Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/311

274 of the Divine Self-Consciousness. The One Will of the Absolute is a One that is essentially and organically composed of Many. These many forms of will harmonise with the Whole, just by being, in a relative measure, free in respect one of another. The many forms of will form One, because it is best — is an aspect of the perfection of the Divine Selfhood — that they should do so. The One Will stands differentiated into many, because in such variety of ideals there is greater significance than in a merely dead and abstract unity. The many ideals are indeed all thus subject, even in their very freedom, to the condition that their various embodiments of freedom should be such as ultimately to unite in the one system of the Absolute Will; but this condition simply does not exhaustively predetermine what each ideal contains or expresses, since the best type of unity is precisely such a unity as consists of elements which embody a universal type, but which are not exhaustively predetermined either by that type or by one another. The sort of dependence which each individual thus constituted has upon other individuals and upon the Whole is precisely the sort of dependence demanded by the moral world, namely, the dependence involved for me when I say that unless I, in my private capacity, will what harmonises with the Absolute Will as such, I shall be overruled by the other wills that (in that case, despite me) harmonise in the Whole. Less dependence than this upon the constitution of the “City of God” itself, no individual beside the Absolute could have in any moral world. More dependence, less individual freedom than this, our