Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/327

 such a real Ego only in so far as each of us finds his experience, in some coherent and connected way, determined and pervaded by a conscious and comprehensive plan of his life, which he experiences as his own plan, attentively selected from amongst the plans of life that experience has suggested. This plan need not be abstractly formulated. It must be concretely present.

A plan in life, pervading and comprehending my experiences, is, I say, the conditio sine qua non of the very existence of myself as this one, whole, connected Ego. If I have no such plan, whether abstractly defined or concretely intuited, I simply do not exist as one Ego, but remain a disconnected mass of fragments. But such a plan means that we are conscious of ourselves as continually setting before ourselves an ideal, noble or relatively base, good or relatively devilish; a model of what this individual life and its successive experiences, in our view, ought to be. This ideal, in the case of every rationally self-conscious human being, is such that we never do fulfil this ideal, complete this plan, or live up to this purpose of life, by means of actually attained experiences of life. Every human deed falls short of what the plan of life of the steadily self-conscious being demands; and that, too, whether this plan itself is divine or is, relatively speaking, damnable. Our ideal, in so far as it is a genuine ideal, is never attained at any temporal point of our experienced existence as individual beings. We never become, for our own rational consciousness, perfect individual selves. Yet all our empirical life has meaning, and constitutes the life of one Self,