INtRODUCTION 



authorized to proceed to his final definition of 

 this religious attitude itself. 



32. Chapter v., entitled " Religion as Ad- 

 justment," undertakes this final definition in 

 somewhat practical terms, by recurring to what 

 Fiske has formerly pointed out regarding that 

 generalization towards which our ethical con- 

 sciousness tends. Regarded in its original so- 

 cial bearings, the moral consciousness, as we 

 have seen, has to do with the adjustment of the 

 individual life to the life of the community. But 

 throughout the development of the ethical con- 

 sciousness, there has been a constantly increas- 

 ing adjustment of the individual will to a larger 

 and larger environment. In its most generalized 

 form the moral consciousness seems to Fiske to 

 counsel the greatest possible " fulness of life," 

 for the individual, for the social order which he 

 serves, and for humanity generally. But fulness 

 of life means perfect adjustment to the whole of 

 reality. When, however, the life which the in- 

 dividual serves is conceived as itself a part of the 

 manifestation of the one Unknowable Power, 

 and when one also conceives, as we have thus 

 learned to do, that the Unknowable Power is 

 quasi-psychical, and also that just because of its 

 universality it is immeasurably above our limi- 

 tations, — then, in the very effort to define the 

 ideal of a " perfect adjustment," one is led to 

 M xcviii 



