It is in short the same demand as Augustine's. There is indeed a wide gulf of temperament and circumstances dividing the bishop of Hippo from the mathematician Descartes and the rationalist Spinoza. But in the cry for the knowledge of 'God and my Soul' as the first, the indispensable, the sole knowledge: as the _one_ knowledge which binds the finite and the infinite together,--the knowledge on which turns the truth of science, and the reality of experience, the great thinkers of these diverse ages are at one.[2] They turn their backs upon the external that they may find rest in the truly internal, on the inner certainty, which is not a mere subjective but a very objective also: not a mere _anima mea,_ but in close unity therewith _Deus meus._ This is perhaps more explicit in Spinoza, in some points, than in Descartes, and in many respects more decisively put by Augustine than by either. But this is what is really meant by the initial concentration of suspense: this is what is sought when a Principle is sought. Nothing short of this unity of subjective and objective in an Absolute--we may say--Ego, is a principle. But 'principles' like other terms are sometimes lightly taken; and can be in the plural--just as in lower levels of religion and society there can be gods many and lords many. Nor in a way wrongly. For, as has been before pointed out, a principle is the unity of beginning and end: it is only caught hold of by approaching from different directions: it loses its life and power when cut off from the many organs by which it distributes itself so as to grasp reality. If it be essentially one, it is not a bare unit: it cannot, without injury, be reduced to utter simplicity, and accepted in the shape of a single term. And yet this is what almost inevitably happens to every so-called principle.