But perhaps, never having come to be but being as He is, He is still not master of his own essence: not master of his essence but being as He is, not self-originating but acting out of his nature as He finds it, must He not be of necessity what He is, inhibited from being otherwise?
No: What He is, He is not because He could not be otherwise but because so is best.Not everything has power to move towards the better though nothing is prevented by any external from moving towards the worse.But that the Supreme has not so moved is its own doing:
there has been no inhibition; it has not moved simply because it is That which does not move; in this stability the inability to degenerate is not powerlessness; here permanence is very Act, a self-determination.This absence of declination comports the fulness of power; it is not the yielding of a being held and controlled but the Act of one who is necessity, law, to all.
Does this indicate a Necessity which has brought itself into existence? No: there has been no coming into being in any degree; This is that by which being is brought to all the rest, its sequents.Above all origins, This can owe being neither to an extern nor to itself.
11.But this Unoriginating, what is it?
We can but withdraw, silent, hopeless, and search no further.What can we look for when we have reached the furthest? Every enquiry aims at a first and, that attained, rests.
Besides, we must remember that all questioning deals with the nature of a thing, its quality, its cause or its essential being.In this case the being- in so far as we can use the word- is knowable only by its sequents: the question as to cause asks for a principle beyond, but the principle of all has no principle; the question as to quality would be looking for an attribute in that which has none:
the question as to nature shows only that we must ask nothing about it but merely take it into the mind if we may, with the knowledge gained that nothing can be permissibly connected with it.
The difficulty this Principle presents to our mind in so far as we can approach to conception of it may be exhibited thus:
We begin by posing space, a place, a Chaos; into this existing container, real or fancied, we introduce God and proceed to enquire:
we ask, for example, whence and how He comes to be there: we investigate the presence and quality of this new-comer projected into the midst of things here from some height or depth.But the difficulty disappears if we eliminate all space before we attempt to conceive God: He must not be set in anything either as enthroned in eternal immanence or as having made some entry into things: He is to be conceived as existing alone, in that existence which the necessity of discussion forces us to attribute to Him, with space and all the rest as later than Him- space latest of all.Thus we conceive as far as we may, the spaceless; we abolish the notion of any environment: we circumscribe Him within no limit; we attribute no extension to Him; He has no quality since no shape, even shape Intellectual; He holds no relationship but exists in and for Himself before anything is.
How can we think any longer of that "Thus He happened to be"?
How make this one assertion of Him of whom all other assertion can be no more than negation? It is on the contrary nearer the truth to say "Thus He has happened not to be": that contains at least the utter denial of his happening.
12.Yet, is not God what He is? Can He, then, be master of being what He is or master to stand above Being? The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered:
In us the individual, viewed as body, is far from reality; by soul which especially constitutes the being we participate in reality, are in some degree real.This is a compound state, a mingling of Reality and Difference, not, therefore reality in the strictest sense, not reality pure.Thus far we are not masters of our being; in some sense the reality in us is one thing and we another.We are not masters of our being; the real in us is the master, since that is the principle establishing our characteristic difference; yet we are again in some sense that which is sovereign in us and so even on this level might in spite of all be described as self-disposing.
But in That which is wholly what it is- self-existing reality, without distinction between the total thing and its essence- the being is a unit and is sovereign over itself; neither the being nor the essence is to be referred to any extern.Besides, the very question as to self.disposal falls in the case of what is First in reality; if it can be raised at all, we must declare that there can be no subjection whatever in That to which reality owes its freedom, That in whose nature the conferring of freedom must clearly be vested, preeminently to be known as the liberator.
Still, is not this Principle subject to its essential Being? On the contrary, it is the source of freedom to Being.
Even if there be Act in the Supreme- an Act with which it is to be identified- this is not enough to set up a duality within it and prevent it being entirely master of that self from which the Act springs; for the Act is not distinct from that self.If we utterly deny Act in it- holding that Act begins with others moving about it-we are all the less able to allow either self-mastery or subjection in it: even self-mastery is absent here, not that anything else is master over it but that self-mastery begins with Being while the Supreme is to be set in a higher order.
But what can there be higher than that which is its own master?
