God the Known and God the Unknown | Page 7

widely distant
species or genera of plants and animals, are one in principle-sterility of
hybrids being due to barrenness of ideas, and barrenness of ideas
arising from inability to fuse unfamiliar thoughts into a coherent
conception. I have insisted on this at some length in "Life and Habit,"
but can do so no further here. (Footnote: Butler returned to this subject
in "Luck, or cunning?" which was originally published in 1887.
In like manner we have so long associated the word "Person" with the
idea of a substantial visible body, limited in extent, and animated by an
invisible something which we call Spirit, that we can think of nothing
as a person which does not also bring these ideas before us. Any
attempt to make us imagine God as a Person who does not fulfil [sic]
the conditions which our ideas attach to the word "person," is ipso facto
atheistic, as rendering the word God without meaning, and therefore
without reality, and therefore non-existent to us. Our ideas are like our
organism, they will stand a vast amount of modification if it is effected
slowly and without shock, but the life departs out of them, leaving the

form of an idea without the power thereof, if they are jarred too rudely.
Any being, then, whom we can imagine as God, must have all the
qualities, capabilities, and also all the limitations which are implied
when the word "person" is used.
But, again, we cannot conceive of "everything" as a person.
"Everything" must comprehend all that is to be found on earth, or
outside of it, and we know of no such persons as this. When we say
"persons" we intend living people with flesh and blood; sometimes we
extend our conceptions to animals and plants, but we have not hitherto
done so as generally as I hope we shall some day come to do. Below
animals and plants we have never in any seriousness gone. All that we
have been able to regard as personal has had what we can call a living
body, even though that body is vegetable only; and this body has been
tangible, and has been comprised within certain definite limits, or
within limits which have at any rate struck the eye as definite. And
every part within these limits has been animated by an unseen
something which we call soul or spirit. A person must be a persona-
that is to say, the living mask and mouthpiece of an energy saturating it,
and speaking through it. It must be animate in all its parts.
But "everything" is not animate. Animals and plants alone produce in
us those ideas which can make reasonable people call them "persons"
with consistency of intention. We can conceive of each animal and of
each plant as a person; we can conceive again of a compound person
like the coral polypes [sic], or like a tree which is composed of a
congeries of subordinate persons, inasmuch as each bud is a separate
and individual plant. We can go farther than this, and, as I shall hope to
show, we ought to do so; that is to say, we shall find it easier and more
agreeable with our other ideas to go farther than not; for we should see
all animal and vegetable life as united by a subtle and till lately
invisible ramification, so that all living things are one tree-like growth,
forming a single person. But we cannot conceive of oceans, continents,
and air as forming parts of a person at all; much less can we think of
them as forming one person with the living forms that inhabit them.
To ask this of us is like asking us to see the bowl and the water in

which three gold-fish are swimming as part of the gold-fish. We cannot
do it any more than we can do something physically impossible. We
can see the gold-fish as forming one family, and therefore as in a way
united to the personality of the parents from which they sprang, and
therefore as members one of another, and therefore as forming a single
growth of gold-fish, as boughs and buds unite to form a tree; but we
cannot by any effort of the imagination introduce the bowl and the
water into the personality, for we have never been accustomed to think
of such things as living and personal. Those, therefore, who tell us that
"God is everything, and everything is God," require us to see
"everything" as a person, which we cannot; or God as not a person,
which again we cannot.
Continuing the article of Mr. Blunt from which I have already quoted, I
read :-
"Linus, in a passage which has been preserved by Stobaeus, exactly
expresses the notion afterwards adopted by Spinoza: 'One