IN the last lecture, after a study of the various forms which our empirical self-consciousness assumes, we reached an idealistic definition of what we mean by an individual human Self, regarded as a Real Being. During the present lecture I shall, by the term Self, denote, unless I expressly declare to the contrary, the human Self, as thus defined, and not the Absolute Self as the Absolute.

In the present lecture I propose, first, to make some further comparison of our theory of the Self with doctrines that have been maintained in the history of thought, and in this connection to develope our own thesis more fully. Secondly, I shall undertake to consider the relation of our theory of the individual to that Interpretation of Nature which we expounded in our Fourth Lecture, and to discuss the sense in which, from our point of view, new individuals can appear in the course of natural evolution. Thirdly, I intend to consider briefly the question as to the degree to which the Self is causally determined, as to its experience and its will, by its relations to the natural order. Finally, I shall discuss the sense in which the individual Self can possess ethical Freedom, in view of its relation to the divine Will.

I

Historically, there are theories of the Self which correspond to each of the four conceptions of Being. And in the first place, ever since the doctrine of the Sânkhya, that classic instance of early Realism, realistic Metaphysic has been an especially wealthy source of various theories of the Self. Not always has Realism taken the form of the Soul-Substance theory, although, as we saw at the last time, that theory itself is a typical instance of Realism, and is an especially frequent instance of the realistic view of the Self. But any theory of the Self uses the realist's conception of Being, in case this theory views the Self as logically or essentially independent, in its innermost nature, of the fact that other Selves exist, so that you could conceive other Selves vanishing, while this Self still remained, in some innermost core of its Being, unaltered. Leibniz's Monads are realistic selves; and very frequently the extremer forms of ethical individualism, in order to preserve the dignity, or the freedom, or the rights of the Self, have chosen to use a realistic formulation. When thus defined by the more ethical types of individualistic Realism, the Self seems to stand, within its own realm, as a sort of absolute authority, over against any external will or knowledge that pretends to determine its nature, or its precise limits, or its meaning. It is merely what its own substantial nature determines it to be. It is thus a separate entity, in its essence unapproachable, in some sense, by God or man, unconquerable, possessing perhaps its own inalienable rights, the unit of all ethical order, the centre of its own universe. From this point of view, the principal problem, for any such realistic Individualism, always becomes the question how this Self, whose interests are essentially its own, can rationally come to recognize any responsibility to other Selves or to God, or to any absolute Ought, beyond its own caprice. Just because, within its own realm, it is whatever it is in entire indifference to whether you from without know it or not; or to whether your external will approves it or not; the problem at once arises as to why this Self should, in its turn, recognize any authority. In its knowledge of Being, the independent Self of any theoretical form of Realism, when once the independence of this individual Self has come to be recognized, tends to become, in extreme cases, solipsistic. But in its morality, this same Self, in equally extreme forms of ethical Realism, tends to become an anarchist.1 If, in such extreme and less common forms, Realism, untrue to its usual historical tendencies, throws off its usual and respectable conservatism, that is merely because, in general, extremes easily meet, and because, in the special case of the theory of the Self, Realism deals with a test problem which is peculiarly apt to bring out its deeper inconsistencies. About the world external to all our human Selves, Realism, as it appears in history, is typically submissive, respectable, and conservative, just because it is dealing unreflectively with an unapproachable and absolute Reality beyond our own life. But so soon as Realism attempts to apply its categories to the realm within, where its unreflective methods are decidedly not at home, it does not, indeed, become less dogmatic than usual, and not the less disposed to cite tradition, and to hurl its customary pathological epithets at its opponents, but it becomes more manifestly unable, when once it has defined any one of its Independent Beings, to say what link or tie, what law or reason, what obligation or responsibility, can ever bind this Independent Being to any other. Hence the dogmatic anarchists of the history of ethics are often realists in their theory of the Self.

As to the Mystical theory of the Self, we have already followed to the end its account of the problem of life. The Self is the Absolute, the Absolute is simple, and there is neither variety of individuals, nor form nor law of life left. The only word as to the true Self is the Hindoo's Neti, Neti. Consequently Mysticism simply condemns all finite individuality as an evil dream.

Modern Critical Rationalism also has its own accounts of the Self. These again are manifold. But the Third Conception of Being in general, as we have all along seen, is both reflective and widely observant; and its theories of the Self have, in most cases, their large measure of truth. For Critical Rationalism the Self is no independent entity, nor any mere experience, but a being whose reality involves the validity of a system of laws and relationships. These laws may be viewed in their psychological aspect. In this sense my Self extends as far as my possible memories, or expectations, or definable plans hold valid for the empirical region called my human life. And my existence as a Self means merely that these laws of my memory, of my will, and of my personal experience are valid as long as I live. Or the laws in question may be viewed as those of an ethical interpretation of life. In this case, by the Self, Critical Rationalism means a being defined in the terms of a certain valid system of laws about the rights and the duties of persons. The Self, in the view of such theories, does not first exist as an Independent Being and then either originate, or else acquire, as an external addition, its system of rights and of duties. But, for Critical Rationalism, the ethical Self is defined and exists only through the prior recognition of these valid rights and duties themselves. Whoever has not learned to recognize his office in the world, as a subject of the moral law, or as a member of a social order, is therefore no ethical Self at all. But whoever is a Self, is such by virtue of this recognized validity of law. In the history of recent thought the Kantian conception of the Self, apart from its realistic elements, is, in its consequences, essentially of this third type. Kant's knowing Self exists, from our human point of view, precisely in so far as the Categories, which express its unity in the realm of experience, are valid. Its existence as the Subject of Knowledge, so far as we can know it, thus becomes coextensive with the range of such validity. Kant's ethical Self exists as the free recognizer of the Moral Law. And in Fichte, who purged Kant's doctrine of its realistic elements, this view of the Self especially comes to light, and contends with the purely idealistic tendencies of Fichte. For Fichte, the Self, although the very principle of Being, rather ought to be than is.

Now the truth, and the practical value of every such doctrine, lies in the fact that it recognizes the valid relations of the Self, and the laws which bind the Self to its fellows, as conditions without which the Self can neither exist nor be conceived. The defect of Critical Rationalism lies in the consequences of its essentially abstract and impersonal view of Being. The Self, in this sense, is a law rather than a life; and a type of existence rather than an Individual. It is precisely the restoration of individuality to the Self which constitutes the essential deed of our Idealism. For us the Self has indeed no Independent Being; but it is a life, and not a mere valid law. It gains its very individuality through its relation to God; but in God it still dwells as an individual; for it is an unique expression of the divine purpose. And since the Self is precisely, in its wholeness, the conscious and intentional fulfilment of this divine purpose, in its own unique way, the individual will of the Self is not wholly determined by a power that fashions it as clay is fashioned and that is called God's will; but, on the contrary, what the Self in its wholeness wills is, just in so far, God's will, and is identical with one of the many expressions implied by a single divine purpose, so that, for the reasons already set forth, in general, in the closing lecture of the foregoing series, the Self is in its innermost individuality, not an independent, but still a Free Will, which in so far owns no external Master, despite its unity with the whole life of God, and despite its dependence in countless ways upon Nature and upon its fellows, for everything except the individuality and uniqueness of its life.

Meanwhile, I cannot too strongly insist that, in our present form of human consciousness, the true Self of any individual man is not a datum, but an ideal. It is true that people at first very naturally, and often very resentfully, reject this interpretation. “Do I not directly know,” one insists, “that I am and who I am?” I answer: You indeed know, although never in a merely direct way, that you exist. But in the present life you never find out, in terms of any direct experience, what you are. I know that I am, as this individual human Self, only in so far as every Internal Meaning, that of my present experience included, sends me elsewhere, or to some Other, for its complete interpretation, while this particular sort of Internal Meaning, such as gets expressed in the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, the meaning whereby I come to be aware of myself as this individual different from the rest of the world, implies and demands, for its complete embodiment, some sort of contrast between Self and not-Self. I am assured of myself, then, only in so far as I am assured of the Nature of Being in general. I am indeed right in thus contrasting Self and not-Self; but my certainty regarding the Being of this contrast depends upon the same general assurances that lead to my whole metaphysical view of the nature of Reality.

