Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/219

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THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY.

individual object of our sympathy. To sympatliize with ail men is to wish everybody happy, each after his own fashion. But we rejected that emotional sympathy as such. We said: The facts of life show us a conflict of wills. To realize this conflict is to see that no will is more justified in its separateness than is any other. This realization is ethical skepticism, a necessary stage on the way to the true moral insight. The ethical doubt means and is the realization of the conflict. But this realization means, as we see on reflection, a real will in us that unites these realized wills in one, and demands the end of their conflict. This is our realization of an Universal Will. The rest of our doctrine must be the development of the nature of the universal will. This will first says to each of the individual wills: “Submit thyself to me.” Or otherwise put, let each will be so acted out as if by One Being who combined in himself all the other wills. Hence the universal will must demand, not the indefinitely conceived or dimly and sentimentally desired separate satisfaction of everybody, but an organic union of life; such an union as this our world would try to make of itself if it were already in empirical fact what the universal will demands it to be, namely, one Self. This one Self, however, could no longer will to cut itself up again into the separate empirical selves, any more than it could in any narrow, priggish fashion set itself up for a new specimen of a lofty individual, to be obeyed as an arbitrary law-giver. It would demand all the wealth of life that the separate selves now have; and all the unity that