Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/373

ledge, but is merely another aspect of it; that the world of the various forms of will, expressed in the contents of finite life, is a world of Moral Individuals, as free as the moral order admits and demands; and, finally, that each individual, while possessing his ethical freedom, and expressing it in his life, is as knower an organic part, as will a particular will-form, and so, as complete individual, a moment, of that total Unity of consciousness whose will, whose thought, and whose life constitute the world, — if, I say, one faces these considerations, together, and in their whole meaning, the paradox vanishes. The unity of the world of knowledge is not “solipsistic,” in the sense in which that word was first used. There is, indeed, but one knowing Self, when we pass to the highest unity of the world of knowledge, or to what we have before called the Absolute as Knower. At the same time, even this very unity of the Absolute Knowledge implies, as we have seen, and contains an organic variety of interrelated selfhood, even when we confine ourselves to the categories of knowledge alone. On the other hand, the Absolute Self, as such, is not the finite individual, as such; and when, as knower, the individual identifies himself with the Absolute Knower, he does not do this in so far as he is this finite individual, but in so far as his knowledge is universally reasonable knowledge. Meanwhile, both the Absolute and the finite individual are true individuals. The Absolute, as individual, is One; the finite individuals, as such, are many. They are not confounded with one another. They do not slip as