[49] I call attention to the difference between the view here expressed and that of Emerson in the last paragraphs of his _Essay on Love_, where he says: “Our affections are tents of a night. Our warm loves are clouds that pass over the firmament of mind with its overarching vault, its galaxies of immutable lights. In the personal relations we are put in training for impersonal submergence and absorption in God.” In my own view the infinite community of spiritual beings that takes the place of God consists altogether of personalities. Godhead, if you choose to apply that name to this infinite society, is not a person but a community of personalities. Personality is not drowned in the impersonal. On the contrary, the individual becomes a personality through his relation to his associates in the eternal life. [50] I have real intercourse with Aristotle and Kant, as the outgoings of their minds are still effectual in me—more vital intercourse than with many of those who surround me. CHAPTER IV THE SHADOW OF SIN If any term in the moral vocabulary stands in need of strict redefinition, it is sin. Three elements combine to complete the idea of sin: first, that the deed was one that ought not to have been done, not so much because of its painful consequences to others or to self, or to both, or, by repercussion on society as a whole; but because it was opposed to what is intrinsically right: in other words, because it contravened the kind of interrelation which would exist in its purity in the ethical manifold. Secondly, the idea of sin implies that the sinner himself is the doer of the deed, or that there is to this extent freedom of the will. I do not say that he is the cause of which the deed is the effect. Causality appertains to sequent phenomena. As regards freedom of the will, the distinction between the category of interdependence and that of causality is vital. A long series of causes, such as bad heredity, bad environment, etc., may have led A to determine to murder B.[51] The notion of the freedom of the will as here viewed signifies that no matter what the causal series may have been which leads up to the act, when the act itself is about to be performed, when B is about to experience the effect of A as cause, in that moment the relation of interdependence between A and B ought to arise before the mind of A and withhold him from completing his evil purpose. Thirdly, it is characteristic of sin that the fuller knowledge that the harmful deed is sinful _comes after the act_,—that it is the Fruit of the Tree, the enlightenment of the eyes. As the serpent said: “If ye eat of the fruit ye shall be as gods.”