Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/360

Rh our foregoing hypothesis, the goal of the Ego, its life-ideal, is one of God’s ideals, actual or genuine; and for God there are no genuine possibilities unfulfilled; no true ideas that hover above reality as bare possibilities. God’s ideas are fulfilled in his experience. The inevitable result seems to be, that, just in so far as the moral Ego really is unfulfilled in this life, there is another finite life in the universe, consciously continuous with this one, which, when taken together with this one, consciously reaches the here unattainable goal of this individual moral Ego, so that, in the universe, the individual is perfected in his own kind. To be sure, if his life-ideal has its essentially anarchical or diabolical aspect, this implies that this Ego may, as a moral being, reach the perfection of its own kind in the form of a relatively lost or morally bankrupt Ego; and I see no reason to deny that numerous individuals, freely attending to the ideal which rationally involves their own damnation, attain, in their special types of relative perfection, to their chosen goal. But the study of the problem of Evil belongs not here. Moreover, as I said before, even the lost, if they exist, cannot be utterly devoid of goodness, but are only relatively lost. Enough, however: the individual’s life is a process of experience that means the aim of attaining his life-ideal. If this aim is one of God’s aims, — as it is, — this aim does not remain, from an absolute point of view, a barely possible ideal. There is an experience, and a finite experience, which fulfils this aim, and which involves, then, the perfection of just this individual Ego after his own kind. And this experience is this individual