going account of the relation of choice to individual fact is to be maintained. For no one simple free act suffices, but many such acts are needed, in order to account logically for the individuation actually present in any such world.
But now let us take one step further. Let us make the moral relationships that we are to consider explicitly relationships amongst Selves of the type that we have been defining. Let A be one of these Selves; a conscious life, defined in its unity by its relation to some one ideal. Let B be another Self in the same world with A. From A’s point of view, from B’s point of view, and from the absolute point of view, these two lives are, first, distinct. They are, to be sure, as masses of fact, present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness. But they themselves are more than mere masses of fact, that is, more than mere data. Each is metaphysically an individual, in so far as his life is the object of an exclusive interest, which we first define as the exclusive interest whereby the Absolute individuates this life, this portion of the world of fact. These two exclusive interests are, even in and for the absolute point of view, not the same. And so far we have variety, at all events, of will in the Absolute. Now, as we have before seen, from the point of view of A or of B, there exists a self-consciously individuating will, an exclusive interest in his life, as realising his ideal, or as struggling towards it. This will and self-consciousness in A is inevitably a part of the Absolute Will and Self-Consciousness, by virtue of the very unity of consciousness upon which our whole
