reason in the world why that content should be confined to the ‘this me.’ In the case of a social being, this is impossible; and to point out any human being, in whom his exclusive self is the whole content of his will, is out of the question. But, if so, where is the difficulty of my object being one and the same with the object of other people; so that, having filled the form of my personality with a life not merely mine, I have at heart, and have identified with and made one with myself, objective interests, things that are to be, and in and with the existence of which I am not to satisfy my mere private self; so that, as I neither will nor can separate myself from what makes me myself, in realizing them I realize myself, and can do so only by realizing them? (We shall come on this again—see especially Essay VII.)
Well then, just as we must accept the teaching that ‘all is relative to self,’ but supplement and correct it with the teaching that ‘myself also is relative’; so we must accept the teaching of the selfish theory that I can will myself only, but correct it by the addition ‘and yet the self which is myself, which is mine, is not merely me.’ Hence that all willing is self-realization is seen not to be in collision with morality.
To conclude—If I am asked why I am to be moral, I can say no more than this, that what I can not doubt is my own being now, and that since in that being is involved a self, which is to be here and now, and yet in this here and now is not, I therefore can not doubt that there is an end which I am to make real; and morality, if not equivalent to, is at all events included in this making real of myself.
If it is absurd to ask for the further reason of my knowing and willing my own existence, then it is equally absurd to ask for the further reason of what is involved therein. The only rational question here is not Why? but What? What is the self that I know and will? What is its true nature, and what is implied therein? What is the self that I am to make actual, and how is the principle present, living, and incarnate in its particular modes of realization?
