technical but actually ungrounded objections. The individual’s knowledge, such objectors insist, is something that he carries perhaps in his head, perhaps as a mere organ of his immortal soul, perhaps as his reflection of the far-off Sun of divine insight. In any case, however, it is just his knowledge; and he is primarily a being with this life and this will, wholly incapable of including within either his life, or the knowledge that is so far a mere incident of such a life, either the knowledge or the life of anybody else. If he thinks that he does this, he is deluded into the vain fancy that he can absorb the whole universe into his head, can swallow all souls in his own capacious soul, or can live all lives while he lives his own! Professor Howison, as philosopher, is beyond the cruder forms of such polemic. He admits that our thesis need not mean that the world is absorbed into the narrow individual Ego as such. But he objects that, in that case, the individual, as such, is, in his turn, inevitably lost in the self-abnegating consciousness: “I am He.” But not thus are the alternatives exhausted. Knowledge is a form of self-consciousness. So also is self-conscious individuality. But the two, while in the closest and most organic relationship, are distinct, and secure their organic relationship by virtue of this very distinction. The finite knower, as such, is thinking of and conforming to the beyond, so long as he is finite knower. For herein lies his essence as knower. He lives in self-surrender, in seeking to understand what he possesses by discovering its relation to, its inclusion in, an
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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD
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