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296 largely — yes, mainly — illusory, our very existence as Selves is the embodiment of the Divine freedom. So that, once more, the individual can say to God: “Were I not free, you would not be free.”

On the other hand, in order to prove the individual free, you have indeed first to prove that God is free as well as rational. For then, when the uniqueness of the individual’s attention to his constituent ideal, to the plan that makes up the very essence of his Selfhood, appears amongst the facts of God’s world as that without which this Ego could neither be nor be conceived, the already demonstrated Divine freedom may be applied to this unique case of the universal principle.

The proof of the foregoing theses, as I have said, can here only be indicated. The essential considerations, however, may be reduced briefly to these: We have seen how our empirical self-consciousness gets formed; namely, as what we have called a social contrast-effect, which arises within the circle of our actual and empirical consciousness. We are primarily conscious of the self as a very varying, unstable, and ill-defined mass of contents — thoughts, wishes, interests, memories, desires, sensations — which we find different from, and opposed to, or contrasted with, a largely ideal world of contents which we conceive as the minds, wishes, interests,