Excerpt from The Value and Destiny of the Individual: The Gifford Lectures for 1912 Delivered in Edinburgh University The general title of the two courses was "The Value and Destiny of the Individual." The first course, "The Principle of Individuality and Value," delivered last year, attempted to show how the reality and value of all things in the universe depended on the degree of their embodiment of the principle of individuality - the completeness, coherence, or self-containedness of the universe. This second course, with the title, "The Value and Destiny of the Individual," is an attempt to apply the principle developed in the first course to finite beings, that is, in effect, to human souls. It discusses in what way the so-called "individual" or human soul works out its destiny and achieves its worth, by and through its membership of the universe, the only real and ultimate individual. The present lecture, on "Finiteness and Self-Transcendence," was intended to give an outline of the course, showing how its sub-divisions are connected with different sides of the nature of finite beings as our principle requires us to analyse it. The human soul has sometimes been thought of as a celestial spark of divinity, sometimes as a crystallisation out of unconscious Nature, or out of a hardly conscious tribal collectivity, sharing the nature of a suffering deity who represents that collectivity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.