And now as to the finding out what I am, the answer to this question involves, upon its empirical side, all the complications and inconsistencies of common sense which we set forth at the last time. If you take me merely as common sense views me, I am, from moment to moment, whatever social experience or lonely reflection makes me seem. I am, so far, whatever my empirical contrast with you, with society in general, with those whom I love, or with those against whom I contend,—I am, in brief, whatever my remembered or anticipated powers, fortunes, and plans, cause me to regard with emphasis as myself in contrast with the rest of the world. There is no instant in our human experience when I can say, Here I have not merely assumed, or presupposed, or conceived, but actually found in experience the Self, so that I here observe what I finally am.

In what way then can I just now rationally define myself as this actually unique and real person? Already we have seen, in general, the answer to this question. The Self can be defined in terms of an Ideal. If we ask a man to observe once for all what he now is, we call his attention to various empirical accidents of his life,—to his bodily presence, to his organic sensations, to his name, to his social status, and to his memories of the past. But none of these are of any uniquely determined significance; and not thus can we show a man what he is. But when, in vexation at the moral ineffectiveness of a man, we significantly use the imperative mood and say, “Whatever you know or do not know about yourself, at all events be somebody,”—we lay stress upon what is, after all, the essential point. What we mean by our words is the exhortation: “Have a plan; give unity to your aims; intend something definite by your life; set before yourself one ideal.” We conceive, in such cases that the Self is definable in terms of purpose, of continuity of life-plan, and of voluntary subordination of chance experiences to a persistently emphasized ideal. If this ideal keeps the individual contrasted with other individuals, as the servant of these masters, or again as the servant, in some unique fashion, of God,—as the friend of these friends, as the teacher of these pupils, as the fellow-worker with these comrades, then the Self which we have defined is the Self of an individual man. It is in so far not to be confounded with their selves just because the ideal, if expressed in a life, would be expressed in constant contrast with these other lives. Our idealistic theory teaches that all individual lives and plans and experiences win their unity in God, in such wise that there is, indeed, but one absolutely final and integrated Self, that of the Absolute. But our idealism also recognizes that in the one life of the divine there is, indeed, articulation, contrast, and variety. So that, while it is, indeed, true that for every one of us the Absolute Self is God, we still retain our individuality, and our distinction from one another, just in so far as our life-plans, by the very necessity of their social basis, are mutually contrasting life-plans, each one of which can reach its own fulfilment only by recognizing other life-plans as different from its own. And if from the Absolute point of view, as well as from our own, every individual life that has the unity of a plan, takes its own unique place in the world's life, then for God, as for ourselves, we various human beings live related lives, but still contrasting and various lives, each one of which is an individual life, connected within itself, but distinguishable from all the other lives, precisely as our normal social consciousness makes us seem.

But now, if my human Self can be defined in a single and connected fashion only in terms of such an ideal, we see at once that, in our present human life, no one life-plan ever gets both a precise definition and a complete embodiment; and, therefore, we can say, Never in the present life do we find the Self as a given and realized fact. It is for us an ideal. Its true place is in the eternal world, where all plans are fulfilled. In God alone do we fully come to ourselves. There alone do we know even as we are known.

The conception of the Self thus sketched involves difficulties, and leaves special questions still to be answered, such as I should be the last to ignore. It was for the sake of meeting just such difficulties that our whole previous discussion of the Theory of Being was required as a beginning of our enterprise; and that our Theory of Nature has also been needed as a preliminary to the study of the Self. In general we stated both these difficulties and their answers in dealing with the general problems of Being. But in defining the Self we have already recognized these general problems in a case where, owing to the complex natural relations of the Self, they possess peculiar significance. Nobody can deal with the problem of the Self upon the basis of the empirical facts about human selfhood without seeing, as we saw at the last time, that the Self is in the most intimate relation of dependence upon both natural and social conditions, for every one amongst its attributes that can be defined in general terms. It has an origin in time. It has an hereditary temperament. It is helpless to become anything apart from social training. And, if you remove from its inner consciousness the recognition of its relations of contrast to its literal and to its more or less ideally conceived comrades, rivals, and authorities, it loses at any moment all that makes self-consciousness either worth having, or conceivable. Its whole ethical significance thus depends upon relations to God and to man which, in its capacity as finite being, it can only accept and cannot create. In all these senses the Self temporally appears as a product, a result, a determined creature of destiny. Remove from it the support of the world, and it instantly becomes nothing. Moreover, you in vain endeavor to save the independence of the Self by defining it as a Substance. For all the independence that it ever can even desire to have is a conscious independence, and to this a Soul-Substance contributes nothing. And if your consciousness is merely based upon an existence which lies beneath the consciousness, and which never comes to light as your own present will and meaning, you gain nothing but a name when this unobserved substratum of your personality is called your Soul. The Cartesian res cogitans is significant precisely in so far as it is the name for a rational thinking process, but not in so far as it is a res. What you want, however, for your Self, is conscious meaning, conscious individuality, and conscious freedom. And the problem is, in view of your unquestionable dependence upon the world for all your endowments, How shall you win this conscious meaning and freedom and individuality; and how is it possible that in any sense you should possess them? Now it is precisely these questions that our Idealism undertakes to answer.

From our point of view, your distinction from the rest of the universe, your contrast with other selves, your uniqueness, your freedom, your individuality, all depend upon one essential principle. This world that we live in is, in its wholeness, the expression of one determinate and absolute purpose, the fulfilment of the divine will. This fulfilment is unique, just because, in the world as a whole, the divine accomplishes its purpose, attains its goal, finds in absolute dominateness what it seeks, and therefore will have no other world than this. Now for this very reason, since the world in its wholeness is unique, every portion of this whole life, every fragment of experience, every pulsation of will in the universe, every intent anywhere partially embodied, is, by virtue of its relation to this unique whole, also unique,—but unique precisely in so far as it is related to the whole, and not in so far as you abstract its various features and endowments from their relation to God, and view them in finite relations. Taken apart from its relation to the whole, the finite fragment appears as something more or less incomprehensible, and therefore as something more or less vaguely general,—a mere case of a type, a member of a series—a temporal expression of dissatisfied will,—a fact that seeks for other facts to explain it,—a bit of experience subject to various psychological laws,—a sort of life that can be interpreted now in this way, and now in that, just as, at the last time, we found the Self subject to the most varying interpretations and estimates.

Yet fear not to find in what manifold ways your life depends upon Nature and Society. It depends upon them for absolutely all of its general characters. That is, whatever character it shares with others, implies dependence upon others. If it did not so depend, it would have no intimate share in the common life. But its dependence means precisely that it derives from the other lives everything except its uniqueness,—everything except its individual fashion of acknowledging and taking interest in this its very dependence, and of responding thereto by its deeds. When, as man, you take your place amongst men, you thus derive all of your life from elsewhere, except in so far as your life becomes for you your own way of viewing your relation to the whole, and of actively expressing your own ideal regarding this relation. This your own way of expressing God's will is not derived. It is yourself. And it is yours because God worketh in you. The Spirit of God in its wholeness compels you,—the individual, the Self, the unique personality, in the sense that it compels you to be an individual, and to be free. Or it compels your individual will only in so far as you consciously compel yourself.

