Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/423

362 to reply: No, you are quite as wrong this time as you were when you called the free system atheism. The system of freedom is genuine monotheism, and the only genuine. All the members of the eternal world except God freely posit themselves as not God, in freely positing God; and God, in positing himself, likewise posits them as not himself. Moreover, this difference from Deity is thought by each spirit's purely thought-put — and therefore free — exclusion of any alternative, as a difference that is defect, the active maintenance or the passive acceptance of which would be sin.

For inasmuch as its characteristic difference is by each spirit thought against the Ideal who is absolute Perfection, the Unity of all possible perfections, all difference from this must include some degree of imperfection, self-posited in the very being of each self-definer. The active consciousness of each is therefore really answerable for the presence of this in his being, but also answerable, by the terms of its being and his, for the rational control of it: answerable, just because the free self-definer is himself the source of it, and yet by his total nature, which eternally contemplates and mirrors God, transcends it. On this ground, the absolutely singular and unrepeatable personality of each soul lies in the exactly identical manner, one and only, in which his thinking differentiates him (1) from