Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/329

 pirical life of any man is the life of any one finite being who, in his wholeness, has any single definably clear and precise contrast with the rest of the life of God. The empirical ego, apart from the unity of life-plan, can be as truly called a thousand selves as one Self. In short, the term “person,” in its metaphysical sense, can mean only the moral individual, i.e. the individual viewed as meaning or aiming towards an ideal, good or relatively bad, angelic or relatively diabolical, lawful or relatively anarchical; for only the moral individual, as a life lived in relation to a plan, a finite totality of experience viewed as meaning for itself a struggle towards conformity to an ideal, has, in the finite world, at once an all-pervading unity, despite the unessential accidents of disease and of sense, and a single clear contrast, in its wholeness, to the rest of the universe of experience. The consciousness of self, however, everywhere depends upon contrasts. And the individual is one Self, for himself, only in so far as he knows one sort of contrast between himself and the universe.

As to the relation of this individual, as thus defined, to God, I shall be equally explicit. I assert: (1) That this individual experience is identically a part of God’s experience, i.e. not similar to a portion of God’s experience, but identically the same as such portion; and (2) that this individual’s plan is identically a part of God’s own attentively selected and universal plan. God’s consciousness forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment; and whatever is, has, in general, such relation to that whole as, in our consciousness, the partial