spiritual things in each other.  But these statements do not make it clear how Eckhart accounts for the imperfections of the phenomenal world, which he is precluded from explaining, as the Neoplatonists did, by a theory of emanation.  Nor can we solve the difficulty by importing modern theories of evolution into his system.  The idea of the world-history as a gradual realisation of the Divine Personality was foreign to Eckhart’s thought.  Stoeckl, indeed, tries to father upon him the doctrine that the human mind is a necessary organ of the self-development of God.  But this theory cannot be found in Eckhart.  The “necessity” which impels God to “beget His Son” is not a physical but a moral necessity.  “The good must needs impart itself,” he says.[242] The fact is that his view of the world is much nearer to acosmism than to pantheism.  “Nothing hinders us so much from the knowledge of God as time and place,” he says.  He sees in phenomena only the negation of being, and it is not clear how he can also regard them as the abode of the immanent God.[243] It would probably be true to say that, like most mediaeval thinkers, he did not feel himself obliged to give a permanent value to the transitory, and that the world, except as the temporary abode of immortal spirits, interested him but little.  His neglect of history, including the earthly life of Christ, is not at all the result of scepticism about the miraculous.  It is simply due to the feeling that the Divine process in the “everlasting Now” is a fact of immeasurably greater importance than any occurrence in the external world can be.

When a religious writer is suspected of pantheism, we naturally turn to his treatment of the problem of evil.  To the true pantheist all is equally divine, and everything for the best or for the worst, it does not much matter which.[244] Eckhart certainly does not mean to countenance this absurd theory, but there are passages in his writings which logically imply it; and we look in vain for any elucidation, in his doctrine of sin, of the dark places in his doctrine of God.[245] In fact, he adds very little to the Neoplatonic doctrine of the nature of evil.  Like Dionysius, he identifies Being with Good, and evil, as such, with not-being.  Moral evil is self-will:  it is the attempt, on the part of the creature, to be a particular This or That outside of God.

But what is most distinctive in Eckhart’s ethics is the new importance which is given to the doctrine of immanence.  The human soul is a microcosm, which in a manner contains all things in itself.  At the “apex of the mind” there is a Divine “spark,” which is so closely akin to God that it is one with Him, and not merely united to Him.[246] In his teaching about this “ground of the soul” Eckhart wavers.  His earlier view is that it is created, and only the medium by which God transforms us to Himself.  But his later doctrine is that it is uncreated, the immanence of the Being and Nature of God Himself.  “Diess Fuenkelein, das