Even if there be Act in the Supreme — an Act with which it is to be identified — this is not enough to set up a duality within it and prevent it being entirely master of that self from which the Act springs; for the Act is not distinct from that self. If we utterly deny Act in it — holding that Act begins with others moving about it — we are all the less able to allow either self-mastery or subjection in it: even self-mastery is absent here, not that anything else is master over it but that self-mastery begins with Being while the Supreme is to be set in a higher order.
But what can there be higher than that which is its own master?
Where we speak of self-mastery there is a certain duality, Act against essence; from the exercise of the Act arises the conception of the mastering principle — though one identical with the essence — hence arises the separate idea of mastery, and the being concerned is said to possess self-mastery. Where there is no such duality joining to unity but solely a unity pure — either because the Act is the whole being or because there is no Act at all — then we cannot strictly say that the being has this mastery of self.
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