Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/492

Rh us in whom it exists, is this good will in us good at all. In so far as we, viewed abstractly, in our separateness from God, are good, we then do indeed try to realize that life of God in which we are all the time an element. For us this is progress. This progress is the form taken temporarily in us by the good will. But for God this is no real progress. Therefore is it indeed true that the moral insight in us must lead us to aim at progress in goodness, just as, on the other side, the rational element in us leads us to aim at progress in knowledge. But, meanwhile, our moral progress and our rational progress, mere minor facts happening at a moment of time, are but insignificant elements in the infinite life in which, as a whole, there is and can be no progress, but only an infinite variety of the forms of the good will and of the higher knowledge.

And so consciousness has given us in concrete form solutions of our two deepest philosophic problems. The possibility of error, necessitating an inclusive thought, is illustrated for us by our own conscious thought, which can include true and false elements in the unity of one clear and true thought at any moment. And the possibility and necessity of moral evil, demanding a real distinction between good and evil, a hateful opposition that seems at first sight fatal to our religious need for the supremacy of goodness in the united world, is illustrated for us in a way that solves this whole trouble, namely, in the unity of the conscious moral act. There at the one moment are good and evil, warring, implacable, yet united in the present momentary triumph of the