"The modern world is coming more and more to feel that if there is to be any real body and permanent satisfaction to the spiritual life, it will have to be carried back in large part to the sort of experience that we get concretely and verifiably in our every-day human and social relationships. * * * * Now here also in the social realm there is a verifiable and significant sense in which we may talk of identifying ourselves with others. But it distinctly is not to merge our conscious lives into a single and inseparable whole of conscious content. Rather it is to work for common interests and care for the same things, to feel a concern each for the other's welfare, a respect for his character, a regard for the essential individuality of the other. Two things in this situation--and these two the most fundamental--are wholly foreign to an absolute merging and absorption. Love, as human love, presupposes necessarily the self-identical and independent consciousness of the one toward whom it is directed. And the moral life, about which some of the deepest values cling, in its turn involves alike a personal autonomy which absorption would destroy, and an extra-personal, an outgoing and unselfish concern for others, for which no converging of all reality to a single self-conscious centre could find a place. * * * * "We have only, then, to extend this conception a step farther, in order to pass from what is merely an account of the social order to a philosophy of the universe. The ultimate way for understanding the universe _is not self-consciousness, but a society of selves._ But in this community there is one member who occupies a quite exceptional position. For God, as the inner reality of what we call the world of nature, stands clearly somehow in a special way at the centre of things, as human selves do not. In him there are summed up the conditions which are needed to account fully for the lesser world of our own more immediate social experience, since the lives of men confessedly have their roots in nature. In him therefore we may suppose the unity of the whole is directly reflected, and there are gathered the broken threads of the universal purpose as it appears in our partial and limited human experiences. But none the less, if we are to follow the conception, is he still only one member of the community, and not the whole sum of existing things. He exists as one whose nature needs the positing of other lives which do not come within the same immediate conscious unity as his own. He also is a social being as men are, and finds his life in social co-operation, though the complete conditions of his life may be eternally present to his consciousness as they are not to ours. But while his knowledge thus may cover all existence, the inclusion will be one of knowledge simply.