Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/128

Rh being, or created spirit, the numerical unit in the created universe, viewed as such a spirit appears in what has well been called its natural aspect; viewed, that is, as the organising subject of a natural-scientific experience, marked by fragmentariness that is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin a word to match the excellent German one ergänzt. The supernatural, that is to say, the completely rational aspect of this being is left out of the conception we are discussing, — the aspect under which it is seen as the subject and co-operating cause of a moral i.e. completely rational or metaphysical experience. In this last context, the word “experience” has suddenly changed its meaning in kind, and the human consciousness is seen to have, in its total unity, the all-encompassing form of a, — that Complete Reason, of a truly infinite sphere, in which the primal self-consciousness of the creature actively posits the Ideal which is its real world of being. In this complete reason, or Conscience, the single spirit sees itself as indeed a person — a self-active member of a manifold system of persons, all alike self-active in the inclusive unit of their being; all independent centres of origination, so far as efficient causation is concerned; all moving from “within,” i.e. each from its own thought, and harmonised in a society of