even here?

In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable
tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they
are disputing with one another about questions of good and bad. They
imagine an abstract moral order in which the objective truth resides;
and each tries to prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately
reflected in his own ideas than in those of his adversary. It is
because one disputant is backed by this overarching abstract order that
we think the other should submit. Even so, when it is a question no
longer of two finite thinkers, but of God and ourselves,--we follow our
usual habit, and imagine a sort of _de jure_ relation, which antedates
and overarches the mere facts, and would make it right that we should
conform our thoughts to God's thoughts, even though he made no claim to
that effect, and though we preferred _de facto_ to go on thinking for
ourselves.

But the moment we take a steady look at the question, _we see not only
that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be
no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a
claim_. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they
cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves
as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true 'in
themselves,' is therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else
it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real
Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our
obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic-ethical philosophy
that thinker in question is, of {195} course, the Deity to whom the
existence of the universe is due.

I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have
called the superstitious view, to realize that every _de facto_ claim
creates in so far forth an obligation. We inveterately think that
something which we call the 'validity' of the claim is what gives to it
its obligatory character, and that this validity is something outside
of the claim's mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon
the claim, we think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the
moral law inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the
influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But
again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness,
additional to the imperat