2. To overcome the Kantian abstraction, and give content to the formal law of reason was the aim of the idealistic writers who succeeded him. Fichte conceived of morality as action--self-consciousness realising itself in a world of deeds. Hegel started with the _Idea_ as the source of all reality, and developed the conception of Personality attaining self-realisation through the growing consciousness of the world and of God. Personality involves capacity. The {113} law of life, therefore, is, 'Be a person and respect others as persons.'[14] Man only comes to himself as he becomes conscious that his life is rooted in a larger self. Morality is just the gradual unfolding of an eternal purpose whose whole is the perfection of humanity. It has been objected that the idea of life as an evolutionary process, which finds its most imposing embodiment in the system of Hegel, if consistently carried out, destroys all personal motive and self-determining activity, and reduces the history of the world to a soulless mechanism. Hegel himself was aware of this objection, and the whole aim of his philosophy was to show that personality has no meaning if it be not the growing consciousness of the infinite. The more recent exponents of his teaching have endeavoured to prove that the individual, so far from being suppressed, is really _expressed_ in the process, that, indeed, while the universal life underlies, unifies, and directs the particular phases of existence, the individual in realising himself is at the same time determining and evolving the larger spiritual world--a world already implicitly present in his earliest consciousness and first strivings. The absolute is indeed within us from the very beginning, but we have to work it out. Hence life is achieved through conflict. The universe is not a place for pleasure or apathy. It is a place for soul-making. No rest is to be found by an indolent withdrawal from the world of reality. 'In one way or another, in labour, in learning, and in religion, every man has his pilgrimage to make, his self to remould and to acquire, his world and surroundings to transform. . . . It is in this adventure, and not apart from it, that we find and maintain the personality which we suppose ourselves to possess _ab initio_.'[15] The soul is a world in itself; but it is not, and must not be treated as, an isolated personality impervious to the mind of others. At each stage of its evolution it is the focus and expression of a larger world. A man does not value himself as a detached subject, but as the {114} inheritor of gifts which are focused in him. Man, in short, is a trustee for the world; and suffering and privation are among his opportunities. The question for each is, How much can he make of them? Something above us there must be to make us do and dare and hope, and the important thing is not one's separate destiny, but the completeness of experience and one's contribution to it.[16]