on the basis of necessity; but the attempt is doomed to failure. The living throbbing experience of the moral man-remorse and retribution, approbation and reward, all the grief and humiliation of his life, all its joy and exaltation-imply a deep and ineradicable conviction that his destiny, if partly shaped for him by a power beyond himself, is yet, in its grand outline, in his own hands, to make it or to mar it, as he will. As man cannot, without ceasing to be man, escape the imperative of duty, so he cannot surrender his freedom and become a child of nature. All the passion of his moral experience gathers itself up in the conviction of his infinite and eternal superiority to nature: it cannot do otherwise,' he can. Engulfed in the necessity of nature, he could still conceive himself as living the life of nature, or a merely animal life, but no longer as living the proper and characteristic life of man. That is a life rooted in the conviction of its freedom; for it is not a life, like nature's, 'according to law,' but a life according to the representation of law,' or in free obedience to a consciously conceived ideal.

The grand characteristic of the moral life of man, which forbids its reduction to the life either of nature or of God, is responsibility or obligation. This is more than expectation of punishment, to which Mill would reduce it. It is rather punishability, desert of punishment or of reward. The element of retribution or desert, instead of being accidental, is essential to the conception. In the common human experience of remorse there is implied the conviction that different possibilities of action were open, and, therefore, that the agent is accountable for what he did-accountable not necessarily in foro externo, human or divine, but primarily and inevitably to himself, to the inner tribunal of his own nature in its alternative possibilities. And retribution comes, if not from without, yet, with sure and certain foot, from within. Our moral nature, in its high possibilities, is inexorable in its de

mands, and relentless in its penalties for failure to satisfy them. To say that the actual and the possible in human life are, in the last analysis, identical; to resolve the 'ought to be' into the 'is,'-would be to falsify the healthy moral consciousness of mankind.

On the other hand, the admission of the full claim of that consciousness may mean the surrender of metaphysical completeness in our scheme of the universe. For it means the recognition of a spiritual force different in kind from the natural or mechanical, and therefore the surrender of a materialistic monism or a scientific synthesis. It means also the recognition of a plurality of spiritual forces, and therefore the surrender of such a spiritual or idealistic monism as would exclude that plurality. It may even mean, as Professor James insists that it does, the entire abandonment of the monistic point of view, or of the conception of a "block-universe." The admission of free personality may cleave the universe asunder, and leave us with a seemingly helpless pluralism in place of the various monisms of metaphysical theory. Such an admission means further the recognition of evil, real and positive, alongside of good, in the universe. may therefore mean the surrender of optimism, philosophical and religious; or, at any rate, it may force us to pass to optimism through the strait gate' of pessimism. All this darkness and difficulty may result to metaphysics from the recognition and candid concession of the demands of the moral consciousness. Nor will this seem strange when we remember that the moral problem of freedom is just the problem of personality itself, which cannot but prove a stone of stumbling to every metaphysical system :

"Dark is the world to thee; thyself art the reason why ;

For is He not all but thou, that hast power to feel 'I am I'?"

It

2. The 'moral method.'-Recognising these difficulties, and regarding them as insuperable, we may still

accept freedom as the ethical postulate, as the hypothesis, itself inexplicable, upon which alone morality becomes intelligible. This is the 'moral method,' which some living thinkers share with Kant. The method or standpoint has received a brilliant exposition and defence from Professor William James, in a lecture on "The Dilemma of Determinism.' "I for one," says the latter writer, "feel as free to try the conception of moral as of mechanical or of logical reality. . . If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example." Insisting upon the integrity of our moral as well as of our intellectual judgments, and especially upon that of the "judgment of regret," and upon the equal legitimacy of the postulate of moral with that of physical coherence, Professor James thus states his conclusion: "While I freely admit that the pluralism and restlessness [of a universe with freedom in it] are repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that the alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism offends only the native absolutism of my intellect an absolutism which, after all, perhaps deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism violates my sense of moral reality

through and through."

Now, such a solution of the problem of freedom is, to say the very least, a plausible one; but let us note exactly what it means. It recognises, and gives a new emphasis to, the Kantian antithesis between the intellectual or scientific consciousness on the one hand, and the moral and religious on the other; and the solution offered consists in an assertion of the rights of the latter along with, and even in precedence of, those of the former. The decision in favour of freedom is thus a kind of "moral wager," as M. Renouvier has well called 1 The Will to Believe, and Other Essays, pp. 145-183.

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it; the odds seem to be on the side of morality, and therefore the odds are taken. And probably the question is generally answered on some such grounds, though not so explicitly formulated. The philosopher is the man, after all; and the stress is laid on the one side of the question or the other, according to the temper of the individual. One man feels more keenly the disappointment of his moral expectation, another feels more keenly the disappointment of his intellectual or scientific ambition. For the ethical and the scientific temper are not generally found in equal proportions in the same man. As men are born Platonists or Aristotelians, so are they born moralists or intellectualists, men of practice or men of theory; and this original bent of nature will generally determine a man's attitude to such an ultimate question. While the intellectualists will, with Spinoza, ruthlessly sacrifice freedom to completeness and finality of speculative view, the moralists will be content, with Kant and Lotze, to "recognise this theoretically indemonstrable freedom as 'a postulate of the practical reason.'" The latter position, if it confessedly falls short of knowledge, is at any rate entitled to the name which it claims for itself, that of a "rational faith"; it is a faith grounded in the moral or practical reason. Since man must live, whether he can ever know how he lives or not, freedom may well be accepted as the postulate or axiom of human life. If moral experience implies freedom, or even the idea of freedom, as its condition; if man is so constituted that he can act only under the idea of freedom, or as if he were free, then the onus probandi surely lies with the determinist. It is for him to make good this libel upon human nature, that it is the constant dupe of such deep delusion; as it is for the agnostic to make good that other libel of the mere relativity of human knowledge.

But, while fully recognising the merits of this 'moral

method,' and, above all, the intellectual candour which it expresses, must we not seek to establish freedom upon some higher and yet more stable ground? Kant's antithesis still remains; can it not be overcome? Is it not possible to exhibit the unity of the intellectual and moral judgments, and thus to eliminate the subjective element which seems to cling to the solution just referred to? We, and our life, moral as well as intellectual and physical, are after all part of a single reality; moral reality and physical reality are elements of a real universe. The moral consciousness is the consciousness or expression— one among other expressions, conscious and unconscious

-of the universe itself.1 It is objective as well as subjective; we cannot detach the moral subject and his consciousness from the universe in which he finds his

place and life. The conception of duty or oughtness, with its implicate of freedom, is not an artificial product, or a foreign importation into the universe; it is a genuine and authentic exponent of the universe itself, and therefore we must interpret the universe in its light. Whatever the difficulties which the moral consciousness may raise for the metaphysical intellect, it is of right, and not of favour or of choice, that its utterance is heard. It, too, is the voice of reason—the voice of the universal reality or nature of things; and the determinism that would choke its utterance or treat it as illusion and 'pious fraud,' is a libel not only upon human nature, but upon the universe itself. The breach between our intellectual and our moral judgments can be only apparent, not real or permanent. Must we not then continue the effort to achieve their reconciliation, and to understand freedom in its relation to so-called necessity? Let us revise both conceptions once more, to discover whether such a reconciliation is still possible.

3. The 'reconciling project.'-It has always been the 1 Cf. Fouillée, L'Avenir de la Métaphysique, pp. 262 ff.