by explication from the infinite. A controlling significance in the serial
construction of the world is ascribed to the ten, as the sum of the first
four numbers--as reason, understanding, imagination, and sensibility are
related in human cognition, so God, spirit, soul, and body, or infinity,
thought, life, and being are related in the objective sphere; so, further,
the absolute necessity of God, the concrete necessity of the universe,
the actuality of individuals, and the possibility of matter. Beside the
quaternary the tern also exercises its power--the world divides into the
stages of eternity, imperishability, and the temporal world of sense,
or truth, probability, and confusion. The divine trinity is reflected
everywhere: in the world as creator, created, and love; in the mind as
creative force, concept, and will. The triunity of God is very variously
explained--as the subject, object, and act of cognition; as creative
spirit, wisdom, and goodness; as being, power, and deed; and, preferably,
as unity, equality, and the combination of the two.

God is related to the world as unity, identity, _complicatio_, to
otherness, diversity, _explicatio_, as necessity to contingency, as
completed actuality to mere possibility; yet, in such a way that the
otherness participates in the unity, and receives its reality from this,
and the unity does not have the otherness confronting it, outside it. God
is triune only as the Creator of the world, and in relation to it; in
himself he is absolute unity and infinity, to which nothing disparate
stands opposed, which is just as much all things as not all things, and
which, as the Areopagite had taught of old, is better comprehended by
negations than by affirmations. To deny that he is light, truth, spirit,
is more true than to affirm it, for he is infinitely greater than anything
which can be expressed in words; he is the Unutterable, the Unknowable,
the supremely one and the supremely absolute. In the world, each thing has
things greater and smaller by its side, but God is the absolutely greatest