You indeed find then, as Goethe found in his well-known verses about heredity, that your dependence on the rest of the world extends to every character of your nature, precisely in so far as you can define such a character in general terms. Your temperament you derived from your ancestors, your training from your social order. Your opinions, as definable ideas, belong to many of your neighbors also. Your consciousness of yourself, from moment to moment, depends upon social contrast effects, and varies with them. But your purpose, your life-plan, just so far as it possesses true rationality of aim, is the purpose to find for yourself just your own place in God's world, and to fill that place, as nobody else can fill it. Now this purpose, I maintain, is indeed your own. As nobody else can share it, so nobody else can create it; and from no source external to yourself have you derived it. And this I say on the sole ground that in you, precisely in so far as you know the world as one world, and intend your place in that one world to be unique, God's will is consciously expressed. And his will is one, and in that will every life finds its own unique meaning. Hence our theory of the Self assigns to it the character of the Free Individual but maintains that this character belongs to it in its true relation to God, and cannot be observed, at any one instant of time, as an obvious and independent fact.

II

But herewith, having defined what general Form of Being the Self possesses, we come to a question that in the former lecture was kept in the background, although it lay very near to us. This is the question as to the precise relation of our present doctrine about the individual human Self to our general theory of the process of Evolution in Nature. If the individual is, within the range of our experience, already known as a product of Nature, and of his social relations, by so much the more must his temporal origin, in those aspects of it which escape our direct observation, be viewed as a portion of the vast activities that are hinted to us by our experience of Nature in general. Therefore an effort to bring our theory of the Self into closer relation to our former interpretation of the process of evolution, must form at once the culmination of our doctrine about Nature and a sort of test of our views as to the Self. To such an effort we are now ready to proceed.

As has now been sufficiently shown, a frank admission of the natural origin of the Self, and a study of its relations to the physical world, in no sense involves an abandonment of the idealistic point of view. That the world is the expression of my will, and that nevertheless there has been an infinite past time in which I, the human individual, did not exist—may indeed seem at first a hard saying. But our discussion of the general Categories of Experience, our idealistic theory of Time, and our portrayal of the contrast between the private Self of the human individual and the Absolute Self in its wholeness,—all these preliminaries have cleared the way for an understanding of every such difficulty. In dealing with the categories of the Ought, we saw how and why it is always my will as this human being to acknowledge what is other than the present temporal expression of my will. In our doctrine of Time, we reconciled the fact of our acknowledgment of a remote past time with our assurance that all temporal facts are at once present to the Absolute. In our development of the concept of the human Self, we have shown that we ourselves demand the other individuals, as the very condition of our existence in the Absolute, and that through a wealth of individuality other than our own, and only through such variety, is our own life-purpose to be attained. Just as my opponent in a game embodies my will to play with him by opposing me, and gives me an opportunity to be myself through the very fact that he expresses my will in the form of a selfhood whose particular plans are uncontrolled by my private will, while mine are in part uncontrolled by his,—so in general, the private Self is this Self only through contrast with and dependence upon others; and finds its complete Selfhood embodied in other individual life than its own. Moreover, in order that my private will should at this temporal instant form a definite plan, I must always presuppose some world of completed fact as the basis of my present deed; and the realm of that which is viewed as the so far completed expression of the Will, is the temporally Past. The Past too, in its own way, embodies my present will, but embodies it by virtue of the very fact that the Past is the realm of the irrevocable, which I am therefore able to presuppose as a fixed starting-point in forming every new plan. The manifold dependence of my present will upon the social, natural, and temporal order, is thus not only matter of fact, but also a requirement of our idealism.

III

Meanwhile, in order to give full expression to our hypothesis regarding the temporal evolution of new forms of individual selfhood, it will be necessary first to recall some features of our doctrine of the sense in which the Absolute includes a variety of lives, and possesses a temporal expression at all. Only then can we see in detail how what we call novel forms of life can arise in time.

In our criticism of Mysticism, in the former Series of these lectures,2 we pointed out that a goal which is “a goal of no real process, has as little value as it has content, as little Being as it has finitude.” Ever since, in defining the Absolute from our own point of view, we have indeed declared it to be a goal,—i.e. a fulfilment of purpose, but have also insisted that, corresponding to each result that is attained in the Absolute, there must also be, in the real world of the Absolute itself, a corresponding purpose or intent, which, just because it is fulfilled in the whole, is at the same time consciously distinguished, as a longing,—a pursuit, a finite idea,—from its own fulfilment. This consideration has constituted, throughout, the ground of our deduction of finitude,—our means of conceiving the union of the One and the Many in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness. For, as a consequence of this principle, the Absolute Life is definable, in the terms of our Supplementary Essay, as a Self-Representative System. Every fact in this system, namely, fulfils a purpose. The consciousness of this purpose is, however, a fact distinct from the fulfilment, and yet correspondent thereto; while, on the other hand, this consciousness itself, as a fact, belonging to the system of the Absolute, is in its own turn the fulfilment of another purpose, which is the consequence, in some degree, of another act that has led up to it; and so on ad infinitum. A consciousness of purpose, distinct from fulfilment, is, however, when viewed by itself, a longing, a dissatisfaction, an incompleteness. Hence the Absolute Life includes an infinity of longings, each one of which, in so far as it is taken in itself, is a consciousness of imperfection and finitude seeking its relative fulfilment in some other finite act or state. Only through such consciousness is perfection attainable. The only alternative here is Mysticism, and that is Nothingness. But, as our Supplementary Essay also showed,3 any system that is self-representative in one way, is self-representative in countless other ways, and the consciousness of the system involved in each one of these ways of self-representation is therefore distinct from the consciousness involved in any of the others, since each way involves a series of voluntary strivings after a goal. Inconsequence, as the Supplementary Essay4 also pointed out, whoever conceives the Absolute as a Self, conceives it as in its form inclusive of an infinity of various, but interwoven and so of intercommunicating Selves, each one of which represents the totality of the Absolute in its own way, and with its own unity, so that the simplest conceivable structure of the Absolute Life would be stateable only in terms of an infinitely great variety of types of purpose and of fulfilment, intertwined in the most complex fashions. Apart from any doctrine of evolution, then, we have to regard the Absolute in its wholeness as comprising many Selves, in the most various interrelations.

Now we must urgently insist that, when once we have recognized this variety of finite purposes, and of infinite systems consisting of finite purposes, within the Absolute, we are not at all obliged to assume, as many more or less idealistic systems have done, some further principle of blind self-differentiation within the Absolute as the ground of the separation or falling away of the finite beings from their divine source. Longing, considered as a fact other than fulfilment, is, indeed, in its own already distinguished nature, to any extent blind. But, by our hypothesis, longing exists in the Absolute Life, and as a significant portion thereof. Any temporal present, taking that word in the “inclusive” sense that was defined in our Third lecture of the present Series, contains, as we saw in discussing Time, just such an experience of finitude and of dissatisfaction. Now longing, in itself, means non-possession of the goal; and the temporal instance shows us that the proposition: “To-day the ideal is sought for and not found,” is perfectly consistent with the proposition: “In eternity the ideal is found.” Nor is it necessary in the least to suppose that if the Absolute is possessed of the eternal point of view, and so is acquainted with the finding of the ideal which to-day is sought in vain, the Absolute is therefore not directly acquainted with the vain seeking of to-day, or is no sharer therein. Rather, from our point of view, is the very reverse the necessary conclusion. In order to be possessed of the eternal knowledge of the attainment of the goal, the Absolute insight will actually include all that we experience when to-day we seek the goal in vain. For the Absolute insight then, as for our own, the seeking of the goal to-day will not be successful. Just this ill-success of the temporal instant will be the very condition of the success of the eternally expressed Will. For, as we have insisted, without longing, no attainment. Therefore the larger consciousness does not lose the conscious incompleteness of the lesser, but gives that, just as it is, its place in the completed whole.

