and through faith alone, self-suppression issues in a higher self-realization.
2. Within the sphere of my station and its duties we see the contradiction is but partially solved: and the second objection is also very serious. You can not confine a man to his station and its duties. Whether in another sense that formula would be all embracing is a further question: but in the sense in which we took it, function in a ‘visible’ community, it certainly is not so. And we must remark here in passing that, if we accept (as I think we must) the fact that the essence of a man involves identity with others, the question what the final reality of that identity is, is still left unanswered: we should still have to ask what is the higher whole in which the individual is a function, and in which the relative wholes subsist, and to enquire whether that community is, or can be, a visible community at all.
Passing by this, however, let us develope our objection. A man can not take his morality simply from the moral world he is in, for many reasons, (a) That moral world, being in a state of historical developement, is not and can not be self-consistent; and the man must thus stand before and above inconsistencies, and reflect on them. This must lead to the knowledge that the world is not altogether as it should be, and to a process of trying to make it better. With this co-operates (b) what may be called cosmopolitan morality. Men nowadays know to some extent what is thought right and wrong in other communities now, and what has been thought at other times; and this leads to a notion of goodness not of any particular time and country. For numbers of persons no doubt this is unnecessary; but it is necessary for others, and they have the moral ideal (with the psychological origin of which we are not concerned) of a good man who is not good as member of this or that community, but who realizes himself in whatever community he finds himself. This, however, must mean also that he is not perfectly realized in any particular station.
3. We have seen that the moral man can to a certain extent distinguish his moral essence from his particular function; and now a third objection at once follows, that the content of the ideal self does not fall wholly within any community, is in short not merely the ideal of a perfect social being. The making myself
