For an illustration of how all limited beings are incorporated in an absolute personality, Boström likes to fall back on the numerical system. Spiritual beings form a series, as it were, of lower and higher entities, where the latter contain the former pretty much as higher numbers contain the smaller. Boström distinguishes between positive and negative attributes, and means by the former those attributes without which the being cannot be thought, and which it therefore in one sense contains. So for instance in the number ten, all the previous numbers are positive attributes because ten cannot be thought without them, which, however, does not imply identity with either of the lower numbers. On the other hand all the following numbers are negative attributes to the number ten because this may well be thought without them. It contains them only if it is considered as one point in the numerical system, in which case it has them all as attributes. Thus, still referring to the number ten, this may be considered complete within itself without considering the higher numbers, whereas if we wish to comprehend it fully we must see it as a link in the numerical system. Ten would not be the half of twenty without the latter, and so on. The existence of the higher is after all required for that of the lower as fully as the existence of the lower is necessary to that of the higher. Because each entity is higher according as it has a larger number of the rest as its positive and a smaller number as its negative attributes, it follows that the highest entity, or Deity, has no negative attributes but only positive ones, which of course is the true meaning of the expression that God is the most perfect being. As a lower being is more perfectly defined when considered included in a higher, this fact must be the reason why all finite, rational beings in their evolution try to assert themselves in the higher beings, up to the highest, by whom they finally obtain their full scope and in whom only they live their complete life. But if Boström had lived to study the modern cytology he would have found a more adequate comparison within man’s organism, and one that perhaps in several respects would have modified his conception of the world of divine ideas. God is related to man as man is, not to the cell, but to the lower units of which the cell is composed. Between God and man there is at least one other organism that we know of, namely humanity. But if we overlook this and for simplicity’s sake imagine the relationship as that of man to cell it should be evident from what has been previously said that man is and must be something else to God than he is to himself.