The Absolute and the Individual - The Conception of God

I shall try to show... that the Absolute, as I have ventured to define the conception, has room for ethical individuality without detriment to its true unity, or to the argument that I advanced for its reality. I shall also try to show that the very essence of ethical individuality brings it at last, despite the mentioned antinomy, into a deeper harmony with the concept of the Absolute that I venture to maintain; so that, as I shall try to explain, just because the ethical individual is sacred, therefore must his separate life be “hid,” in a deep and final sense, in the unity of the system to which he is freely subordinated. For his ethical life is, as such, a life of free subordination. He cannot be ethical and undertake to exist separately from God’s life. On the other hand, as I shall try to maintain, the unity of this system, i.e. of the Absolute, as defined in my thesis is not a dead unity, — a night that devours all, — but precisely the unity of many, where the many are; but the unity is still supreme, while the unity is supreme just because the many exist, over whom and in whom it is supreme.