Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/487

468 different from that of any other finite being, and if your finite purpose now in any sense uniquely expresses, however inadequately, its own determinate meaning, in its own way, then, you can indeed assert: I alone, amongst all the different beings of the universe, will this act. That it is true that God here also wills in me, is indeed the unquestionable result of the unity of the divine consciousness. But it is equally true that this divine unity is here and now realized by me, and by me only, through my unique act. My act, too, is a part of the divine life that, however fragmentary, is not elsewhere repeated in the divine consciousness. When I thus consciously and uniquely will, it is I then who just here am God’s will, or who just here consciously act for the whole. I then am so far free.

The other popular conception, in addition to the conception of freedom, which belongs in this connection, is that very conception of Activity which I have just employed. By the term “activity” I regard our ethical common sense as meaning precisely the very fact that our present will, as the will of an individual, is unique. By our activity, then, I mean just the unique significance of the present expression of our will. If a general law, — a merely universal type, — if our characters or temperaments, or some other such universal nature of things, are expressed in our present experience, then, in so far, we are indeed mere cases of types. In so far we do not act. But if this my present expression of my meaning is in such wise unique that, but for this meaning, this expression would have no place in the whole realm of Being, then indeed I may call my present expression of meaning