The unity of consciousness, even in our own narrow experience, gives us many instances where consciousness either spans in one moment the conflict between two opposing internal tendencies, or embraces in one act the contrasts of longing and fulfilment, of ignorance and knowledge, of defeat and victory. One who, to take a trivial instance, “expects the unexpected” (as a sensible man should in dealing with fortune), combines in one consciousness, at the moment when the surprising event occurs, the shock of knowing that event as surprising, and the little triumph of observing that, just because of its surprising character, it meets, in one aspect, his expectations, because he had expected a surprise. Just such expectation of surprises constitutes one of the most cherished joys of the Christmas holidays; and the children, as they fall upon the parcels which contain their presents and open these, have also an instant wherein their temporal span of consciousness, brief as it is, is long enough to embrace “at once” (in the sense discussed in our third lecture) the contrast between ignorant suspense and delighted discovery. Now for them, just that is the supreme moment. And it is so because consciousness spans at once the suspense and the solution. Or again, if I have wandered long, thirsty, in a dry land, and find the spring, the most perfect experience is that in which, even while I still am full of thirst, I also drink the water for which I have so agonized and wandered. Or still again, a recent psychologist5 has extensively illustrated the well-known thesis that part of the joy of play lies in the “bewusste Selbsttäuschung,” the “conscious self-deception” of the player. The delights of the theatre are of this sort; the plays of children and even of puppies and kittens, either exhibit, or at least suggest, the same state of mind. Now “conscious self-deception” is a state of mind that more or less definitely spans and includes ignorance and knowledge, blind belief and proud disbelief, in one act. It is only a petty bondage to conventional formulas, and in particular a purely formal and thoughtless use of the phraseology of the principle of contradiction, which makes some of us unwilling to recognize these normal complications that find place in the unity of even our own little consciousness. As a dramatic spectator, I can at once feel with Othello his own strong delusion, and also see with Iago the precise devices that are employed to deceive, and meanwhile, as spectator, can take my critical view of the whole situation. As reasoner, I can (in following the course of an indirect demonstration) appreciate the force of an argument even while I refute it; or can at once hold an opinion, viewed in its unreflective meaning, before my consciousness, even while I also reflect upon it, and so give it a new and a deeper import; or can think the meaning of the separate assertions contained in the antecedent and consequent of a hypothetical judgment, even while I hold in mind the decidedly different meaning involved in their combination in the judgment itself.

Now what these instances illustrate in our own narrow sort of consciousness, I apply, in universal terms, to the Absolute. I hold that all finite consciousness, just as it is in us,—ignorance, striving, defeat, error, temporality, narrowness,—is all present from the Absolute point of view, but is also seen in unity with the solution of problems, the attainment of goals, the overcoming of defeats, the correction of errors, the final wholeness of temporal processes, the supplementing of all narrowness.

Consequently, I see no reason, after once we have found that the Absolute, in order to be complete, must include finitude, to ask yet further, “How then in us does the finitude come to seem to be sundered from the Absolute?” Finitude means a sense of sundering, but of a sundering that from the Absolute point of view, also involves union. We, by hypothesis, are aware of the longings and of the ignorance. The Absolute, which is our own very selfhood in fulfilment, is aware of all that we are aware of (i.e. of the longings and of the ignorance) and of the supplement also. If one persists in asking, “But what has sundered us from the Absolute, and narrowed our consciousness as it is narrowed?” my only general answer is, Such narrowness must find its place within the Absolute life, in order that the Absolute should be complete. One needs then no new principle to explain why, as Plotinus asked, the souls fell away from God.6 From the point of view of the Absolute, the finite beings never fall away. They are where they are, namely in and of the Absolute Unity. From their own point of view, they seem to have fallen away, because (as finite) they are the longing aspect, and not the final fulfilment of longing; because they are partial ignorance, and not the fulfilment of knowledge; because they are the expression of an attention to this and this, and not of that attention to the whole which, in the Absolute, is the corrective and the includer of their inattention; and finally, because they are stages of a temporal process, while the Absolute is possessed of the inclusive eternal insight. The only general deduction of their existence is furnished by the fact that, unless they existed, the Absolute Will, which is also their own, could not be expressed.

What we have said of the relation of the Absolute to the various included Individuals, applies also, within the world of the various Selves, to the relation in which any larger or including Individual Self stands to the lives of the Individuals which, from our point of view, are included within it. Thus, according to our account, every new Self that arises in time must find its place within the life of a larger and inclusive Selfhood. This larger Selfhood indeed permits the included Self, in some aspect of its nature, to become an Individual,—an image of the Absolute,—a will that takes its own individual attitude towards the world. Yet the including Self also in some measure predetermines the character of that which it includes, and limits the latter to a particular place in Being. In our Supplementary Essay we suggested, very inadequately, the variety of internally differentiated structure which any Self-Representative System involves. As a fact, any Self except the Absolute is included within the life of a richer Self, and in turn includes the lives of partial Selves within its own. The consciousness of the included Selves is indeed hereby limited to a particular place in Being, and so constitutes only a particular type of consciousness. At any moment of time the consciousness that embodies a particular stage in the life and self-expression of any Individual, may therefore be limited to an explicit attention to certain facts only,—the “rest of the world” being known to this Individual, just then, only as the undifferentiated background of its consciousness. All such limitations will be expressible in the same general terms. The larger Selfhood involves the inclusion of the partial Selfhood. Therefore the partial Selfhood exists; and one has not to explain by new principles why its consciousness at any temporal instant appears, from its own point of view, as cut off from that which includes it. It is cut off only in so far as it is indeed a partial form of consciousness, which, as this partial form, knows at any time so much of the whole world as just then expresses its stage of life-purpose.

An explanation of the particular existence of this finite consciousness can be given therefore, only in one of two forms: first, in terms of universal principles, in so far as without just this finitude, the eternal purpose would not obtain the wealth of individual expression that it actually possesses; or, secondly, in terms of the particular relations of each finite being, in so far as it is what it is in consequence of the presence in the world, and especially in the temporal Past, of other finite beings, whose nature and acts required some aspect of its own life as their resultant.

Consequently, any effort to give an account of the temporal origin and evolution of any particular finite being, such as one of ourselves, must follow the second of these forms of explanation, and cannot undertake to give an account of the origin of all finitude. The question about the evolution of new forms of finite life then becomes this What conditions of the previous finite life of the world explain why, just at this point, a new Self should begin to appear? Or again, to put the question a little more generally, our former theory as to evolution accepted the thesis that humanity, as a whole, has sprung from some non-human process of experience which, before our special type of selfhood appeared, was taking place in the natural world. This previous process, we have said, was no doubt in itself a conscious process, perhaps possessing a type of consciousness whose “temporal span” was more or less different from our own, just because its present interest was always expressed by a longer or shorter series of facts than we now at present take into account. But in any case it was not what we should have called a human process. How came it to give origin to a process of our type? This is the sole question that any philosophical theory of the evolution of the Self can undertake to deal with.

Our answer will take some such form as the following,—a form inevitably hypothetical, but consistent with the facts and theories which we now have at our disposal.

