362 £SS.4VS IN PHILOSOPHY 



to reply : No, you are quite as wrong this time as 

 you were when you called the free system atheism. 

 The system of freedom is genuine monotheism, and 

 the only genuine. All the members of the eternal 

 world except God freely posit themselves as 7iot 

 God, in freely positing God ; and God, in positing 

 himself, likewise posits them as not himself. More- 

 over, this difference from Deity is thought by each 

 spirit's purely thought-put — and therefore free — 

 exclusion of any alternative, as a difference that 

 is defect, the active maintenance or the passive 

 acceptance of which would be sin. 



For inasmuch as its characteristic difference is 

 by each spirit thought against the Ideal who is 

 absolute Perfection, the Unity of all possible per- 

 fections, all difference from this must include some 

 degree of imperfectiofi, self-posited in the very being 

 of each self-definer. The active consciousness of 

 each is therefore really answerable for the presence 

 of this in his being, but also answerable, by the 

 terms of its being and his, for the rational control 

 of it : answerable, just because the free self-definer 

 is himself the source of it, and yet by his total 

 nature, which eternally contemplates and mirrors 

 God, transcends it. On this ground, the absolutely 

 singular and unrepeatable personality of each soul 

 lies in the exactly identical manner, one and only, 

 in which his thinking differentiates him (i) from 



