Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/330

 elements of any one moment of consciousness have to the whole of that moment. On the other hand, I insist that this individual’s experience, even by the aid of the very conditions that force psychology to view it as an evanescent and unspeakably delicate product of the most various and unstable factors, is, when viewed in relation to an exclusive ideal, — in other words, when metaphysically viewed, — a unique experience, and consequently a unique constituent of the Divine life, nowhere else capable of being represented in God’s universe, and therefore metaphysically necessary to the fulfilment of God’s own life; so that, thus viewing himself, the individual can say to God, in Meister Eckhart’s beautiful words: “Were I not, God himself could not be.” For so the individual can say: Without just my unique experience in its wholeness, and in its meaning as a totality of life progressively fulfilling an individual ideal, God’s life would be incomplete; or, in other words, God would not be God. Furthermore, as to the individual plan or ideal, as such, I assert: (1) It is identically a part of God’s plan, so that when I attentively find my life one with reference to the ideal which it aims progressively to fulfil, but can never, humanly speaking, attain, the attention that thus selectively determines my ideal is not similar to, but actually identical with, the fragment of the divine Will as defined earlier in this paper, i.e. with an element of the divine Attention. I assert: (2) On the other hand, this individual attention of mine, whereby my ideal is mine and whereby my experience is the life of one Self in view of the ideal, — this