And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.  Only thus is it possible to understand how in God we live, move, and have our being.  That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and Hell (De Coelo et Inferno, lii.), when he tells us:  “An entire angelic society appears sometimes in the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the Lord to see.  When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels, He doth not appear as encompassed by a multitude, but as a single being in angelic form.  Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called.  Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so named from their functions.”

May we not perhaps live and love—­that is, suffer and pity—­in this all-enveloping Supreme Person—­we, all the persons who suffer and pity and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire consciousness of their suffering and their limitation?  And are we not, perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of us as existing confers existence upon us?  Does not our existence consist in being perceived and felt by God?  And, further on, this same visionary tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one man.

“God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,” wrote Kierkegaard (Afslutende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that “God is great because His thought is action” (Ai giovani d’ltalia), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by God.  Is it not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word—­that is to say, with His thought—­and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists?  And what God has once made does He ever forget?  May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein?  In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?