an infinite number of rational forces which are continually striving to express themselves through the matter with which they are in union. He is through them and in them working to realize an end. The teleological idea controls the whole conception. He is always moving with purpose and system, and always thereby producing the world. The products are all divine, but not all equally divine. In His purest essence, He is the highest form of mind in union with the most attenuated form of matter. In the lowest form of His essence, He is the cohesive force which holds together the atoms of a stone. Between these two poles are infinite gradations of being. Nearest of all to the purest essence of God is the human soul. It is in an especial sense His offspring: it is described by the metaphors of an emanation or outflow from Him, of a sapling which is separate from and yet continues the life of its parent tree, of a colony in which some members of the mother state have settled.[316] If all this were expressed in modern terms, and by the help of later conceptions, it would probably be most suitably gathered into the proposition that the world is the self-evolution of God. Into such a conception the idea of a beginning does not necessarily enter: it is consistent with the idea of an eternal process of differentiation: that which is, always has been, under changed and changing forms: the theory is cosmological rather than cosmogonical: it rather explains the world as it is than gives an account of its origin.