freely enough, between pulls of his pipe.
But such work as this is still largely speculative and in the future. It does not solve the secret of life. It does not affect the fact of consciousness which we are free to conceive, if we will, as the other side of what we call matter, evolving with it from the most rudimentary forms into the highest known form in man, or still further into some super-personal or universal form.
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