If God is all, _then what are we_? Granted the basal axiom of this type of immanentism, it follows with irresistible cogency that our separate existence, consciousness, volitions and so forth are merely illusions. We can be "ourselves God" only in the sense that we are individually nothing; the contrary impression is simply an error, which we shall have to recognise as such, and to get rid of with what speed and thoroughness we can. This, it is true, is more easily said than done, for our whole life both of thought and action bears incessant witness to the opposite; there are, however, those to whose temperament such a complete contradiction, so far from being distressing, is positively grateful because of its suggestion of mystery and mysticism. Sometimes a Tertullian voices this abdication of the reasoning faculty defiantly--_certum est quia impossibile est_; but more often perhaps the same position {26} is expressed in the spirit of Tennyson's well-known lines, which, indeed, bear directly upon our immediate theme:-- We feel we are nothing--for all is Thou and in Thee; We feel we are something--_that_ also has come from Thee; We know we are nothing--but Thou wilt help us to be. We submit, however, that while such a contemplation of, or oscillation between, mutually destructive tenets may for a time minister to some kind of aesthetic enjoyment, the healthy mind cannot permanently find satisfaction while thus suspended in mid-air; nor are we appreciably advanced by the temper which, after pointing out some alleged fundamental antinomy, "quietly accepts"--_i.e._, in practice ignores--it. Problems of this description are not solved by what Matthew Arnold called a want of intellectual seriousness; is it true, we ask, that the "mystical view of the Divine immanence" compels us to believe in the allness of God, and so to deny our individual existence? The answer is that this _soi-disant_ "mystical view" is simply a distorted view of what immanence means. We are not really called upon to do violence to the collective facts of our experience, which rise up in unanimous and spontaneous testimony against the monstrous fiction that we are either nothing or God. The fallacy upon which this fiction rests is not a {27} very subtle one. When we speak of God's indwelling in man, we predicate that community of nature which the writer of Gen. ii expresses by saying that God created man in His own image; we predicate, _i.e._, what we already called homogeneity--likeness of substance--and not identity, which is a very different thing. We do not commit ourselves to the proposition that "God _in_ man is God _as_ man." Parent and child are linked together by a precisely analogous bond to that subsisting between God and man, but they are nevertheless distinct individualities.