Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/324

 the knight of this quest, like Browning’s Childe Roland, finds his strenuous way.

Now indeed you know yourself as one Self, as a person. For, first, you know your empirical self as the Seeker, meaning, intending, aiming at, that life-ideal; and here you have a contrast of real and ideal self. And, secondly, since your ideal is this ideal, the expression of the meaning of your unique experience, you can rightly contrast yourself with all the rest of the world’s life. And now we may notice this surprising fact: What from a psychological point of view appeared to us as the evanescence, the infinite delicacy, the natural instability, of your selfhood, is now to be viewed, in the light of your ideal, as the essential uniqueness of just your significant experience of selfhood. For just what as mere content is so fleeting, is in the light of the one and unique goal a process tending and striving thither.

We are now ready to pass from the psychological to the metaphysical point of view. The facts of experience are empirically viewed, when you take them just as they chance to come, and try from an external point of view to observe their laws. The same facts are viewed as expressing the nature of reality, as having a metaphysical bearing, whenever you are able to view a group of these facts as embodying, in its wholeness, some one idea, and so having some one inner unity of meaning or of significance. The reality that in such a case you each time deal with is an absolute reality only in case the contents of experience that you consider, are, when taken together, identical with the whole life of God. In all other cases, you deal