Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/225

200 tional expression of the result of putting ourselves at the point of view of our critics. We see our limitations as they see them. Our will conforms itself, therefore, to their contemptuous will concerning us, because we realize the existence of that will. In recognizing and sharing their contempt, we therefore realize in part the universal will that must condemn all individual limitations as such. We practically experience the truth that a perfectly fair judge of us all would not be satisfied merely with our individual contentments as such, but would also demand the destruction of all our individual limitations. We thus get practically far beyond hedonism. We see that as we are weak and wretched in the eyes of one another, we should all be far more so in the eyes of a ofod Our ideal of life must then be the notion of a life where no one being could fairly criticise any other at all. But such a life would be no longer a life of separate individuals, each limited to his petty sphere of work. It would be a life in which self was lost in a higher unity of all the conscious selves.

Singular may appear this conception even now, after all that we have said; but it is a practical conception in our every-day human life. That we criticise the limitations of others, and desire them to sacrifice their pleasures for the sake of removing these limitations, may be regarded at first as our cruel caprice, if you will so regard it. But when the edge of the sword is turned against us, when we, feeling the bitterness of criticism and seeing our limitations, long to be beyond them, hate ourselves for them, and yet refuse to escape from the pain of all this by