Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/386

Rh of the thoughts which he missed in my former definition of the Absolute. In the former paper I observed that the divine Omniscience cannot be the only real divine attribute. In the present paper, I have given very full place to the other divine attributes that Professor Le Conte missed in my previous discussion, — to the attribute which I have called Will, or Love, and to the attribute of Personality. I have indeed especially endeavoured to show the organic connexion between these attributes and that of Omniscience. The very completion of knowledge, so I have asserted, demands a factor in the absolute Unity of consciousness that cannot be defined in purely theoretical terms, with due reference at once to its nature and to that which it determines. This factor, the Will, individuates both the Absolute and its world. Hereby the Absolute becomes a Person, and completes both its knowledge and its personality, through its self-expression in a system of mutually free as well as mutually interrelated, and in so far dependent, moral Selves. To these Selves, from their definition as moral beings, expressive of really distinct elements of the Absolute Will, I have assigned a nature which forbids us to conceive their lives as limited by any definite temporal boundaries. In this sense, while distinctly and deliberately declining to define the concrete nature, or contents, or temporal relations, of any individual immortal life, I have declared that what tradition has called eternal life positively belongs to the moral individual. I do not pretend to know, and absolutely decline to affirm, that any and every being bearing human form rep-