South plunged into the fray, and used his sledgehammer with unmerciful violence. Not unlearned, not unversed in logic, South was more of a rhetorician than a philosopher, more of a wit than a Divine. After denouncing Sherlock’s explication as wholly inconsistent with the mysteriousness of the subject, and representing his exceptions to the use of certain words in relation to it as false, groundless, and impertinent, he exposed, with tremendous ridicule, the theory of mutual consciousness. “For self-consciousness, according to him,” says South, “is the constituent principle, or formal reason, of personality. So that self-consciousness properly constitutes or makes a person, and so many self-consciousnesses make so many distinct persons. But mutual consciousness, so far as it extends, makes a unity not of persons (for personality as such imports distinction and something personally incommunicable), but an unity of nature in persons. So that after self-consciousness has made several distinct persons, in comes mutual consciousness and sets them all at one again, and gives them all but one and the same nature, which they are to take amongst themselves as well as they can. And this is a true and strict account of this author’s new hypothesis; and such, as I suppose, he will not except against, because justly I am sure he cannot; howsoever, I may have expressed the novel whimsey something for the reader’s diversion.”[259] How monstrous to think of diverting people, when professedly engaged in studying the awful secrets of the Divine Essence! [Sidenote: THE TRINITY.] South maintained that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not distinct infinite minds or spirits--that to say they are so, is to contradict Councils, Fathers, Schoolmen, and later Divines; that the book he assailed contains philosophical paradoxies and grammatical mistakes; and that the author was insolent, scornful, and proud beyond all parallel. To quote a full sample of South’s personal abuse would be to cover pages.[260] [Sidenote: 1693–8.] [Sidenote: THE TRINITY.]