Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/342

 individual. This individual is what it is, in order that the exclusive interest of the Absolute in just this world of fact might find a free expression. The individual, then, is contingent. It need not be, but is. “But all this,” one may say, “applies to the whole world of fact as One Individual, and to each fact only as this part of the Individual Whole, but not to any finite fact as such. Surely the whole determines the parts. This world of fact, as a whole, exists as this contingent and free fulfilment of the Absolute Thought, in a way that expresses the Absolute Will. But any one fact — say, this atom, this star, this man — is, as fact, determined by the one Absolute Will. At a stroke the Eternal World is finished. There is one Individual, and that is the Whole. The parts are predestined by the Whole. Each part is determined. ‘Only One is free, and that is Zeus.’”

I reply with a question: Why so? Why not view the Individual Whole as a whole of many related but not therefore mutually determined individuals? Why is not that at least possible? Do you say that one system of Thought, one ideal unity of universal Ideas, or Laws, is by our hypothesis to be fulfilled, and that therefore the individual fulfilment can only be such that it realises the very system of laws in this system of facts, where the Whole is contingent, but the parts are predetermined by the unity of the system? Then I answer you, first, by instances. When I am to fill a space with matter, I have to do it so that whatever individual whole of matter fills that space shall conform to the system of the universal geometrical laws