DEFINITIONS OF TERMS 173

diversity, in which a visio beattfica of God the Father wars with a visio
malefica of God the Tyrant. This conflict of incompatible visions will
exercise us throughout this Part. At the present stage we have merely to
take note of the indisputable truth that both visions alike are consonant
with the image of God as a personality pictured in the anthropomorphic
guise beyond which the human imagination seems to be impotent to
penetrate even in its farthest flights of intuition.

(Ill) THE ANTINOMIANISM OF LATE MODERN
WESTERN HISTORIANS

(a) THE REPUDIATION OP THE BELIEF IN A <LAW OF GOD5
BY LATE MODERN WESTERN MINDS

The idea of a 'Law of God' had been wrought out by the travail of the
souls1 of Israelite and Iranian prophets in intuitive responses to the
challenges of Babylonic and Syriac history, while the classical exposi-
tions of the concept of 'laws of Nature' had been blue-printed by philo-
sophic observers of the disintegration of an Indie and an Hellenic World.
Yet, though these might be the illustrations of the two possible schools
of metaphysics that would occur most readily to a twentieth-century
Western mind, we have already observed2 that one or other of the two
concepts had been embraced in some form by the children of almost all
civilizations that had met with the experiences of breakdown and disin-
tegration.

Moreover, both concepts can be entertained by the same mind at the
same time without any prohibitive inconsistency; for, even if they were
incompatible in the theoretical sense of being logically irreducible to
unity,3 this would not ipso facto make them incompatible in the practical
sense of its being inconceivable that these two kinds of Law should be in
force simultaneously side by side. We can, indeed, conceive of them as
being co-regnant, not only without conflict, but in positive co-operation

* Isa. xliii. ii, a In V. vi. 15-49.

3 Actually, the gulf between the repetitive recurrent regularity of 'a law of Nature*
and the purposively, and therefore non-repetitively, persistent regularity of the Law of
God appears to be unbridgeable only so long as we forget that, in thinking of the pheno-
mena in which '& law of Nature' manifests itself, the thinking human rxiind itself is a
party to the situation.

There is a sense in which the mind's faculty of memory—reinforced and amplified in
its range by the social technique of making and preserving records—converts every
repetitive cyclic movement into a unique one-way movement (i.e. a movement of the
same character, in this respect, as the movement manifested in the Law of God). When
the repetitions of the phenomena are not unrealis^ically abstracted from their subjective
setting, it is manifest that Repetition No. x+i differs from Repetition No. x not merely
quantitatively but also qualitatively, because the apprehension of it carries with it a
memory of x previous instances, whereas the apprehension of No. x carries with it a
memory of x— x instances only.

'Let us take the most stable of all internal states: the visual perception of an exterior
object at rest, It is in vain that the object remains the same, and that I look at it from the
same side, from the same angle, in the same light: the vision that I have of it differs, none
the less, from the vision that 1 had of it just now—if only because it has aged by the
quantum of one instant. My memory is there, and my memory injects something from
this past into this present. My mental state, as it advances along the track of Time, is
constantly swelling its bulk with the duration that it is amassing; it is making, so to
speak, a snowball of itself (Bergson, H.: L'Evolution Crtatrice, 241*1 ed. (Paris IQZI,
Alcan), p. a).