IV

Any form of finite selfhood, just in so far as it is definitely conscious of explicit relations to the divine plan, tends, ipso facto, to express itself in an activity that accords with this plan, and that in consequence is one of the stages in that temporal process whereby the divine self-consciousness directly gets its own temporal embodiment7 Now since the divine plan of life, in its wholeness, is a self-representative system of longings and attainments, where each act expresses some particular purpose, and accomplishes that purpose, and where to every particular fact there corresponds just the purpose that wins embodiment in this fact, the conscious temporal life of any being who is explicitly aware of his relations to God, who acts accordingly, and who sees his act attaining its goal, must be a Well-Ordered series of deeds and successes, where each step leads to the next, where there is so far no wandering or wavering, where novelty results only from recurrent processes, and where plans, as a whole, do not change. We have already seen, especially in our Supplementary Essay, that the process of counting, dry and barren as it often seems, is for us, in our ignorance, an admirable example of the mere Form of such a recurrent activity as a being in full control of his own rational processes and of his experience would carry out. For counting produces an endless and, for our reflective investigation, an endlessly baffling wealth of novelties, as the Theory of Numbers proves. And yet this divine wealth of truth is the product of the seemingly so uniform, the unquestionably recurrent process, of counting again and again. Give to such a process the concrete content of a life of action in accordance with a principle, and in pursuit of ideals,—and then you would have, in the will that expressed itself in this life, a boundlessly wealthy source of constantly novel experience. Such would be the grade of life that we sometimes ascribe to an angel,—a life wherein one is always serving God, unswervingly, and wherein one is nevertheless always doing something new, because at every stage (as in our own number-series) all that has gone before is presupposed in every new deed, and so secures the individuality of that deed.

But now such a finite life as this is, from our point of view, indeed an ideal. We are not such finite beings as this. Nor do we concretely know of any such. The finite beings whom we acknowledge in the concrete, are always, at any temporal moment, such as they are by virtue of an inattention which at present blinds them to their actual relations to God and to one another. Their acts are limited by reason of this inattention. They are indeed, as finite beings, aware of the world as a whole, as that which they acknowledge, and as that to which they ought to react thus or thus. But neither their own will nor their plans of action are at the present temporal instant clear to then. They are also conscious, although imperfectly, of themselves. And their imperfect self-consciousness does indeed show itself in the form of activities which tend to become recurrent, but in a somewhat tentative way. Such partially recurrent activities constitute intelligent habits. Examples of such are: a planful searching after plans, a rational striving to become more concretely rational, and so on. But in such processes these beings are seeking further definition of their own life and powers. They are seeking themselves,—their own purposes, and the means to the execution of these purposes. Now that such imperfect finite beings should be found in God's world at all, is explicable solely on the foregoing general grounds. Ignorance, error, striving after selfhood,—these are significant, even if, when taken by themselves alone, unintelligible forms of experience. They are, however, intelligible in their relation to the whole. If the divine life did not include them, it could not win the completion of their incompleteness, and so could not attain absolute perfection in the eternal world. We have here then to presuppose the occurrence of some such processes of a finite, that is of a longing, dissatisfied, incomplete type. What interests us here is simply the problem: given such forms of finite striving, how could new forms, new Selves, arise from them? What about their nature makes them fruitful of new types of individuality?

To this question, one may next respond with another, viz. What constitutes a new form of finite life and experience,—a new sort of selfhood? And the answer here is: A new form of selfhood means simply the appearance (as in our own case), of a new type of interest in the world, in God, and in finding the way to self-expression. A new individual is thus never a new thing, but a new kind of life-purpose, finding unique individual embodiment in experience by means of definite acts. Now already, in following the development of the empirical Ego within the range of our human experience, we have seen how a new sort of selfhood can arise. We have now only to generalize in order to see how a similar process can occur universally, and can lead to a transformation of finite consciousness in the direction of the evolution of new types.

V

It will be remembered that, in our second lecture, we saw how a finite consciousness is led to take a two-fold view of its relations to the world. In the case of our human interpretation of the nature of things, it was this twofold view that gave us the conception of the contrast between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation. We are at present no longer concerned with the doctrines or theories about the universe which may result, in any finite mind, from the emphasizing now of this and now of that aspect of the contrast here in question; but we are much interested in dwelling, for a moment, upon the fact that this double view of things, which the ignorance of a finite being may lead it to take, has, or tends to have, a very important influence upon the differentiation of new kinds of activity. We may remember how the idleness of the cat watching the squirrels reminded us of the contemplative absorption of the men of science in describing phenomena. We easily see how vast an indirect influence upon human life and conduct such absorption in the study of the World of Description has possessed. But there is still another aspect of the tendency here in question which we must at this point emphasize.

In so far as a finite being conceives himself as already knowing enough, in general, for his purposes, he sets about attaining his goal by direct self-expression. That is, he proceeds to react upon his world in a definite way. In so far, however, as although intelligent, he still feels his inability to act in such a more direct way, he falls into that state of watchful discrimination, which looks, as we saw, for some new object between any pair of objects that has already attracted attention.8 Now this search for the between is itself a kind of activity, with a recurrent plan. It differs from what we usually call a definite course of action by virtue of the way in which it deals with experience. And, as we saw, it is an activity directed by nothing so much as by an attention to the contents of experience when once they chance to have been discriminated. Therefore it is indeed on the whole opposed, by virtue of this attitude, to the more direct plans of action already present in the life which this love of discriminating novelties interrupts. It emphasizes, in a relatively random way, now this and now that special fact. It tries experiments in the forming of new series of linked contents. Now, in our last lecture, when we followed the genesis of the Empirical Ego, what did we find as the chief source of the new ideas that led to its gradual organization? Imitation. But upon what does all Imitation depend? First, upon an interest in discriminating between the doings of some other individual and the present deeds of one's own organism; and, secondly, upon an interest in seeking, through a persistent process of trial and error, to find a new course of action which, when discovered, shall constitute a modification of the former deeds of one's own organism in the direction of the deeds of one's model.

It will be seen at once that the accomplishment of an act of imitation, whereby I modify what I formerly could do, so as to be able to conform to my fellow's act, is essentially a construction of something that lies, in a technical sense, between the acts of my model, and what were formerly my own acts. Apart from my model, I already tended to act thus or thus. Under the influence of my model, I tend to approach his way of acting. But I never merely repeat his act. Imitation is a kind of experimental origination, a trial of a new plan, the initiation of a trial series of acts. The result of imitative efforts is that the world comes to contain a sort of action which lies between two former ways of action, in such wise that, if you regarded these two former ways of acting as equivalent to each other, the new way would be equivalent to both. Meanwhile, by being interested in the new act as in something different from both its predecessors, you define for your own consciousness, in a clearer way, the difference of these predecessors from one another. The result is, that the world of your consciousness wins a new expression of the relation of the One and the Many. For here, as in our former discussion of the relation of between, it appears that the original, and puzzling, diversity between the imitator and the model has, by the interposition of the imitative act between these prior courses of action, come to appear as a diversity of stages in the same series. The triad, formed of the three terms,—(1) the original activities of the imitative being, (2) the activities of the model, and (3) the imitative act itself,—is now a triad of connected members whereof the third lies between the two others. The finite world has hereby won a new consciousness of the unity of its own life.

Any individual Self grows, however, by means of very numerous imitations of many models. Every new act of imitation has this character of interposing a new intermediary between a pair of facts that, apart from the imitation, would have appeared less related. The result is that the new Individual, the life of the empirical human Self, comes to be, in one aspect, a series of results of intermediation, a more or less systematic establishment of new terms whereby triads are constituted. Every result of imitation tends, however, to the establishment of recurrent processes, whereby the new sort of action, once discovered, tends to repeat itself indefinitely in new acts of the same sort. For the mark of the will that has once discovered its own purpose is that its activities assume the recurrent form. Hence, in initiating new acts, the imitative activity tends to the establishment of new forms of recurrent self-expression.

