V
THE ABSOLUTE AND THE FINITE INDIVIDUAL
The Absolute, then, possesses a logically complete form of self-consciousness. And the Absolute, as we have seen, is an Individual, whose life is known as the attentively selected fulfilment of its ideas, a fulfilment such that “no other” is admitted as genuinely possible. That selection of the possessed goal is, as we have seen, an absolutely free fact, and a fact of Will. It is free, because nothing in the Absolute Thought, as such, — unless, if you please, the very idea of free perfection, as such, — determines this fact of selection. But the freely selected goal is no single experience. It fulfils the whole system of ideas. It is therefore as full as the whole richness of life. The whole world of concrete facts belongs to it. Whatever is, is so far, then, an object of the one Divine Will, and helps to fulfil that Will. Therefore, as naturally follows, every fact in the world has, amidst all the necessity of its finitude, an element both of uniqueness and of contingency about it, — an element of contingency, because it is there to fulfil a free Will; an element of uniqueness, because it is a constituent in a single and unique integral Whole. This element in every finite fact is an element that no thought can predict. We express this when we say that every fact in the world is an individual fact, which cannot have its whole nature expressed in universal, that is, ideal terms.
