Note 49 — Chapter III · BEREAVEMENT

I call attention to the difference between the view here expressed and that of Emerson in the last paragraphs of his Essay on Love, where he says: “Our affections are tents of a night. Our warm loves are clouds that pass over the firmament of mind with its overarching vault, its galaxies of immutable lights. In the personal relations we are put in training for impersonal submergence and absorption in God.” In my own view the infinite community of spiritual beings that takes the place of God consists altogether of personalities. Godhead, if you choose to apply that name to this infinite society, is not a person but a community of personalities. Personality is not drowned in the impersonal. On the contrary, the individual becomes a personality through his relation to his associates in the eternal life.