ABSTRACT

Among the theories of reality based on immediacy, an important group make appeal to synthetic states such as these, to illustrate the immediacy intended. Besides the theories of primitive and transcendent immediacy, already spoken of, find a further group based upon the immediacy of synthesis or reconciliation. As an abstraction, the super-personal loses both the concrete immediacy of the mystic's feeling and the qualitative concreteness of the knowledge and will postulated by intellectualists and voluntarists. The resort to personality was renewed in the mysticism of Jacob Boehme at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the German mystics, Eckhart and Tauler, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the heart—so to translate the German term Gemuth as used by them—the affections, the entire conative-affective determination of personality, is involved. The mental faculties, knowledge, will, and love, arise in the course of this evolution of positive personality.