Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/383

346 now demands, in its turn, that moral activities should be conceived as incapable of being ended in time. The solution of the antinomy would, as before, insist upon the difference of the points of view. It would demand that we render unto eternity the things that are eternity’s. These things are precisely the fulfilled ideals, the attained goals, of the Absolute Life as such. Unto time, on the other hand, we should render the things that are time’s; namely, the processes whose end cannot be temporally conceived, and whose significance lies in their struggle for goals which they find always remote. Illustrations of such twofold realities, drawn from the mathematical world, have been so often repeated as to be philosophically tedious, and I need not dwell upon them here. Any convergent infinite series approaches, as to its sum, an unattainable Limit. When this Limit chances to be definable by us in terms quite other than those which the infinite series embodies, we are able to be, at once, in possession of the Limit, aware that this is the Limit of the infinite series, and able to see how the infinite series is absolutely incapable of ever attaining this its own goal. On the other hand, when the Limit is an irrational number, it is, in general, known to us only as the unattainable goal of an infinite series; and here we see only one aspect of the Limit. Applying the simile, one may declare that the moral consciousness, as such, views its goal only as the term of an infinite series, and so as unattainable. That, from an eternal point of view, this Limit should be viewed as attained, is no more surprising than that the mathematical consciousness should be able to de-