Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/372

Rh organic whole from which it is inseparable. As knower, such a finite individual, if he were isolated from the whole, would be an absolute self-contradiction. What he discovers in every act of knowledge is, that, just in so far as he sees truth, he is not isolated nor sundered, by any chasm, from the truth that he sees. He learns, in the end, that his knowledge has no meaning, no existence, except as a moment in and of the Absolute Knowledge. Thus he discovers that the world of knowledge is, as a fact, absolutely one, despite whatever variety or apparent or relative sundering or finitude may exist within it, either as to its contents or as to the types of its organisation.

On the other hand, the moral individual, in whose life his own will is to be expressed, exists as expressing this will, and so as declining to confound himself with any other individual, and as incapable of absorbing other individuality into himself. His first view of his situation, in so far as he uses his knowledge merely as the instrument of his individuality, is therefore that he is sundered by impassable chasms from all other realities.

But if we once see that the unquestionable unity of the world of the knower, viewed as Absolute Knower, implies the very individuality by virtue of which the whole world is known as whole; that individuality, in a moral world, means a variety of forms of will, mutually and, although only relatively, yet very really independent, both as to their meaning and as to their expression; that the world of the will is not sundered from the world of know-