naturalistically so that each sphere gives scope for one
sort of good. God, or the highest being, would then be simply the life
of nature as a whole, if nature has a conscious life, or that of its
noblest portion. The supposed "metaphysical evil" involved in finitude
would then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good. In
realising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectly
happy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being.
Such forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even if
conventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and their
soul more complex. Nor would divine perfection itself be in any sense
perfection unless it gave expression to some definite nature, the
entelechy either of the celestial spheres, or of scientific thought, or
of some other actual existence. Under these circumstances, inhabitants
even of the lowest heaven would be unreservedly happy, as happy in their
way as those of the seventh heaven could be in theirs. No pathetic note
would any longer disquiet their finitude. They would not have to
renounce, in sad conformity to an alien will, what even for them would
have been a deeper joy. They would be asked to renounce nothing but
what, for them, would be an evil. The overruling providence would then
in truth be fatherly, by providing for each being that which it inwardly
craved. Persons of one rank would not be improved by passing into the
so-called higher sphere, any more than the ox would be improved by being
transformed into a lark, or a king into a poet.

Man in such a system could no more pine to be God than he could pine to
be the law of gravity, or Spinoza's substance, or Hegel's dialectical
idea. Such naturalistic abstractions, while they perhaps express some
element of reality or its total form, are not objects corresponding to
man's purposes and are morally inferior to his humanity. Every man's
ideal lies within the potentialities of his nature, for only by
expressing his nature can ideals possess authority or attraction over
him. Heaven accordingly has really many mansions, each truly heavenly to
him who would inhabit it, and there is really no room for discord in
those rounds. One ideal can no more conflict with another than truth can
jostle truth; but men, or the disorganised functions within a given
individual, may be in physical conflict, as opinion may wrestle with
opinion in the world's arena or in an ignorant brain.