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THE MORAL PERSONALITY.

395.

certainly within the sphere of experience than the idea of personality, which, at least in its centralness, we continually comprehend and verify. Clearly,

then, there is no call to lay any such stress on the self-centredness of man's moral personality as shall obscure for us the pathway of self-realisation, which lies along the line of its realised relations to the Primal Personality, and to personalities that are finite.

We close this chapter by saying, therefore, that recent theistic philosophy has more than ever found reason for affirming, in a true sense, with Goethe

"Wie das Gestirn,

Ohne Hast,

Aber ohne Rast,

Drehe sich jeder

Um die eigne Last"

which, being interpreted, runs, "Like a star, without haste, but without rest, let each revolve about his own weight," or, as we should like more freely to say, "Let every man's life, starlike, turn on the axis of his own real personality." For has it not, as a spiritual philosophy, had a deeper sense that, just as his awakened spirit does so, man comes more near his spiritual perihelion? Has it not more clearly realised that, while the fashion of the world passeth away, personality, as that whereby man is able to will in conformity with the supreme Eternal Will, is that which "endureth for ever"? Has it not found always more reason for standing firm, with

a poet of a late time, by those "high instincts," "those first affections," which go to form "the fountain-light of all our day" in making up for us a wondrous personality? Turning from the superficialism of the mechanical philosophy, on the one hand, and from the lack of real standing - ground for man in the pantheistic philosophy - surfeited with Deity on the other, it has been more wisely able than before to find a real place for personality in man—in man who is a personality which no theory can shatter-personality being still for it, as for the peerless poet of an earlier time, "la rosa in su la cima" -"the rose upon its top." Nowise shall personality show itself in us as it will in our faith in the spiritual and eternal order of things—our faith in the ideal, which cannot be broken or lost, for the ideal is no more to us a visionary and exterior thing, but something which is internal and immanent in our conscious and aspiring life.

With the personality of Jesus Christ the crown and climax of this problem of the active and originating power of personality are, for the philosophy of religion, reached, for, as we contemplate the Person of the Son of Man, does not a new and everlasting glory of personality for, and in, man burst upon our view? Where shall we find a life that so subjected, as did He, the actual to the ideal? Even Ritschl has been able, to his honour be it said, to make a perfectly clear and

IDEAL PERSONALITY.

397

peculiar place for Christ among religious founders in virtue of Christianity, on his conception of it, making His person an element or factor in its philosophy of the universe or Weltanschauung. Do we not then feel anew that not only must "the ideal self" be, as Professor Lloyd Morgan properly remarks, "an object of desire," but of intense and all-consuming desire? Yes, for what perfection of finite personality can there be for us save free and progressive companionship with that Infinite Person, wherein freedom, harmony, and security are alone for us to be found? What is the true and precise end of moral development but just the development of that free, moral personality of which we have spoken, acting, of course, in no isolated way, but in and through society? What other moral ideal could satisfy alike the reason and the affections but just that reality and perfection of the personal character of which we have spoken-an ideal, of course, progressively realised wherever true individuality is found. This reality and integrity of the self or individual-and of a priori consciousness in the individual as such-we thus maintain, giving way as little to the running of these rational elements back into the Divine Mind with pantheistic idealism, as to resolving them into accumulations of experience by agnostic evolutionism. And it is because it rests with each one, as life's great moral achievement, to constitute or erect himself

such an ideal moral personality-yes, to rear such a moral fabric as this ideal self or person out of all the unpromising material of natural feeling, will, and impulse, that there is ethical force and solemnity in the poet's word to every man

"To thine own Self be true."

True to that self we must be just because that self is one so real and true. Never so true to it are we as when we make it no self-centred ego, but a self that seeks its home, its vital breath, its native air, in God, even that God Who works in and through the finite ego both to will and to work for His good pleasure. The self is not then lost, but only gone before it has become, so to speak, a pioneer of the ideal, to prepare a way or upward track for all that remains of our unsubjected nature, and render it no more disobedient to the heavenly vision that calls it to "come up higher."

CHAPTER XIII.

RECENT STUDY OF HUMAN FREEDOM.

THEISTIC philosophy locates the true life of man in the alluring region of freedom, ruled by his will. It sees that no other philosophy supplies such personal relation betwixt God and man as that theistic doctrine in which we find a true responsibility arise, and worthy conceptions of duty and freedom spring up. It notes how the freewill problem has seized hold on the theologic and philosophic mind of the ages as hardly any other has done, and has enlisted the interest also of minds of juridical, philological, scientific, and medical turn. And, well-worn and profoundly perplexing as may be the theme of freewill, it is yet too obtrusive and of too transcendent moment, for the theistic philosophy of religion, not to deserve our attention to recent thought on the idea of freedom, with its elements of power, independence, and spontaneity, and on the measure of its compatibility with scientific determinism. Not that the deter

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