In addition to this more definite experimental search for new forms of activity by means of imitative adjustments to the social environment, and in addition also to the recurrent activities whereby a growing individual shows that he has discovered what to do, and so seeks novelty only in the form of the new terms of a self-representative series, we find, indeed, in the life of any growing self, a still vaguer process of growth through mere trial and error. And in the early life of any mind, as well as in our maturer life whenever we are in the midst of very novel conditions, this process plays a large part. In this case, a being, as yet unconscious of a plan, and too ignorant or too unfortunate to find the right social models to guide him, acts at random in accordance with his instincts, until by mere happy accident he discovers a plan, which he then begins to pursue in recurrent fashion. This is in a great measure what happens when a child gradually learns to creep, stand, walk. This way of acquiring new habits by a wholly or partly non-imitative adjustment to the environment, has been studied by psychologists even more than the more complex processes of imitation. It is in this way that we vaguely look for new ideas, find our way in new places, help ourselves in learning new arts such as bicycling, and so on. Yet we always prefer the imitation of social models to this vaguer sort of wandering whenever social guidance is possible.

It is to be noted, however, that even here the new adjustment is learned by a process of finding constantly something new that stands between our former course of action and our vaguely appreciated goal. We are dissatisfied. That means, so far as we are conscious, that we find ourselves doing something, and conceive vaguely, in the yet unknown future, a way of acting that would satisfy if we could find it. Our course, hereupon, is to seek something between that unknown goal, and ourselves as we are. This something, as soon as found, tends to satisfy the will as an effort, even if it leaves us disappointed with the result.

All our finite striving thus includes a creation of new intermediaries between the starting-point and the goal, by imitation where that is possible, by random attention to new facts where such is our only course.

The evolution of a new Self, in the realm of our own conscious life, thus involves, at every step, just the contrast between the two finite ways of viewing the world, and between the two sorts of resulting series,—just the contrast, I say, which we studied so extensively when we compared the structure of the World of Description and the World of Appreciation. Either, namely, one has already found out, according to one's lights, what to do, or else one is vaguely trying to discriminate, in the vast background which constitutes the world, the facts whose union into series, through the establishment of intermediaries, will give one a comprehension of what one's environment is, a sense of how the One and the Many are related, and so an insight into what one has to do. In the first of these two ways of dealing with one's world, one is already, as far as one's consciousness goes, possessed of one's plan as a Self. One's life then consists in doing again and again what, according to one's conscious plans, one has to do, and in thereby winning new stages of self-representative life. But in the second case, one is receptive, rather than freely constructive; is searching; and succeeds, if at all, only by an experimental interpolation of new terms in given series of discriminated facts. The union of these two tendencies leads to a constant differentiation of new stages of self-consciousness. The principal source of the novel forms of self-expression is the second of the two tendencies. The first tendency leads to the sort of novelty in results that the number-series has illustrated.

So much for the two processes, so far as we can observe them within the limits of our human consciousness. I now make the wholly tentative hypothesis that the process of the evolution of new forms of consciousness in Nature is throughout of the same general type as that which we observe when we follow the evolution of new sorts of plans, of ideas, and of selfhood in our own life. And, as the general evidence for the worth of such an hypothesis, I point out the following facts.

The types of life that are phenomenally known to us in Nature, form series such as indicate a gradual evolution of new forms from old. A new individual life, so far as we observe, in the outer world, the signs of its presence, is a new way of behavior appearing amongst natural phenomena. This new collection of functions comes to be manifested to us gradually. In the process of heredity, its generation involves, in a vast number of cases, the phenomena which our science interprets as the sexual union of cells that represent previously living individuals. As a result of this union of sexual elements, the cell from which the new organism developes has, in all this class of cases, characters that lie between those represented by the parent cells. The resulting organism consequently has characters, and accordingly developes functions, that lie between those of formerly existing organisms; and so the new living individual is at once a new link in the series of the possible forms of its type, and an individual variation of its species. In these respects, sexual generation is analogous to the process of conscious imitation. For imitation (not, to be sure, in the case of a whole organism, but in the case of a single voluntary function) means that a new process results from the conscious union of the influence of two previous processes; and in case of imitation, as we have just seen, the new process lies between the original processes. Thus the conscious union of former types of activity, in the very act that, while uniting, discriminates them, results in a new sort of intermediate activity. A corresponding union of two elements, with a resultant that lies between formerly existent beings, characterizes sexual generation.

But in another class of cases, new living individuals, as they are phenomenally known to us, result asexually. Here the processes involved are sufficiently typified, for our present purposes, by the very process of cell-multiplication from which any new organism always results. All such processes are, in form, relatively recurrent. Novelty, where it becomes notable at all in the course of such processes, depends upon the massing of the results of former stages of this same recurrent process. So it is, in part, when the multiplying cells of a new organism undergo differentiation just because the newer cells find their places in a whole which is formed of all the previous cells, and so adjust themselves to an environment different from that in which the earlier cells grew. But this whole process is analogous, in structure and in result, to the recurrent processes of the conscious will that has found what it has to do, that does it again and again, and that reaches novel results in a way which the counting process has most clearly illustrated for us. Whether such novel results are significant, depends on the grade of significance that the special will, whose expression we observe, has reached. But such recurrent processes are, as we have seen, the normal ones of the World of Appreciation. They are known to us, in our own consciousness, as the source of a particular sort of novelty in the results of conduct. They lead to Well-Ordered series of self-expressions.

But further, the new living individuals, in their development, largely illustrate what we call the process of gradual adaptation to the environment by novel forms of structure and function. Here again the character of the enormously complicated organic processes involved is still analogous to a process that we observe in consciousness, viz. to our conscious process of learning new arts through trial and error. The series of facts that we observe in the living beings are, in this type of instances, on the whole, non-recurrent. The process is one of interpolating new terms in a series of stages that lie between the original condition of the organism, and a certain ideal goal of perfect adjustment to the environment which the individual organism never reaches.

So far then, for certain analogies between the evolution of new living beings in the phenomenal world, and the evolution of new forms of selfhood in conscious life. But now for one more analogy, and one that relates to that most critical phenomenon, the death of an organism, and to the temporal cessation of a given process of conscious striving.

The discriminating tendency that, in our consciousness, gives rise to the conceptions of the World of Description, is always, as we have seen, one of two contrasting tendencies that our finite relation to our world determines. Of these two tendencies, this is the subordinate one, which yields to the tendency to recurrent expression of our already established Purpose, whenever we know what to do. So far as we conceive our world in terms of the will that is now explicit in us, we do not need to give ourselves over to the discrimination of new phenomena, and we do not do so. Descriptive Science is secondary to life, and the scrutiny of that world “in the background,” in search of novelties, ceases whenever we are absorbed in what seems to us triumphant self-expression. This is true even when the will which seems to itself clearly conscious of what it has to do, and of how to do it, is in fact of what we have to call a relatively low grade. For in us the will can be base in content, even when it is in form to a great extent of the higher type.

Consequently, our discriminative activities, and also our imitations, our processes of trial and error, and all our tentative seekings after greater clearness, are subject to the often rigid selection exerted by our already established conscious plans of recurrent action. Or, as they say, practical motives predominate in our life. We make these tentative efforts for the sake of establishing new plans of action wherever we lack plans. But when we have plans, already accepted, the tentative establishment of new courses of action between stages already existing, is permitted only in so far as it does not run counter to these already established plans.

Well, just so, in Nature, the variations of organic life that get established by means of the processes analogous (as we have just seen) to those of trial and error, and to those of imitation, are subject to a rigid selection on the part of the “environment.” But the “environment,” according to our own interpretation of Nature, stands, as an environment with already established characters, for the expression of such portions of the Nature-life as have already won the habitual, that is, the more or less definitely and permanently recurrent form, wherein a relatively persistent will to act repeatedly in the same way has become characteristic of the finite consciousness that we suppose to be represented by the natural phenomena in question.

