368 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



Or passing to deeper decline, it may out of this slug- 

 gard self-love advance into aggressive struggle to 

 maintain it, falling with hate upon the activities of 

 others whom it finds, or assumes, to interfere with its 

 ease. 



This empirical volition seduced by the vision of 

 the sense-world, be this sensual or malicious, or be it 

 ever so much raised above the brutal, — this willing- 

 ness to stay where one temporally is, to accept the 

 actual of experience for the ideal, the mere particular 

 of sense for the universal of the spirit, the dead finite 

 for the ever-living infinite, the world for God, — this 

 is exactly what sin is.^ It may take either of two 

 forms, according as the sinking into sense directly 

 involves only the violation of the spirit's own self- 

 reverence or the graver assault upon the sacredness 

 of others. In either case it is dishonour of God. 

 The risk of it lies in the nature of our being, goes 

 back to the conditions of our existence, of our self- 

 definition in freedom ; is constituent in our freedom 

 as this is defined against the freedom of God. This 



^ Some readers may feel that this account of sin is defective because 

 it seems to them to omit the characteristic factor of selfishness. But it 

 does not in fact do so. The statement that sin is the choice of the 

 actual instead of the ideal, the world instead of God, is more compre- 

 hensive, but is, as directly made, merely formal. In the light of what 

 has preceded, however, it is plain that the real 7neaning, contained 

 indi7-ectly in this formal contrast between God and the world, is that 

 the ideal is universal love, and its neglect a violation of this. 



