Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/218

Rh is something to be done by the one life after it is united! As if the moral insight must not reveal some deeper truth than can be seen in its first moments!

One expects what we are coming to. In discussing this problem of Shelley’s we are reaching the sense that the moral insight must be yet further completed, or else it will be all in vain. The moral insight says to us all: Act as one being. We must come to that point; but we must also go beyond. We must ask: What is this one being to do, after the insight has made all the individuals of one will? And we already begin to see, in opposition to hedonism, that it cannot be the end of this universal will simply to make of us so and so many new separate individuals once more. The mass of tediously happy selves seems insipid to our common sense, just because we all dimly feel the truth that we must now come to understand better, namely, that the universal will of the moral insight must aim at the destruction of all which separates us into a heap of different selves, and at the attainment of some higher positive organic aim. The “one undivided soul” we are bound to make our ideal. And the ideal of that soul cannot be the separate happiness of you and of me, nor the negative fact of our freedom from hatred, but must be something above us all, and yet very positive.

Had we deduced our principle in any other way than the one we chose, we should be unable to take this, our present necessary step forwards. The feeling of sympathy, for instance, is concerned with the