Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/328

 just in so far, but only in so far, as this our empirical life is consciously viewed by ourselves as a process of progressing towards the fulfilment of our individual and consciously chosen ideal.

In consequence, the true or metaphysically real Ego of a man, as I venture now with emphasis to repeat, is simply the totality of his experience in so far as he consciously views this experience as, in its meaning, the struggling but never completed expression of his coherent plan in life, the changing but never completed partial embodiment of his one ideal. His empirical ego, or collection of egos, is constituted by his relatively self-conscious moments just as they chance to come. His metaphysically real Ego is constituted by his experiences in so far as they mean for him the struggle towards his one ideal. A man’s Ego, therefore, exists as one Ego, only in so far as he has a plan in life, a coherent and conscious ideal, and in so far as his experience means for him the approach to this ideal. Whoever has not yet conceived of such an ideal is no one Ego at all, whether you view him empirically or metaphysically, but is a series of chance empirical selves, more or less accidentally bound together by the processes of memory. In the consciousness of such an incoherent being, if he is of human rank, there is indeed, in general, empirical self-consciousness; that is, there is a fragmentary empirical embodiment of the form of self-consciousness. But what I mean is, that, in advance of the coherent life-ideal, — the consciously chosen, even if abstractly undefined, plan of life, — there is no metaphysical truth in saying that the em-