ABSTRACT
It is then essential that the principle of the immanence of the Absolute within every finite real should be interpreted, in its special bearing upon personality, as the immanence of an absolute freedom. For apart from this conclusion it is almost inevitable that the activity of the universe will be regarded as manifested in and through an instrument which, although certainly conscious, is nevertheless wholly passive; the self, in other words, is reduced to the level of a helpless mechanical object— the classic difficulty, of course, of the concept of immanence as such. The difficulty is a very real and serious one; and it can be removed only by recognizing that in conscious personality it is essentially the freedom of the Absolute that has there actualized itself, and has thus reached a certain level of attainment that makes it almost permissible to say that every developed personality is itself an “absolute” in miniature; while the more it develops the more absolute it becomes. For within certain limits every self is obviously absolutely free—to take an extreme case, it is absolutely free to destroy itself in deliberate suicide; 1 nothing whatever will hinder it doing so—except itself; and just as it is thus free to destroy itself, so it is equally free to develop itself. The limits of this characteristic freedom may be —and in actual life they undeniably are—extremely narrow—that is as relative to the nature and extent of the whole environment. But the fundamental point here is not the narrowness of these limits, but the reality of the freedom that exists within them. So far as it extends this freedom is absolutely real, and is, further, capable under proper conditions of illimitable expansion; 1 and thus the immanence of the Absolute within conscious selfhood means the very reverse of passive mechanical necessity.
