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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

thus or so. In this sense the attentive aspect of the Absolute Experience appears as itself possessed of absolute Freedom. That it shall realise or adequately fulfil the ideas, is, from our point of view, when we define it, necessary. Nor can it leave unfulfilled any true idea. But on the other hand, what individual fulfilment it gives these ideas, the ideas themselves cannot predestinate. In this sense, the individuality, the concrete reality, of the contents of the Absolute Experience must be conceived as on the one hand fulfilling ideas, but as on the other hand freely, unconstrainedly, — if you will, capriciously, — embodying their universality in the very fact of the presence of this life, this experience, this world.

In this completion of our conception of the Absolute Experience, we now see sufficient reason to speak, in a generalised sense, of a World-Will, as absolutely free, and still as absolutely rational. This Will we can regard, if you choose sufficiently to spiritualise your term, as the World-Creator, but not as if the creation were an abstractly separable act, existent apart from the world's existence, and not as if this creation were, properly speaking, a causal process. The Divine Will is simply that aspect of the Absolute which is expressed in the concrete and differentiated individuality of the world. Hereby the world appears, not as a barely abstract world of pure ideas, but as a world of manifested individuals, known in the unity of the one transcendent moment of the Absolute Experience, but there known as a discrete and clearly contrasted collection of beings, whose