Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/358

 upon his fellows, not only in his experiences, but in his moral opportunities, in his place as a moral agent; while he, in turn, will appear as limiting by his deeds the moral opportunities of others. That one moral agent can do not merely good but moral harm to another moral agent, can render the other’s freedom of less scope and value, is not only an empirical fact, but (since the opportunity to do good which is implied in this very dependence is the basis of moral effectiveness) this very correlative power to do real mischief to other free-agents is an essential part of the constitution of the moral world. In view of this, I consider it not only vain but dangerous to regard the moral individual A as having such independence of B that one has a right to call him “infinite,” — in the eternal world, any more than in the temporal. A world of so-called “infinite” free moral agents is, at best, a polytheistic world. At worst, it threatens, as I before said, to prove no “City of God,” but something much more diabolical. The free-agents of a moral world are free only in so far as their essential moral relations ideally leave them free. They have their place and must stay in it. They have their individuality and must subordinate it. They can do one another moral mischief, and the sufferer from such mischief proves the limitations, not merely of finite experience, but of moral individuality.