Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/363

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THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

entered in the heart of man to conceive. I also hasten to point out that the lesson of all this is, that our temporal categories are wholly inadequate to express the ultimate facts of an eternal life. To the restless questions of a human consciousness whose present temporal form is wholly inadequate to its moral ideals, philosophy must reply simply thus: When you want immortality, you want what rationally means simply that this moral individual, at home as he is in God’s world, does not remain fragmentarily expressed, as on earth he is expressed, in a life of broken chance. You want to know that somewhere he — this individual, he himself and not another — knows himself as fulfilled after his own kind; as possessed of a life that, in its wholeness, earthly and superhuman, is adequate to his ideal. Now, that this is the case is just what tradition has asserted in its doctrine of the final perfection of the just and of the unjust, each after his own freely chosen kind. Philosophy here supports tradition. This is a moral world. All moral battles get fought out. All quests are fulfilled. The goal — yes, your individual goal — is by you yourself attained in the eternal life. You yourself, and not merely another, consciously know in the eternal world the attainment of that goal. But how? Where? When? To this philosophy at once answers: The temporal as well as the spatial world is but a fragment of the complete experience; your fulfilment will never come in time; and how your eternal experience of your perfection is individually realised by you, is a question which cannot be answered, in so far as you remain on this shoal of time.