Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/298

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SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE
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on another side of his nature. He has a plaything, — say, a lead soldier. He loves it. He breaks it. Now offer him — yes, at once show him — another plaything, another lead soldier, as nearly as possible like the one just broken. Were the broken one not, as such, before the child’s mind, the new one might prove in all respects satisfactory. It has, perhaps, all the universal characters that aroused his interest in the former. But now, will the child, keenly fond of universal types as he intellectually is, — will he be very likely to accept the new soldier as a compensation for the broken one? No. He is very likely to mourn the more vociferously in view of your offer. If you could have hidden the broken soldier before he observed the disaster, and if you could have substituted the other, perhaps the child would never have recognised the loss, and all would have been well. It is not, then, that he theoretically recognises this simple lead soldier as observably unique in type or as definably different from all others. It is that his love for his toy is, in its subjective, instinctive, preconscious type, an exclusive passion, that is, a feeling such that the idea of the two objects that shall at the same time be conceived as equally possible satisfactions of this feeling, is a repugnant, a hateful, idea. Now, at this moment, I say, when the child rejects the other object — the other case that pretends to be an apt appeal to his exclusive love for the broken toy, — at this very moment he consciously individuates the toy. And he does this because he loves the toy with an exclusive love that permits no other. Of course, he indeed knows not why he