In view of this analogy, I suggest that the evolution of new Selfhood in our own conscious case, and of new forms of life in Nature, is a process subject everywhere to the same sort of selection, whereby new tendencies are accepted or rejected according to their relation to preëxistent tendencies. The evolution of new Selfhood, as I conceive the matter, is rendered possible by the fact that a finite form of conscious life may have a twofold relation to the Absolute, and so may seek the truth and its own self-expression in a twofold way,—a more active and definite course of self-expression, or a more tentative one of discovery. That is, it may grow either by performing, in recurrent fashion, over and over, the type of action that it has already come to regard as its own form of Selfhood, or else by adopting the discriminating attitude that gives us, in our own conscious life, our conceptions that together make up our view of the World of Description. When a consciousness adopts the latter of these two attitudes, what happens within the unity of its sphere of experience is the appearance of new contents that lie between previously recognized contents, or that lie, as tentative expressions of its will, between itself and the goal. These new expressions of purpose are tentative, like our trials and errors, or like our imitations. When they are successful, they so mass themselves as to form definite centres of new experience. By emphasizing the contrast between the Self that has created or discovered them, and the rest of the world, they then suggest plans of action, which become recurrent, so long as they survive. But when they suggest nothing that permanently accords with the established habits of the Self within which they arise, they are unadapted to their environment, and so pass away. A rigid selection presides over their persistence. It is the selection established by the more persistent habits, and conscious intents, of the finite Self to which they belong. The portion of Nature where these tentatively adopted new forms of life phenomenally appear to us, we call the Organic World.

But now these new creations, if they survive, are not the mere contents of another and larger consciousness. They are also processes occupying time, and embodying will; they are themselves finite conscious purposes, having an inner unity, a relation to the Absolute, of which they also are ipso facto partial expressions, and a tendency to adjust themselves to the goal in their own way. If, as in case of the conscious Self of any one of us, they become aware of this their own relation to the Absolute, then they no longer survive or pass away merely in so far as they serve the larger purpose that originally invented them as tentative devices of its own. They then, like all finite purposes of self-conscious grade, define their own lives as individually significant, conceive their goal as the Absolute, and their relations to their natural sources as relations that mean something to themselves also. Their destiny thus becomes relatively free from that of the finite Self within which they first grew up.

Thus indeed the natural generation of an organism would be the mere phenomenon of a process of creating new stages within the life of previously existing Selves. But the new stages might become significant for themselves, with their own time-span, their own relations to the Absolute, and their own sort of selfhood. Originally I, as this Individual, coming into existence at this point of time might result from an organic process that phenomenally represents how a finite Selfhood, much vaster than mine (let us say the Selfhood of the human race as a whole) established in a tentative and experimental way, within its own conscious life, a new process that was serially interpolated between the processes represented by the reproductive cells of my parents. This was, for the race, merely a tentative variation in its life-series, due to the same sort of interest that, in our imitative life, makes us interested in trying the effect of creating a new sort of function intermediate between two previous ones, or to the same sort of scrutiny of the world that leads us to make new experimental discriminations in our scientific thinking. Had this variation been inconsistent with the habits of action already established in Nature, I should not have survived. Just so, a useless imitation, or a new idea inconsistent with established ideas, is erelong abandoned. But having survived, I have entered, with all the instincts of my race, into the social order. On one side of my nature I am thus a resultant. My conscious interests were originally narrowed by the act that determined my place in the series. Hence I am primarily constituted by a series of interests in a small group of facts, and am relatively inattentive to all the rest of the universe. But within my narrow span I can still learn about universal truth, because, after all, I am a conscious process, and every such process is really linked to all the world. But when once I become aware that my little form of willing also is a hint of an Absolute truth, I know myself as in intent this Individual in the World. And now I have indeed a character that may well survive, that in fact will survive, all the organic processes which were originally expressed in my life as this variation of the human stock. For in God, I am this seeker after God, so soon as I know myself as a Self at all, and, as such a seeker after God, I no longer wholly depend on the finite Self within which I came into being, just as my organism, even in its physical functions, no longer depends on the parent organisms.

By precisely such processes, the evolution of new life everywhere in Nature would be, upon this hypothesis, explicable. Selves would always originate within Selves, but, as related to the Absolute, would be capable of surviving the finite experimental purposes for which they were originated. Their natural origin would be perfectly consistent with an immortal destiny, just because all facts in the world, however originated, have teleological relations with the Absolute, and because, whatever life includes an explicit seeking for its own selfhood is in conscious relations with the Absolute.

The appearance of new Individual Selves would be, however, when temporally considered, a genuine fact. And their source would be the one that in ourselves enables us to vary the plans of our Will through the tentative play of the Discriminating Attention. And thus, in completing the sketch of our hypothesis regarding the interpretation of Nature and Evolution, we have brought this hypothesis into definite relation to our former contrast between the World of Description and World of Appreciation. This contrast appears, not merely as a fact of our own consciousness, but as a consequence of a tendency that is responsible, in Nature, for the whole process of Evolution. What in us appears as the conflict between science and practical life, is an example of the struggle for existence in Nature.

VI

That the Self whose natural relations have been so definitely admitted, is, like any other phenomenon in Nature, a proper object for the investigations of any external observer who is interested in explaining the occurrences of his life in terms of Causation, is now plain enough. An external observer of a human Self, as expressed in the behavior of the phenomena of its organism, may be a psychologist. If so, he will be interested in explaining how any human Self appears as a resultant of temperament, heredity, training, and the rest, and how his life is subject to law. To treat the Self thus, is to make its life an object in the psychologist's own World of Description. The undertaking will be as much justified as any other undertaking of science. To an external observer who seeks to win his purposes as a student of science, the individual Self, and all its temporal deeds, must be viewed as facts to be explained, in so far as that is logically possible, through their causal connections with previous facts, and with the whole of Nature. Such an observer, in so far as he deals with the World of Description, can recognize no deed of the Self as a mere outcome of free will. Every describable character of the Self, its temperament, its motives, its impulses, its training, its knowledge, its deeds, will appear to this observer as causally explicable by heredity and by environment. In so far as these aspects of the Self are not yet explained by science, they will still be inevitable and proper problems for causal explanation. Science, whether physical or physiological or psychological, will remorselessly and unceasingly pursue the end of making man, the natural being, comprehensible to the understanding of man, the observer of Nature. And this undertaking will be strictly rational. When we admit all this, do we not endanger our own doctrine of the freedom of the Individual Self?

I answer: No, for this very undertaking will have as its sole justification the fact that the teleological structure of Being gives warrant for holding that the true purposes of our descriptive science are, as far as that is logically possible, actually expressed by the universe. Man, as the observer of Nature and of man, has a purpose, and a very profound purpose, in trying thus to comprehend in causal terms his relation to Nature and to his fellows. We know from earlier lectures what this purpose is. This purpose, according to our view, must be capable of some relatively final expression, viz. of the very expression, which our science now begins and unweariedly prosecutes, but which no merely mortal toil will ever finish. Hence it is true that human nature, down to the least externally describable detail of its temporal fashion of expressing itself, is a natural phenomenon, a part of universal Nature, and is as much capable of some kind of explanation in causal terms as is any natural fact. But, on the other hand, this very way of viewing man sets to itself its own limits, viz. the limits of the World of Description. For, in the first place, thus to view man is not to view him as he consciously views his own inner life, that is, as possessing Internal Meaning. To explain man in causal terms is to view him as an external observer sees or might see him; and not as he himself means to be when he expresses his will in his deeds. Hence what you never causally explain about a man is precisely his primary character as a Self, namely, his conscious meaning itself, in so far as it is his. And secondly, all causal explanation has to do with the types and the describable general characters of events, and never with whatever is individual about events. For the individual, as we saw in our foregoing series of lectures, is the indefinable aspect of Being. But what you cannot define, you cannot explain in causal terms.

