[Footnote 235:  Prof.  Karl Pearson (Mina, 1886) says, “The Mysticism of Eckhart owes its leading ideas to Averroes.”  He traces the doctrine of the [Greek:  Nous poietikos] from Aristotle, de Anima, through the Arabs to Eckhart, and finds a close resemblance between the “prototypes” or “ideas” of Eckhart and the “Dinge an sich” of Kant.  But Eckhart’s affinities with Plotinus and Hegel seem to me to be closer than those which he shows with Aristotle and Kant.  On the connexion with Averroes, Lasson says that while there is a close resemblance between the Eckhartian doctrine of the “Seelengrund” and Averroes’ Intellectus Agens as the universal principle of reason in all men (monopsychism), they differ in this—­that with Averroes personality is a phase or accident, but with Eckhart the eternal is immanent in the personality in such a way that the personality itself has a part in eternity (Meister Eckhart der Mystiker, pp. 348, 349).  Personality is for Eckhart the eternal ground-form of all true being, and the notion of Person is the centre-point of his system.  He says, “The word I am none can truly speak but God alone.”  The individual must try to become a person, as the Son of God is a Person.]

[Footnote 236:  Denifle has devoted great pains to proving that Eckhart in his Latin works is very largely dependent upon Aquinas.  His conclusions are welcomed and gladly adopted by Harnack, who, like Ritschl, has little sympathy with the German mystics, and considers that Christian Mysticism is really “Catholic piety.”  “It will never be possible,” he says, “to make Mysticism Protestant without flying in the face of history and Catholicism.”  No one certainly would be guilty of the absurdity of “making Mysticism Protestant”; but it is, I think, even more absurd to “make it (Roman) Catholic,” though such a view may unite the suffrages of Romanists and Neo-Kantians.  See Appendix A, p. 346.]

[Footnote 237:  Preger (vol. iii. p. 140) says that Eckhart did not try to be popular.  But it is clear, I think, that he did try to make his philosophy intelligible to the average educated man, though his teaching is less ethical and more speculative than that of Tauler.]

[Footnote 238:  Sometimes he speaks of the Godhead as above the opposition of being and not being; but at other times he regards the Godhead as the universal Ground or Substance of the ideal world.  “All things in God are one thing.”  “God is neither this nor that.”  Compare, too, the following passage:  “(Gottes) einfeltige natur ist von formen formlos, von werden werdelos, von wesen wesenlos, und von sachen sachelos, und darum entgeht sie in allen werdenden dingen, und die endliche dinge muessen da enden.”]

[Footnote 239:  I here agree with Preger against Lasson.  It seems to me to be one of the most important and characteristic parts of Eckhart’s system, that the Trinity is not for him (as it was for Hierotheus) an emanation or appearance of the Absolute.  But it is not to be denied that there are passages in Eckhart which support the other view.]