Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/412

Rh to be related to what we mean when we talk of individual men, of souls, of moral personalities, or of one man as different from any other man?”

Now these are precisely the central questions of religion. These, therefore, are the problems most significant for our whole quest. These two are issues which no one who attacks the central concepts of metaphysical doctrine ought to ignore. The unity of the world, the triumph of the divine plan, the supremacy of good in the universe, these are the interests which religion expresses by asserting that God reigns as a rational, self-conscious, world-possessing, and single Being. The freedom of individuals, the deathless meaning of the life of each person, the opportunity for moral action, these are the interests of every form of ethical religion. I have been forced, before approaching these issues, to dwell so elaborately and so long upon the concept of Being, because that concept is no abstraction, but is precisely the richest and most inclusive of all conceptions, and because, until we had grasped its meaning, any speech as to the various beings that may be found in the world, and as to their relations to the whole and to one another, would have altogether lacked metaphysical foundation. But our task having been so far accomplished, we are prepared to pass from the doctrine of what it is to be real, to the consequent theory regarding what are the existent realities. Hereupon, however, we enter upon the true task of a religious theory.

The problems just stated, if one views them in advance, appear to admit of two opposed solutions. Of these the one would lay the emphasis upon the unity of the whole