Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/332

Rh Divine life, and identical in nature with the rational essence of what we call Attention, wherever attention is viewed as rationally significant. For in so far as in us there is rationally significant attention, and in so far as this rationally significant attention is, as such, the free element of the Divine life, it may prove to be free in us as it is everywhere free in God. The individual attention, in just that aspect in which it constitutes the individual one Self, is peculiarly thus a rationally significant attention, since it concerns that choice of an ideal which gives the individual the whole unity and meaning of his existence. Therefore, as we shall maintain, in choosing the ideal, which is the one means of giving his life the unity of Self, the individual is free with identically the same freedom as is God’s freedom, only that the individual’s freedom is not the whole of God’s freedom, but is a unique part thereof.

Meanwhile, it is never the case that the Self first exists, and then afterwards freely chooses its ideal. On the contrary, the Self exists only as the conscious chooser, the attentively free possessor, of this ideal. The Self finds itself only as having already begun to choose, never as now first choosing. It knows itself only as the being with this ideal. Had it not this ideal, this individual Self would not exist at all. But its choice of this ideal, or, in other words, its very existence as this Self, is determined, in its essential character, by nothing in all of God’s life outside of this unique and individual attitude of attention itself. Therefore, while our current consciousness of our empirical freedom to do this or that is no doubt