Having stated and traced the doctrine of absorption, it remains to investigate the justice of its grounds. The doctrine starts from a premise partly true and ends in a conclusion partly false. We emanate from the creative power of God, and are sustained by the in flowing presence of his life, but are not discerptions from his own being, any more than beams of light are distinct substances shot out and shorn off from the sun to be afterwards drawn back and assimilated into the parent orb. We are destined to a harmonious life in his unifying love, but not to be fused and lost as insentient parts of his total consciousness. We are products of God's will, not component atoms of his soul. Souls are to be in God as stars are in the firmament, not as lumps of salt are in a solvent. This view is confirmed by various arguments. In the first place, it is supported by the philosophical distinction between emanation and creation. The conception of creation gives us a personal God who wills to certain ends; that of emanation reduces the Supreme Being to a ghastly array of laws, revolving abysses, galvanic forces, nebular star dust, dead ideas, and vital fluids. According to the latter supposition, finite existences flow from the Infinite as consequences from a principle, or streams from a fountain; according to the former, they proceed as effects from a cause, or thoughts from a mind. That is pantheistic, fatal, and involves absorption by a logical necessity; this is creative, free, and does not presuppose any circling return. Material things are thoughts which God transiently contemplates and dismisses; spiritual creatures are thoughts which he permanently expresses in concrete immortality. The soul is a thought; the body is the word in which it is clothed. Secondly, the analogy which first leads to belief in absorption is falsely interpreted. Taken on its own ground, rightly appreciated, it legitimates a different conclusion.