Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/323

 But the actual life is a heap of chance empirical fragments of personality.” Yet there is a higher view than this. A rational conscience says to me: “Why need the ideal self be lost? Conceive rather, in some rational terms, what you wisely can mean to be. Let this meaning, this intent, be attentively looked upon as expressing an unattained goal, with reference to which your experience is to be moulded, harmonised, rationalised. Keep this goal in sight.” To do so involves rationally significant Attention, i.e. attention such as regards a specific content — namely, here, your ideal — as something to be held present before you, to the exclusion of all barely possible but, for you, rejected ideals. In the light of this ideal, view all your chaos of experience. Now it all has unity, for it is lighted by your intention to bring it all into subordination to that ideal. Now, also, whatever happens to you, you live one life; namely, the life of aiming towards that goal. And now, once more, the very remoteness and ideality of the goal assures the unity of your life. For the ideal is not something that you can to-morrow attain and so have done with. Your ideal is precisely harmony, organisation, unity of life. This, you as you are can never completely fulfil. But for just that reason the ideal goal, shining through all your experience, makes that experience seem to you as one in intent, in purpose, in meaning, despite its empirical variety. Just because your ideal is above you, your real life becomes a single life, for it is now a life of seeking for the goal. The quest is one, however chaotic the wilderness through which the Self,