Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/351

 following things: (1) Their lives, as data, are all present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness; (2) their wills, as personal choices of ideals, are included within a corresponding variety of ideals or forms of will, which together make up the Will of the Absolute, so far as it relates to the moral world; (3) their relations are such that whatever any one of them, A, is, neither the fact of his existence nor his character as an embodiment of the Absolute Will predetermines unambiguously the nature or contents of any other individual life, B. In consequence, we may now without question say that the one act of absolute choice which is embodied in this world that contains the individuals A, B, C, etc., does as fact actually include many mutually contingent, that is, mutually underdetermined, acts of choice, each of which is identical with that mode of will which gets expressed in the life of an individual, and which as a fact includes his own personal self-conscious will. In other words, not merely is the Absolute Will, as expressed in the life and personality of A, distinct from those forms of the Absolute Will that are expressed in other individuals; but this distinction is such that the Absolute Will might be embodied definitely in all the other individuals of the world, and the absolute ideas and their system might predetermine the precise nature of the moral relation in which A is to stand to the rest of the world, and yet A might be left free to be any one of a very large number of individuals, until we conceive the Absolute Free-Will completed by a determinate act expressing itself in the individuality of A, inclusive of the individual