Three main thoughts should be kept clear: the end to be realized, the incongruity of the finite and the infinite order, and hence, thirdly, the indispensable ministry of frustration in the realization of the purpose of life.  
In regard to the so-called moral end of life, there has been much variety and contrarity of teaching. I shall touch only upon that aspect of the doctrine expounded in the previous book wherein it seems to resemble other doctrines, and where a distinct statement of the difference is therefore imperative. “So act as to develop the faculties of thy fellowman” is not the rule proposed. “So act as to develop the so-called good qualities in the man” is not the rule proposed. The rule reads, “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.” Now, in putting the matter in this way, we incurred the danger of seeming to concentrate attention on the individual as a detached being, we seemed to have him only in mind, though it is true, in respect to what is intrinsic in him, the irreducible ethical unit which he essentially is. We must, therefore, constantly remind ourselves that the ethical unit, while unique, is at the same time an inseparable member of a society of differentiated units; that its very distinctiveness consists in injecting, as it were, streams148 of dynamic energy into its fellow-beings. Or, as I have elsewhere figuratively put it, the distinctiveness of any ethical being consists, so to speak, in emitting a ray the color of which is nowhere else to be found, the miraculous quality of which consists in acquiring this color at the very instant in which it causes counter or complementary colors to appear in its fellow-being. (I am using the words “instant,” “miraculous,” “ray of light,” etc., of course, in a wholly figurative sense.)
 
We have at last, this is my belief, achieved a positive definition of the spiritual nature. The spiritual nature is that which forever is social in a supra-social sense, as embracing not only human society, but a universal society of spirits. The spiritual nature is that of which the very life consists in starting up unlike but equally worthwhile life elsewhere, everywhere. The spiritual experience to get hold of, therefore, is the consciousness of this interrelation.
 
The moral end to be realized, in accordance with the deductions of Book II, is “So to act upon another as to evoke in him, and conjointly in oneself, in the same movement and counter-movement the consciousness of the interlacedness of life with life, the reciprocal, universal, infinite interrelatedness.” Now, as a fact, we never realize this end. If we did we should possess what alone is properly called freedom,—freedom in the positive sense being the exercise of power peculiar to ourselves, welling up out of our veriest self, and executing the totality of its effects. Freedom is marked by these two signs: energy coming unborrowed out of self, and producing the totality of its ef149fects. I am free when the thing I do is verily my own, when the power released is the power of my essential self; and when that power is nowhere checked, inhibited or interrupted, so that it produces its due, that is, its universal effects.
 
An ethical being in an ethical universe would be free. The dynamic energy proceeding from it would be aboriginal. And since it would radiate upon every other member of the infinite society, it would also produce the unstinted plenitude of its effects. Each ethical unit, at its station, would be at once the producer and the recipient of the totality of life.44
 
It is apparent from what has been said that the superlative, sublime thing, freedom, is not realizable except in an infinite world. And hence that the supreme end to be realized by man as a finite being cannot be the full release of unique power in himself. But neither can the end be approximation. In so serious a business as a philosophy of life we ought not to play with words, nor delude ourselves with the implication of proximity seemingly contained in the word approximation. For it being admitted that we cannot reach the ideal, approximation seems to suggest that we come into its neighborhood. But the truth is that the more we advance the less do we arrive in the immediate neighborhood of the ideal, the distance at which it lies becoming ever more remote.150 The moral end, therefore, for a finite nature, like that of man, is just to realize the unattainableness of the end. There must be no heaven-on-earth illusions, no resting in the development of our inadequate human faculties, and no illusions as to approximation. The unattainableness of the infinite end in the finite world by the finite nature is the Alpha and Omega of the doctrine, as I propound it. Only after this truth has been fully faced and recognized, shall we be in a position to take in the vast significance of the fact that we are nevertheless under a certain coercion to persist in our efforts to attain the unattainable, and in inquiring into the source from which this pressure comes, we shall be led to infer the influence in us of an infinite nature enshrined in this finite nature of ours. In other words, to............