Canon Moberly on Thursday gave a fine address to the
Church Congress on the necessity of personality in the ulti- mate source of existence,—that is, God. "The fact of intelli- gent consciousness in man led on by necessary steps to the postulate of a supreme universal consciousness." It was "a hypothesis so necessary, so fundamental, that without it all knowledge and thought whatever became unrelated, irrational, -chaotic." "Personality, involving, as necessary qualities of its being, reason, will, love, was incomparably the highest phenomenon known to experience, and as such had to be related with whatever was above it and below it by any philosophy based upon experience. The highest phenomenon known to experience was moral personality in its most -advanced stages of beauty, verging more and more towards its own ideal, growing with visible approach into the lineaments of perfect goodness. Either, then, the highest phenomenon known to experience was a more and more glorious approach towards the blankness of an abstraction which was really non-existent, or supreme existence was that towards which the most beautiful fullness of human personality was but an approach. Supreme existence was either inferior to man, with an inferiority which was literally immeasurable, or it was all, at least, which they had known or could conceive in per- sonality." It is a proof of curious advance in English intelli- gence that an address of that kind should be welcomed in a Church Congress, and that we should be able to quote such -sentences with a certainty that they will interest our readers.
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