Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/387

350 resents one of the moral individuals of the eternal world. But I have so defined the moral individual that it is perfectly possible for anybody who is one to discover the fact in self-conscious terms. The other human beings, if such exist, may as well expect to find philosophy sparing of compliments in this matter; and I do not myself think it required by humanity to identify every empirical human being as a separate moral individual. On the contrary, I very much hope that many of the people who phenomenally appear to us as human beings are not, as we see them, distinct moral individuals at all, but mere fragments of a finite personality whose type is hidden from us, and whose individual meaning may therefore be much less sinister than the fragments within our ken would suggest. In immortality as a boon offered to anybody who feels a wish for it, — as a solace for our ill fortune, or as a character to be attributed, by way of social compliment, to any featherless biped who happens to be called a man, — in all this I feel no philosophical and but little personal interest. What we ought to wish to find finally saved, in our own fortune, in our own lives, or in the lives of those whom we love and honour, is distinctly moral personality, conceived as a self-conscious process aiming towards a unique goal, — a goal that cannot be conceived as attainable at any temporal moment. Such individual goals, as Idealism teaches us, must be attained in the eternal world. And in the eternal world there are therefore moral personalities, — individuals, who are yet one in God. The only immortality that I pretend to know about