Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/326

 such a relatively bad or devilish ideal. In such cases, the goal of life remains ideal, but the individual is an evil-doer, a relatively lost soul. There are such lives in plenty in the world. They have their own degree of selfhood, unity, ideality; but a deep colouring of baseness runs through it all.

And now I finally turn from the empirical to the metaphysical. I ask: What reality has the individual self in the universe of God? But in answering this question I indeed cannot and must not ignore the lesson of the foregoing empirical theory. That theory points out that what one empirically means by the self or self-consciousness is an extremely variable mass of mental contrasts, whose empirical unity depends upon conditions of the utmost complexity. I now ask: In what sense, despite this complexity and variability of the individual self-consciousness as it comes to us empirically, have we still a right to say that there is in the universe a real, and, within the range of our individual experience, a permanent being, to be called this individual Ego? I shall answer this question in a way whose proof I can only sketch. To state my whole case would involve a long course of lectures on metaphysics. I have time, here, chiefly for a relatively dogmatic statement, with mere indications of proof. I shall begin by repeating explicitly, that each one of us knows in his own case