Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/483

does indeed unite both your act and the idea that your act expresses, along with all other acts and ideas, in the single unity of the absolute consciousness. But this single unity of the absolute consciousness, as we already saw at the last time, is nothing that merely absorbs your individuality, in such wise that you vanish from amongst the facts of the world. You remain from the absolute point of view precisely what you now know yourself to be, namely, the possessor of just this ideal purpose, whose internal meaning is embodied in just so much of conscious life as is yours. Our very theory insists that your internal meanings, your ideas viewed as internally significant, your selections and expressions, are typical instances of facts, and of precisely the facts of whose unity the world consists. Now if the whole world is, as whole, the unique expression of the divine purpose, it follows that every finite purpose, precisely in so far as it is, is a partial expression and attainment of the divine will; and also that every finite fulfilment of purpose, precisely as we finite beings find it, is a partial fulfilment of the divine meaning. For from our point of view, while all finite ideas, in so far as concerns their external meaning, are indeed general, still no fact exists merely as a case of a type, or merely as an instance of an universal. The very simplest view of any finite fact already makes it a positive part of the unique divine experience, and therefore, as this part, itself unique. A still deeper view recognizes any finite will, say your own present will, as a stage or case of the expression of the divine purpose at a given point of time; but this expression, too, is once more unique. And this expression is also in one aspect