For we cannot really conceive a person as having any reason for being without such relations. He would be constantly baffled at every point, for he is made for persons and personal relations. Love, too, the highest source of both character and happiness, requires everywhere personal relations. Religion itself, as a sharing of the life of God, would be impossible without some relation to others; for God, at least, could not be separated from the life of all. That is, persons, love, religion, in such a world, have gone. This, then, simply means that the ideal world ceases to be, with the denial of the facts that the social consciousness reflects. We must be full persons, social beings in the entire meaning demanded by the social consciousness--hard as the consequences involved often are--if ideal interests are to be supreme. Indeed, the very moral judgment, that incessantly prompts the problem of evil for every one of us, is required, for its own existence, to assume the validity of the relations about which it questions. For it complains, for the most part, of those facts that follow inevitably from the necessary mutual influence of men; but the chief sources of the joy it requires, that it may justify the world, lie in these same mutual relations. It assumes, thus, in its claims on the world, the validity and worth of the very relations of which it complains in its criticism of the world. Or, slightly to vary the statement, the major premise, even of pessimism, is that a really justifiable world must have worth in the joy it yields in personal life, impossible out of the personal relations of a real moral universe. And there can be no moral universe without the facts reflected in the social consciousness. The ideal world requires, then, the facts of the social consciousness. [16] _System of Ethics_, pp. 467 ff. [17] _Philosophy of Religion_, p. 125. CHAPTER IV _THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATION AND GROUND OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS_ The most important and fundamental inquiry as to the possible help of theology to the social consciousness still remains: What is the ultimate explanation and ground of the social consciousness? This question includes two: (1) How can it be metaphysically that we do influence one another? (2) What is required for the final positive justification of the social consciousness as ethical? Theology's answer to both questions is found in the being and character of God, the creative and moral source of all. I. HOW CAN IT BE, METAPHYSICALLY, THAT WE DO INFLUENCE ONE ANOTHER? First, then, how can it be that we do influence one another? What is the final explanation of the constant fact of our reciprocal action? For in our final thinking we may not ignore this question.