And so, to sum up,—that I now have this character, and this environment, and that I am subject to these or these consequences of my past experience, you can undertake to explain causally. Yes, whatever about my words, my deeds, my manner, my mood, my feelings, or my plans, is describable as a feature common to me and to any other being in the world,—whatever then there is about me which is expressible in general terms, or which is capable of being externally observed, you can and must undertake, with rationality, to explain causally as due to my ancestry, training, circumstances, environment, and dependence upon Nature in general. But what remains causally inexplicable is precisely my Being as this individual, who am nobody else in God's world. Now my individuality is not in the least separable from what the Scholastics would have called my “common nature.” My individuality means simply, that my innumerable common traits are teleologically expressed in this internally determinate but externally undetermined unique life which is now mine, and which, if I have a personal ideal, is to be mine until I have come to my full and final embodiment as this one of God's individuals. And so once more, if you ask me what, in my present consciousness, expresses not the separable portion, but that inseparable aspect of my nature which neither God nor man can causally explain, then I answer: Just my conscious intent to be, in God's world, myself and nobody else. In this sense alone my life, not as that of an Independent Being, but as the life expressing a rational purpose to win an unique relation to all the universe, an unique contrast with all other Selves, or if you will, an unique instance of dependence upon all the rest, is now, and will always continue to be causally inexplicable and irreducible. For the unique as the unique is not the common nature as such; and only the common nature of things can be causally explicable.

VII

So much then for the causal relations of my Selfhood. “But,” you may insist, “is not my unique and individual nature, if not causally determined, still teleologically determined by that very relation to the whole upon which my existence as this individual depends? How can our doctrine speak of the will and of the individuality of the Self as in any sense free, and still recognize that unity of the world and of the divine plan upon which our whole theory depends?”

To answer this objection I must indeed still further repeat considerations sketched in our former series of lectures, and must afresh apply them to the Self. Let us return therefore, as we close, to our former teleological view of the universe, and to the relation between God's inclusive will and the various individual wills. Here I can only emphasize, in the form of replies to objections, a theory whose basis has been fully stated in our general Theory of Being.

In answer, then, to this whole view of mine, you still may say, “In so far as this my will is God's will, and is related to the whole, it is God and not my private Self that wills me to be what I am.” I reply, The divine act whereby God wills your individuality to be what in purpose and meaning it is, is identical with your own individual will, and exists not except as thus identical.

“Yet has not the oneness of Being been so explained, by our idealistic theory, as to imply that every life, i.e. every fact in the universe, is so related to every other, that no fact in the universe could be altered without some consequent alteration of every other fact? For this was the earliest generalization reached by our Idealism in our criticism of the realistic doctrine. Now if there are thus no Independent Beings, how can there be in any sense Free Beings? And if I am so related to the world that a change in the universe beyond me would alter whatever I am, then am I not dependent upon the rest of the universe for whatever I am? Upon this idealistic theory, is not the teleological determination of every fact in the universe by every other fact a reciprocal determination? But is not such reciprocal determination absolute? Is not then every individual fact in this idealistic world so determined in its purpose by the purpose of every other that nothing undetermined, nothing free, is anywhere left?” So the objector may state his case.

Hereupon I respond, In the very reciprocity of my relations to all else in the universe lies the very assurance that I possess a certain true and significant freedom. The world beyond me can say to me, “Were I to change, you would change, and become in some sense another, both in your experience and in your purpose.” All this is true. But in turn I can reply, to the whole universe, natural and spiritual, Aye, but if my individual will changed, if I chose to be another than what I am, you, O world, just because of the universal teleology of your constitution, would be in some wise another, and that in every region of your Being. For you are no more truly independent of me and of my will than I am of you and of your might. However slight the change that I can make, I still do make a difference, by my will, to all beings in heaven and earth. And if I, in my individual capacity as this being, do riot create the other beings, just as truly can one say that, in my individual character, they do not create me. Upon precisely such a consideration as this, our whole argument for Idealism itself was founded.

“Yes,” you may insist, “but according to this doctrine, God's will creates us all alike, and in some sense (viz. from the Eternal point of view), all at once, so that we various beings of the world are equally creatures of the one plan.” I respond once more, The very essence of our whole theory, as we already saw in the closing lecture of the foregoing series, is that the categories, whether of causation or of teleological dependence, however they are conceived, are inevitably secondary to the fact that the world exists, in its wholeness and in every fragment and aspect of its life, as the positive embodiment of conscious will and purpose. Now to say that another either causes or teleologically determines me, is to say, at bottom, that my life expresses a purpose that is in some sense different from my purpose, or that is in some sense not my own private or individual purpose. But to say this is to point out what indeed is true of every aspect of my life that can be reduced to my relations with Nature and with my fellows, and with whatever else the world beyond me contains. Now all this my dependence upon other beings is not only true, but is desired and intended by my own purpose itself whenever my purpose is rational. For, as our idealistic argument from the very outset has maintained, I can purpose at all only by purposing that my will should find its expression in what is Other than myself, and consequently in what, in some sense, gives my will its own determination as a will that lives in this world of other life than my private life. That I depend for my life and meaning upon life not my own, is as true as that I am I at all. That this dependence involves a temporal origin, is due to the very nature of Time. The question is whether wholly thus depend. And our answer has been that there is that about me which makes my will, as the will of an individual, not wholly the expression of other purposes than my private or individual purpose. This answer has been based upon our whole Theory of Being. If now I, the individual, exist, in one aspect, as the expression of nobody's will but my own, does this assertion in the least conflict with our other assertion that I and all beings exist as the expressions of the divine will? I answer: There is no conflict; for the Divine Will gets expressed in the existence of me the individual only in so far as this Divine Will first not merely recognizes from without, but includes within itself my own will, as one of its own purposes. And since God, for our view, is not an external cause of the world, but is the very existence of the world in its wholeness as the fulfilment of purpose, it follows once more that my existence has its place in the Divine Existence as the existence of an individual will, determined, just in so far as it is this individual will, by nothing except itself.

The problem then of my freedom is simply the problem of my individuality. If I am I and nobody else, and if I am I as an expression of purpose, then I am in so far free just because, as an individual, I express by my existence no will except my own. And that is precisely how my existence expresses, or results from, God's Will. That this same existence of mine also has, besides its individuality, its dependence, its natural relations, its temporal origin, means that I am not only I, but also the Self along with all other Selves. But that the One Will of God is expressed through the Many individual wills,—this results from that view of the relation of the One and the Many which our former series so extensively discussed. Simple unity is a mere impossibility. God cannot be One except by being Many. Nor can we various Selves be Many, unless in Him we are One. To know just this is to win the deepest truth that religion has been seeking to teach humanity.

• 1.

  Max Stirner's Der Einzige und Sein Eigenthum is in the main an example of this type of treatment of the Self. Nietzsche's conception, however, cannot properly be placed here in view of the idealistic element which, as I think, can justly be recognized in his conception of the individual.

• 2.

  Lecture V, p. 193.

• 3.

  See the former Series of these lectures, p. 515, sqq.

• 4.

  p. 546.

• 5.
  Groos, in discussing the psychology of Play in his Spiele der Thiere and Spiele des Menschen. The term “bewusste Selbsttäuschung” Groos borrows from K. Lange. See Spiele der Thiere, p. 308; Spiele des Menschen, p. 164, sqq., p. 499, sqq
• 6.

  Plotinus, Enn., V, 1, at the beginning.

• 7.

  The relation of this thesis to the problem of Free will, and especially to the question whether the finite being is free to act counter to the divine plan, i.e. is free to sin, will find its place in the next lecture.

• 8.

  The word between, be it noticed, is used here, and in what follows, in the generalized technical sense explained in Lecture II of this series.