HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 339 



be the varying conditions under which their selfhood, 

 the required peculiarity of each, may bring it to 

 appear. Each of them has its own ideal of its own 

 being, namely, its own way of fulfilling the char- 

 acter of God; and its self-determining life is just 

 the free pursuit of this ideal, despite all the oppos- 

 ing conditions by which it in part defines its life. 

 Moreover, since this ideal, seen eternally in God, 

 is the chosen goal of every consciousness, it is the 

 final — not the efficient — cause of the whole existing 

 self. All the being of each self has thus the form 

 of a self-supplying, self-operating life ; or, in the 

 phraseology of the Schoolmen and Spinoza, each 

 is causa sui. This is what its "eternity" exactly 

 means. 



But at this point the counter-side of our religious 

 difficulty presses the strongest. The religious life 

 must indeed be free and individual, yet it must also 

 be self-subordinating and universal ; whereas the 

 free system now appears to be an ujicompromising 

 Pluralism — an absolute democracy, which, read it 

 as levelling down or as levelling up, as all man or 

 as all god, comes ever to the same dead level, where 

 any such superiority as real Deity is jealously ex- 

 cluded. Nay, the older theists of Lordship and 

 Producing Cause will here surely tell us that this 

 moral idealism has overreached itself, and become 

 its own destruction. "This dead level of spiritual 



