Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/331

 individual possession of mine is a unique fact in the unity of the Divine life, a fact determined to what it is, not at all completely, nor in any fashion essentially, by any other fact or system of facts in the Divine life. It is not right to say: God in his wholeness is, as such whole, the maker of what I am. In my grade of reality, I am unique as this element in and of the Divine Will. Nothing else than my will gives my will its essential character. From this point of view, the individual will, in its essentially although always incomplete self-conscious determination to the pursuing of just this ideal, can say to God in his wholeness: “Were I not, your Will would not be”; for had I not this my unique attentive choice of my own ideal, God’s Will would be incomplete. He would not have willed just what I, and I alone, as this fragment of his life, as this member of the Divine Choice, will in him, and as this unique portion of his complete Will.

I shall, then, also strenuously insist that the individual, as I define him, is free, — free with the identical freedom of God, whereof his freedom is a portion. For there is (1) in his consciousness an element which is determined by absolutely nothing in the whole of God’s life outside of this individual himself. Furthermore (2) this element, namely, his attentively selected ideal, is determined neither by the contents of the individual’s experience nor by the mere necessity of the laws of the individual’s thought. For the thesis that the individual is thus free, I have prepared the way by showing that there is an element of freedom universally present in the