DEVELOPMENT OF FREEDOM.

415

dom is that towards which we are advancing, not merely that whereunto we have attained. "That no mind is free until it becomes free, that moral freedom, if possessed at all, is gained only after a certain psychical development is passed through, is an indisputable conclusion from the study of psychology. If, however, the mind ever attains to moral freedom, it does this in the forth-putting of self-conscious and responsible choice." We accept this fact of choice only to say that it iswhether our scientists have understood the matter or not a more real, more potent, and more expansive fact, than their theories of heredity or evolution suffice to explain. Hence the ethical culture of the will is now, as the result of the ethical emphasis of Kant-to whom a good will is the one thing of absolute value-and Herbart, more recognised, we believe, as the highest ideal for our ethical personality. We surely better feel the force of Rothe's strenuous ethical insistence on the completely actual power of self-determination as something only acquired in the thorough moral development of the subject himself. For it has become less doubtful to us that freedom grows with every increment of moral power and physical vigour and righteous life.

But, while recent theistic philosophy has advanced in its acknowledgments of the power and scope of heredity, education, and environmentsthe leverage and auxiliary forces of the will-it

has, with no small skill, opposed the advocates of the doctrine of philosophical necessity in their unduly emphasising these, so that spontaneity becomes eliminated from psychology, and we are left no more creators of our future. We object to heredity, which we admit as an influence, being turned into a fatality, for the race characteristics and the physiological impulses it may bring us cannot be allowed to dominate our moral personality, and beget an irresponsible condition of things. We maintain that life is for freedom, and that the free personal is an irreducible element in the life of man as a moral personality. Yes, an element which has the power to resist and transcend the law of heredity as a fatalistic thing.

as little explains our free upward

Heredity just choices as it

does the outburstings of genius. Heredity, which has so often been called out in this time to curse, has still found voice at times to bless. And then its speech may have been slower, but that which it spake was all the more a strange, inexplicable thing.

We hold that theistic philosophy has maintained the reality of liberty none the less successfully for having more amply acknowledged how that liberty is less abstract in character, more limited in range, more characteristic of the whole of life than of its every act, more dependent than was formerly thought upon environment, education, and the crystallisations of character and experience. We maintain that true

SIDGWICK'S UNSATISFACTORY ATTITUDE. 417

theistic philosophy is seeing the need to take causal circumstance, limitation, and temptation, all into account if we are really to understand and do justice to the law of freedom in relation to what the poet calls

"the dread strife

Of poor Humanity's afflicted Will

Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny."

But in all this it is only exemplifying, in changed and more real fashion, the quaint poet's words—

"How much, preventing God, how much I owe

To the defences Thou hast round me set;

Example, custom, fear, occasion slow,

These scorned bandsmen were my parapet.

I dare not overpeep this parapet,

To gauge with glance the roaring gulf beyond,
The depths of sin to which I had descended,

Had not Thou me against myself defended."

Thus it accords with one who said, "My freedom is an island of small extent in an ocean of necessity which opposes, on every side, an inexorable bar to my finite power." But it is precisely within those limitations against which our spirits chafe that our true, free destiny is realised.

We contend that theistic philosophy has endorsed the forceful manner in which Martineau has shown how vain is the attempt of that distinguished psychologist, Professor Sidgwick, to to hold the Determinist problem in neutral solution, when he urges that freewill is a fact, or else moral judgment,

with its "presence of a personal power of preference," becomes a "delusion." We maintain, further, that it has been rightfully claiming true freedom for man's will with all the powers and consequences which such a claim implies, unhindered in the least by any evolutionary theories as to the time and the manner in which the sense of freedom and responsibility become his. It finds that, when evolution has finished its work, the fact of freedom abides. It is the freedom of rational self-direction attained through obedience to the emancipating law of reason, as it frees from the sway of blind impulse. It is, in our view, the perfectly realisable freedom of a real self, not a self composed merely of a compact majority of existent desires.

There can be no great occasion now to go into the discussions of Hamilton and Mill, who were in substantial agreement-more so than the latter was himself always aware-as to whether we are in freedom wholly free from causation. But we have not got beyond the need to recall, what Zeller says in the last chapter (of the second volume) of his 'Vorträge und Abhandlungen,' that "we are ourselves the only cause (Ursache) of whose mode of action we have immediate knowledge through inner intuition" (Anschauung). Green we take to have made a noteworthy advance on Mill when he emphasised the fact that, in contending for freedom, we are not driven to shun the Scylla of determinism only to fall into the Charybdis of indeterminateness,

FURTHER CRITICISM OF PROFESSOR GREEN. 419

since there is that true via media in which freedom in the self-conscious subject means freedom in, but not from, motive. What we do here decidedly object to in Green is the way in which he immolates the self on the shrine of character. We object to be told that "the action is as necessarily related to the character and circumstances as any event to the sum of its conditions." We object to being told that "he, being what he is, and the circumstances being what they are at any particular conjuncture, the determination of the will is already given, just as an effect is given in the sum of its conditions.' What right has the self to be sunk in the character in this fashion, and made identical with it? We maintain that the man-the self-is always more than the words, more than the works, more than the character, and we give an emphatic non sequitur to Green's absurd supposition that, because we do so, the self therefore stands out of all relation-or even out of most real and intimate relation-to character. We certainly maintain for this self an original spring and freedom of movement which cannot be gauged by any record of its own past. We regard as significant the statement of Professor Henry Sidgwick when, in the chapter on Freewill in his Methods of Ethics,' he says, "that, in fact, 'responsibility,' 'desert,' and similar terms have to be used, if at all, in new significations by Determinists."

We do not suppose it can be doubted that theistic philosophy has been wisely led when it has in

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