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A greater good is one more largely contributory to the organism as its end. A higher good is one more fully expressive of that end. Probably, too, it will be found convenient to set down here a couple of other definitions which will hereafter be explained and employed. A good act is the expression of selfhood as service.
Mine is the spiritual idea which transfigures thought. All real being represents God, and is in Him. In this Science of being, man can no more relapse or collapse from perfection, than his divine Principle, or Father, can fall out of Himself into something below infinitude. Man's real ego, or selfhood, is goodness.
Hence it is feminine, Venus the ruler thereof, and it represents the first pure form of the human soul, as it existed in its bright paradise within the angelic spheres of its parents, and reveals to us the first surprise of intelligence in embryo, the first sensation of consciousness, so to say conscious of its Divine selfhood.
He lives in rapturous companionship with the glory and beauty and majesty of God in the world He has projected from Himself, and with this beneath him, he can rise to the very pinnacle of infinite selfhood.
The origin of the sense-world is conceivable only as a breaking away, a spring, a falling away, which consists in the soul's grasping itself in its selfhood, in its subordination of the infinite in itself to the finite, and in its thus ceasing to be in God. The procession of the world from the infinite is a free act, a fact which can only be described, not deduced as necessary.
In the creation of the at first immaterial world, in which God unites, not with his essence, but with his image only, the same two powers, desire and wisdom, operate as the principles of matter and form. The materialization of the world is a consequence of the fall. Evil consists in the elevation of selfhood, which springs from desire, into self-seeking.
The deliverance from life and its sufferings is the freedom of the intellect from its creator and despot, the Will. The intellect, freed from the bondage of the Will, sees through the veil of selfhood into the unity of all being, and finds that he who has done wrong to another has done wrong to his own self. For selfhood the asserting of the Ego is the root of all evil.
The slumbering selfhood of his soul woke and clamored for its rights. It was Chateaubriand who affirmed that the human heart is like one of those southern pools which are quiet and beautiful on the surface, but in the bottom of which there lies an alligator! However calm the surface of the exile's soul appeared, there was a monster in its depth, and now it rose upon him.
And morality has been the starched buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to his neighbor, not assumed as decorations of the selfhood, but with all divine charities flowing through them.
We need not ask with Faust, "Where is that place which men call 'Hell'?" nor wait for Mephistopheles to answer, "Hell is in no set place, nor is it circumscribed, For where we are is Hell!" Now, it is from such central and poignant experiences as these that men have been constrained to look outward for a God. For these mark the very disintegration of personality, the utter dissipation of selfhood.
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