Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/350

if you give to one of its terms any value otherwise possible, that is, any individual embodiment, the other term is not thereby predetermined. If one of these persons were conceived merely as the embodiment of the other’s ideals, he would be fact of that other person’s life. But, by hypothesis, the ideal or form of will embodied in A is distinct from that embodied in B; A is not what B wishes him to be, merely as such, nor is B what A wishes him to be, merely as such. For what the Absolute wills in A is at least, so far, distinct from what the Absolute wills in B. The only possible relations between these two persons in the moral world would thus be either total independence, so that neither in the least determined anything in the other’s life, or, if the relations were definite, they would have to be of the types that admit many roots, — to use our former metaphor. And so the Absolute Will, in so far as it received individual embodiment in A, would stand in an ideally definable relationship to the will expressed in B, such that any one of various individuals of the type of B would be permitted to exist, when A once existed, and without conflict with the nature of this relationship. In other words, in choosing A, the Absolute would not, logically speaking, have yet chosen B, but only one of several individuals, any one of whom might have satisfied equally well the ideal relationship between A and B. But, now, what holds of the relationship between A and B would hold also of the relationship of either, or of both, to all definable other individual Selves in the universe. Of all these individual Selves we should alike say, according to our hypothesis, the