Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/414

Rh God, when thus viewed, is indeed not other than his world, but is the very life of the world taken in its wholeness as a single conscious and self-possessed life.

In God we live and move and have our Being. The other thesis, at first sight apparently opposed to the foregoing, may be stated as follows: This Fourth Conception of Being appeals, when rightly understood, to the self of each individual thinker. And it appeals to individual thinkers only, whether human or divine. We have often spoken in the foregoing of any idea as if, taken apart from other ideas, it possessed, so to speak, a selfhood of its own, the selfhood imperfectly exemplified, transiently embodied, in your consciousness at this instant while you think and purpose. Now this manner of speech might indeed be said to lay too much stress upon mere fragments. A momentary human idea is indeed not by itself alone a self, although it does fragmentarily contain the partial will of a self. But the meaning that it contains belongs in truth to some individual thinker, to this soul, to this man, to you or to me. Now, however mysterious may be the difference between you and me, we are in such wise different beings, that the unity of Being must find room for our variety. Above all, our ethical freedom, our practical, even if limited, moral independence of one another, must be preserved. The world then is a realm of individuality. Hence it must be a realm of individuals, self-possessed, morally free, and sufficiently independent of one another to make their freedom of action possible and finally significant.

These are the two possible interpretations of our Fourth Conception. It will be our attempt in what immediately