Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/312

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SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE
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theory does not demand. A world of individuals more separate than this, more endowed with absolute caprice than this, would be a world of anarchy, no “City of God,” but a moral hell. The only possible moral world is a world where various individuals are so free from one another, so relatively separate from mutual predetermination, that each has his own share of the Divine Will, his own unique fashion of determining his attitude towards the Whole, while all are so related to one another, and to the Absolute, that they do realise, when viewed altogether, the unity of the Absolute Ideal. Substantially as much as this Professor Howison admits in every word in which he recognises the moral relations of the various free individuals of his world. Exactly such a constitution we assert, when we declare that it is God’s Will, in freely differentiated, various, and unique forms, that appears as identical with the various individual finite wills, but so appears in them that the total constitution of this world of wills embodies the one Divine Will wherein all these free elements are united, organised, harmonised.

So far, our present theses in general. We shall develope them by treating, first, of the finite self-conscious individual. Him we shall consider, first as empirical psychology knows him, and then as metaphysical and ethical considerations define his true nature. For whoever speaks of the finite self-conscious individual, must begin with the facts of our human natural history. And whoever studies our natural history, must remember that empirical psychology raises, but does not by itself solve, the phil-