It is the perennial honor of Sweden’s greatest philosopher, Christofer Jacob Bostr?m, to have satisfactorily explained the extremely difficult and complicated question with which our last chapter concluded. He has shown that man, exactly on the supposition that he is an eternal part of God’s being, requires and must go through an evolution in time. According to Bostr?m, religious intuition has found the truth that man is an eternal idea in God, a living member in His organism. But Bostr?m has also understood and considered the difference implied in thinking of man as a member in God’s organism and in thinking of this member as living its independent life. In the former case man possesses the same[175] qualities as God; in the latter, these qualities with corresponding limitations. For an illustration of how all limited beings are incorporated in an absolute personality, Bostr?m likes to fall back on the numerical system. Spiritual beings form a series, as it were, of lower and higher entities, where the latter contain the former pretty much as higher numbers contain the smaller. Bostr?m distinguishes between positive and negative attributes, and means by the former those attributes without which the being cannot be thought, and which it therefore in one sense contains. So for instance in the number ten, all the previous numbers are positive attributes because ten cannot be thought without them, which, however, does not imply identity with either of the lower numbers. On the other hand all the following numbers are negative attributes to the number ten because this may well be thought without them. It contains them only[176] if it is considered as one point in the numerical system, in which case it has them all as attributes. Thus, still referring to the number ten, this may be considered complete within itself without considering the higher numbers, whereas if we wish to comprehend it fully we must see it as a link in the numerical system. Ten would not be the half of twenty without the latter, and so on. The existence of the higher is after all required for that of the lower as fully as the existence of the lower is necessary to that of the higher.
Because each entity is higher according as it has a larger number of the rest as its positive and a smaller number as its negative attributes, it follows that the highest entity, or Deity, has no negative attributes but only positive ones, which of course is the true meaning of the expression that God is the most perfect being.
As a lower being is more perfectly defined when considered included in a[177] higher, this fact must be the reason why all finite, rational beings in their evolution try to assert themselves in the higher beings, up to the highest, by whom they finally obtain their full scope and in whom only they live their complete life.
But if Bostr?m had lived to study the modern cytology he would have found a more adequate comparison within man’s organism, and one that perhaps in several respects would have modified his conception of the world of divine ideas.
God is related to man as man is, not to the cell, but to the lower units of which the cell is composed. Between God and man there is at least one other organism that we know of, namely humanity. But if we overlook this and for simplicity’s sake imagine the relationship as that of man to cell it should be evident from what has been previously said that man is and must be something else to God than he is to himself.
[178]
To God he is what the cell is to man, a living part in His organism, and in this capacity he possesses all the perfect qualities of that organism. Living his independent life, man is in the same position as the cell in his own being, when the cell is thought of as living the life it is confined to by its less perfect organism.
Although limited to that life the cell may literally be said to be man’s image—but an image of a very singular kind. The cell does not reproduce man’s traits as does a photograph or a statue, but within its lower realm it mirrors the fundamental qualities of the original on a very reduced scale.
These limitations can not be conceived by the cell as such because they are natural to it and belong to its entity. The cell is and must feel itself as perfect in its realm as man in his. Only if the cell could compare its conditions with man’s, these limitations would be apparent to it, and such a comparison the cell really undertakes[179] within certain limits. Into each feeling of want enters a comparison between the possessed and the desired. In the higher wants, then, that drive the cells to upbuild man’s organism we have a manifestation of such a comparing power of the cell. Experience shows that the cell may live in a veritable natural state, but it is also, because of the presence of the soul in its innermost being, capable of a high culture for the development of which it receives constant impulses and stimulations from the soul.
In the same sense man may be said to be the image of God. Living in the world and the natural state, to which he is confined by his relatively imperfect organism, man has the qualities of God with corresponding limitations. But even in this state he feels the spirit of God present in him because he is an original part of God’s own organism. In his conscience and in his religious feeling man not only comprehends distinctly the presence of God in his inner[180] being but constantly receives also impulses, incitements and inspirations to develop that perfect life and heavenly kingdom, of which he is called by his high origin and divine birth to become a citizen.
What the conscience and the religious feelings are to the will, the logical laws of thinking are to the reason, and in the latter, man finds God as immediately present as in the former. Indeed, logical laws are the form in which God himself exists.
Because of God’s presence in the eternal laws of our thinking, man is able to appraise himself and his condition with an absolute measure, and can in this way obtain a certain knowledge of God’s world and of his perfect qualities. He has only to abstract all wants and limitations from such qualities as have a positive content, because lack of want is perfectness. We shall now undertake such a valuation with respect to man’s need of evolution here in time, which quality, as all the others,[181] can be explained and understood only through its connection with the corresponding quality in ............