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VI. 8. 12]
FREE-WILL AND THE WILL OF THE ONE
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not be set in anything either as enthroned in eternal immanence or as having made some entry into things: He is to be conceived as existing alone, in that existence which the necessity of discussion forces us to attribute to Him, with space and all the rest as later than Him—space latest of all. Thus we conceive as far as we may, the spaceless; we abolish the notion of any environment: we circumscribe Him within no limit; we attribute no extension to Him; He has no quality since no shape, even shape Intellectual; He holds no relationship but exists in and for Himself before anything is.

How can we think any longer of that "Thus He happened to be"? How make this one assertion of Him of whom all other assertion can be no more than negation? it is on the contrary nearer the truth to say "Thus He has happened not to be": that contains at least the utter denial of his happening.

12.

Yet, is not God what He is? Can He, then, be master of being what He is or master to stand above Being? The mind utterly reluctant returns to its doubt: some further considerations, therefore, must be offered:—

In us the individual, viewed as body, is far from reality; by soul which especially constitutes the being we participate in reality, are in some degree real. This is a compound state, a mingling of Reality and Difference, not, therefore reality in the strictest sense, not reality pure. Thus far we are not masters of our being; in some sense the reality in us is one thing and we another. We are not masters of our being; the real in us is the master since that is the principle establishing our characteristic difference; yet we are again in some sense that which is sovran in us and so even on this level might in spite of all be described as self-disposing.

But in That which is wholly what it is—self-existing reality, without distinction between the total thing and its essence—the being is a unit and is sovran over itself; neither the being nor the essence is to be referred to any extern. Besides, the very question as to self-disposal

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