Anthropomorphism [pp. 120-144]

THE PRIA'CE TOX RE VIEW.
beyond it in his defence of the conceivable Infinite. But whatever debatable ground there may be beyond this, we are safe,
to this extent, at least, in asserting the congruity of the cqncepts
of infinity and personality.
There is no confusion of concepts in the Christian belief in
a personal God, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. There is, of course, many an incomprehensible mystery.
The Divine must ever be mysterious to us in its essence and its
action. But there is no metaphysical absurdity arising from
contradiction in concepts. The agnostic attack upon the "Infinite Person" can be explained, and explained away, as involving
either a self-contradictory use of the term "infinite," or a misconception of the way in which the two terms are united, or a
misstatement of fact. Our Christian concept of God has nothing to fear if no more scientific metaphysical objections than this
can be urged against it.
Turning away from the rest of the logomachy of the pseudometaphysics of evolution, we must consider, in conclusion, a
third form of the attack upon the theistic belief. The agnostics have not been content to dabble in the shoals of the philosophy of the Conditioned, but have more than once plunged
boldly into the unfathomable pool of Critical idealism. They
claim that anthropomorphism is a relic of barbarian ignorance,
and that psychomorphism is a temporary stage in the evolution
of thought, already outgrown by the "few cultured minds."
But beyond this they philosophize boldly concerning the relativity of all human knowledge to the mechanism of the human
mind, and attack the Christian concept of a personal God as an
attempted human concept of the Superhuman and Transcendent.
Mr. Spencer's use of the term "relativity," by the way, is an
unfortunate one, in that he includes under it two entirely distinct principles-one purely psychological, the other purely metaphysical. The greater part of his discussion of the "relativity
of knowledge" is given up to a development of the principle
that an object of knowledge is known only as it is related to
other objects or differentiated from them. "We think in relations." This is an interesting psychological question. But it
is entirely distinct from the principle usually referred to in the
phrase "relativity of knowledge." That is a metaphysical prin
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