them he wills these horrors for himself, must he not know wherefore?”[1]
(b) The Christian doctrine of the fatherhood of God directly implies that other Christian doctrine of the uniqueness and value of the human soul. For it belongs to every parent to individualize his children. The most ordinary child in a long school procession of little replicas of himself is instantly descried and selected by the individualizing eye of watching father and mother. And Christianity, which teaches that God is a father, of necessity teaches that the human soul is a ‘pearl of great price,’ a ‘treasure hid in a field’—a coin, a sheep which, if lost, must be sought for till it is found. Now this religious teaching, also, is metaphysically justified by the Roycian doctrine that every man is the expression of a unique purpose of the Absolute Self. To the conventional critic’s protest that the human self would be lost in the Absolute ‘as a river in the sea,’ Royce replies that on the contrary, the rich variety, the distinctness, and the stability of the Absolute’s purposes furnish the only guarantee of the individuality of the human self. … The identity of the partial self with the Absolute is never, in his view, a mere identity without a difference.”
(c) Royce teaches, in the third place, that the partial or human self has a ‘relatively free’ will.[2] He accepts (“provisionally” however) “so much of the verdict of common sense as any man accepts when he says: That was my own voluntary deed, and was knowingly and willingly sinful.” The metaphysical reconciliation of the absoluteness of the divine will and the divine experience with even this relative human freedom Royce has, in my opinion, insufficiently worked out. To be sure, he regards the freedom as merely relative: the Absolute is the triumphing, creative Will. And it is the temporal, not the more-than-temporal, finite self of which Royce says that ‘it was good that he should be free.” Yet with all these qualifications the question persists: how can a human self be free to oppose the will of Him by whose selective attention all that exists has its being? how
