its recent stress planted firmer feet on the whole history of humanity as its proof of human freedom, whereof the very laws and languages of mankind are witnesses. For our part, we are free to grant that, not without some plausibility and force has recent monism argued against indeterminism as making every action scientifically indeterminable and morally indifferent. But, admitting will in its freedom to be not independent of the action of spiritual law, to which it may offer obedience, we yet cannot consent to determinism under an overshadowing influence of the law of causality as found by science in the material world, and as bound in the very nature of the forces concerned.

Pfleiderer has, when treating of the philosophy of religion, expressed, with his accustomed lucidity and force, this increased psychological place which has been found for character-as against severe indeterminist theory-whereby freedom is no more "an acting from the pure indeterminedness of a merely possible or unreal ego," and its every act no more "an uncaused decision from a state of pure undeterminedness." It is in some such way that we can allow a certain truth to Schiller's fine negation in "Wallenstein" of an absolute

freedom of will:

"Hab' ich des menschen Kern erst untersucht?

So kenn' ich auch sein Wollen und sein Handeln."

Have I the human kernel first examined?

Then know I, too, the future will and action.

A. J. BALFOUR ON CHARACTER.

421

Professor James Sully, in his Psychology,' seems to follow Volkmann in respect of the "semblance of indeterminateness," holding the action to be always the resultant of the factors engaged, or, as Volkmann has it, of the collective internal movement.

All this sort of justice, which is, rightly enough, claimed for character, is not, however, to be carried to any lengths that would be incompatible with the position of Mr Balfour. In his recent article in 'Mind,' when speaking of the freedom of the man of whom it is impossible to say "that he ought, and therefore he can, for at any given moment of his life his next action is, by hypothesis, strictly determined," Mr Balfour goes on to show how man's responsibility is destroyed by a theory which, though making his action the outcome of his character, treats his character itself as "the outcome of causes over which he has not, and cannot by any possibility have, the smallest control." What spontaneity and grace, we ask, would be left to human action, when we should be made so completely the creatures of habit and passion? The truth is, no inward necessity, such as character, can for a moment be allowed to obscure or exclude the real contingency in our acts of choice. Yet, if things go on as they at present appear, this dependence of will upon character must rapidly become the conventional one. It seems to make the matter easy of comprehension; and it is well adapted to

an age somewhat indolent, deeply imbued with scientific habits of thinking, and not over strenuous in its moral moods.

We find another instance of this treatment of character in Professor S. Alexander, of Manchester, to whom freedom's sense means sheer delusion, and character is everything. This mechanical mode of thinking we shall discuss and criticise presently in connection with other recent writers who occupy this position. Meanwhile we express our agreement with Professor Upton when, in a recent article, he says-"While our character determines the nature of our temptations, we are, I believe, clearly conscious that it is not the character, but the self which has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due. In every moral

crisis of a man's life he rises in the act of moral choice above his own character, envisages it, and passes moral judgment on the springs of action or desire which he feels present within him; and it is because a man's true self can thus transcend and judge his own character, that genuine moral freedom and moral responsibility become possible and actual."

It will be seen how very far indeed is our position from amounting to an unqualified endorsement of the positions advocated or expressions adopted by defenders of the doctrine of philosophical necessity like C. E. Plumptre, in his recent Natural Causation,' by whom spontaneity and the choices

CRITICISM OF PROFESSOR CLIFFord.

423

of reason are, virtually at least, eliminated, and to whom man, as the resultant of the past, is no free electing ego, but the mere creature of conditions. It was a mere absurd and arbitrary a priori materialism that led Professor Clifford to maintain that volition has no power to influence matter; yes, it was "the mere omniscience of an a priori materialism." As Dr George Matheson has well said, "the ideas of cause and power would never have been even suggested by the objects of nature but for the presence within us of a determinative will," and man's sense of freedom has been "most strongly felt" just "where his power to recognise causes is the widest and the most unerring." Theistic philosophy has not been so walled in by any adamantine necessityframed of pre- conditions and ambient circumstances as to be unable to sing

"Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for a hermitage.

If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty."

The incomprehensibility of this freedom, as Lotze has, in his Philosophy of Religion,' in the clearest manner pointed out, need cause no offence, since it is of the very nature of morally free choice

that it be not comprehensible-flowing, that is to say, from a set of pre-existing conditions in some necessary way.

When we find so acute a thinker as Mr G. F. Stout, the able editor of Mind,' but lately saying, in reference to the contention for contingent freedom, that "we might as well argue that the fall of a penny is not causally determined, because when we throw it we do not know whether head or tail will turn up," we seem to find only the traces of those mechanical modes of deterministic thinking which would be in place were man indeed a "penny," and not a personality.

We pass over the strangely inconsistent attempt of Kant to combine freedom and necessity in man, so that he ended by making freedom-which he excludes from the external world, as subject to the law of necessity - - a wholly ineffective thing, in his anxiety to maintain freedom, while touching natural necessity as little as might be. Man is, with him, now an intelligence (Wesen an sich), free, independent, supersensuous, and now a being belonging to the world of sense (Sinnenwesen), subject, as such, to the laws of nature or natural causation. The nature of man is thus disrupted, desire is reduced to mere natural appetence, and the pure self-determining reason is divorced from desire, which last assumes so necessary a character. Defective and inadequate Kant's doctrine of freedom could only be the serial self-determination,