Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/325

 with a reality of some lower grade, — a genuine reality, in its own grade, precisely in so far as it consists of contents bound into some unity of meaning by virtue of some one ideal.

Well, the real Self is the totality of our empirical consciousness when viewed as having unity of meaning, and as exemplifying, or in its totality fulfilling, an idea. Now this idea is, for us, as we have seen, an ideal, which is never wholly embodied at any one empirical moment of the human life that now is. This ideal gives our life its meaning. If our life can be viewed as ever attaining that goal, — say, in a superhuman existence, — then all our individual experience, viewed as a whole, will appear as a total embodiment of this meaning. As we now are, our life that is has unity and meaning only in so far as we regard it as the struggle towards the embodiment of that ideal, which, hovering in still unattainable remoteness above all our earthly existence, gives, by its pervasive contrast, unity to our present fragmentary selfhood. And it is such a way of viewing life that prepares us for the metaphysical theory of the Ego.

One word more here as to the sorts of self that can be defined by referring to a life-ideal. I have spoken as if an individual life-ideal were, as such, a wholly good, a truly worthy, ideal. As a fact, any individual life-ideal, as such, has of necessity a large element of rationality, and so of goodness, about it. On the other hand, a relatively — although never a wholly — diabolical or damnable individual life-ideal is perfectly possible; and the relative unity of an individual self can be, and often is, defined with reference to just