Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/302

of the one life, and all the other individuals that in the end fill our known world of experience. It is by an individuating or exclusive interest in living one life for one purpose, that a man becomes a moral individual, one Self, and not a mere collection of empirical social contrast-effects. The love of pleasure is not an exclusive love. Hence it renders its slave vaguely universal. The love of one career, which excludes other ways of living, tends to individualise the professional man. The exclusive love of God, whom nobody else can serve in just the way open to you, tends to individuate your idea of your moral self. In another realm, the vaguer affections, as youth first knows them, are abstract universals, and may demoralise. The love for one beloved, and one only, is an accident which for the first time individuates both the lover and the beloved. The mother’s love, for this infant, is exclusive, and so individuates both mother and child. In brief, it is such affections that, as they give us the consciousness of the One, henceforth tend to make our world one, and hence, by infection, to individuate for us every object in the world. Science, which is primarily of the universal, thus becomes secondarily that whose beloved but far-off goal is, as we said, the knowledge of the individual, — of that individual which love presupposes, but which theory can never finally verify in the observed world of any finite observer.