Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/164

time, and through numerous forms of thought, applied to experience by their various constructive imaginations. Each one of these moral agents is bound, by his manhood and by his rationality, to serve an unseen and eternal moral law, and to believe in a divine order that supports this law. Such a universe as this of Kant, viewed as it were from without, suggests irresistibly an interpretation which at first sight may seem as romantic as indemonstrable, but which is at all events not excluded by the facts. Let us look at them dispassionately, — these moral agents, blind to absolute truth, but each and all properly destined to be willing servants of an unseen order; world-creators, meanwhile, each and all of them, but creators solely of their inner worlds, communing somehow with one another, by virtue of their common rationality, but cut off from things in themselves. How does such a state of things appear? Does it not suggest at once a plan of reality which might not yet demonstrably, but just possibly, stand for the true divine order itself? Might not this whole universe of the apparently separate and sense-encompassed creatures be an organized spiritual community? — where, like bees working each in his own part of the cell-wax, but all combining to build the honey-laden comb, these creatures, in the very isolation and darkness of each life, labored together for the realization, — yes, I mean it literally, — for the very expressing and constituting of God’s life; a divine life, I repeat, of infinite complexity, whose purposes were so manifold that an endless number of agents might be needed to embody them; whose ideals were so lofty that only such courage and fidelity and devotion as finite beings, in this ignorance and isolation, would have opportunity to develop, could serve the stern and noble ends of the divine decrees. Suppose, in a word, that the infinite whole made up of these finite lives were itself the divine life. From such a point of view, which I now suggest only by way of a pure hypothesis,