the scientific or empirical interpretation of our life, as made from the phenomenal standpoint of science, to advance to this other and ethical interpretation of it—an interpretation no less valid from the noumenal standpoint of ethics. As a moral being, man escapes from the heteronomy of nature and sensibility; as a rational being, he comes under reason's autonomy, and is free. His peculiar ethical task is to emancipate himself from the necessity of the life of sensibility, and to appropriate that freedom which belongs to him of right as a member of the kingdom of pure reason. Thus that idea of freedom which speculatively is but "regulative" and ideal becomes practically" constitutive" and real.

Now it is obvious that this theory does not vindicate actual freedom. Here, as elsewhere, Kant so presses the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal as to make that distinction absolute. In my noumenal nature, or in myself, I am free; in my empirical or phenomenal states, I am not free, but under the necessity of nature. This is hardly better, as M. Fouillée has remarked,1 than to tell a prisoner that outside his prison there is freedom, and that he has only to think himself outside, to realise that he is free. We are confined within the prison-house of desire and passion, of sensibility and motive-force, and the only life we know is that of prisoners. What matters it to us that there is freedom, if we cannot make it our own? But escape we cannot, without ceasing to be men; our very manhood is our prison-house.

But, it may be urged, the Kantian freedom is the true freedom after all, inasmuch as, though not actual, it is yet the ideal or goal towards which the moral man is always approximating. But even regarded as an ideal, it is but a one-sided freedom, as the life of duty which realises it is but a one-sided life. For, according to Kant's view, man is free only in so far as he acts 1 L'Évolutionnisme des Idées-Forces, Introd., p. 76

rationally, or without impulse of sensibility; in so far as he acts from impulse or even with impulse, he acts irrationally, and is not free. Good alone is the product of freedom, evil is the product of necessity. But freedom, if it is to have any moral significance, must mean freedom in choosing the evil equally with the good; only such a double freedom can be regarded as the basis of responsibility or obligation. Freedom is that which makes evil evil, as it is that which makes good good.

If freedom is to be of real moral significance, it must be realised in the concrete life of motived activity, in the apparent necessity of nature, which is thereby converted into the mechanism of freedom; not apart from this actual life of man, in a life of sheer passionless reason, which is not human life as we know it. By withdrawing it from the sphere of nature and mechanism, of feeling and impulse, and constituting for it a purely rational sphere of its own, Kant has reduced freedom to a mere abstraction. What is left is the mere form of the moral life without its content. The content of human freedom can only be that life of nature and mechanism, of feeling and impulse, which Kant excludes as irrational. The self in whose freedom we feel an interest, because it is our self, is the self that rejoices and suffers, that is tempted and falls, that agonises also and overcomes, this actual human self and not another a self of pure reason, which, if indeed it is the ideal self, must remain for man, as we know him, a mere ideal.

The

9. (2) In Hegelianism, a new determinism. self the character. The Hegelian interpretation of freedom seems to me to be defective in two points, and, in consequence of these defects, to give us, instead of a real freedom, a new determinism. In recoil from the absolute dualism of the Kantian theory, Hegelianism maintains, first, the entire immanence of the self in the process of its experience, or the identity of the self with

the character; and, secondly, the entire immanence of God in the process of the universe, and therefore in that of human life. Both positions seem to me to negate moral freedom.

As regards the identification of the self with its character, we have the following, among other, explicit statements of the late Professor Green. "The action is as necessarily related to the character and circumstances as any event to the sum of its conditions." 1 What a man now is and does is the result (to speak pleonastically, the necessary result) of what he has been and has done." 2 "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. The determination of the will might be different, but only through the man's being different." 3 Thus the identification of the self with the character results in a new version of determinism, no less absolute than that of the empiricists themselves. The 'I' is once more identified with the 'me'; the refusal to acknowledge any extra-empirical reality means the denial of freedom.

The only way to save freedom would seem to be by maintaining the distinction between the self and the character, not in the absolute or Kantian sense, but in the sense that while the self is what in its character it appears to be, it yet is always more than any such empirical manifestation of it; that, while it is immanent in its experience, it also for ever transcends that experience. The alternative is not, as Green states it, between a self which is identical with its character and a self which stands out of all relation to its character, so that a man's action does not "represent his character, but an arbitrary freak of some unaccountable power of unmotived willing," and that "I could be something to-day irrespectively of

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 112. 3 Works, ii. p. 318.

2 Ibid., p. 113.

4 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 113.

"4

what I was yesterday, or something to-morrow irrespectively of what I am to-day."1 We may regard the self as, through its character, standing in the most intimate relation to its experience, and yet as being always more than that experience, and in this 'more' containing the secret of its moral life. Dr Martineau has happily expressed this view by calling the character a predicate of the self; the moral life might be described as a process of self-predication. The predicates are meaningless without a self of which they may be predicated—nay, without a self to predicate them of itself; apart from the self, character is a mere abstraction. As Professor Upton has well put it: "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. The freedom of the moral life lies in the fact that it is the original energy of a self, the measure of whose activity is never to be found in the history of its past achievements.

"2

The Hegelian identification of the self with the character leads us back to determinism, because, by a kind of irony of fate, it leads us back to empiricism of the most unmistakeable kind. The self is once more lost in its experience, resolved into its states. At most, the self is conceived as the principle of unity of its states, as the form of its experience; and even then the unity is rather a cognitional than an ethical unity, the essentially dynamical character of the moral life is ignored, the volitional is again resolved into the intellectual. What has been said

1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 115.

2 New World, i. p. 152.

above, in answer to the psychological view of the self, need not be repeated here, in answer to the transcendental denial of its reality and activity.

=

There is

The self God. -The Hegelian doctrine of the immanence of God in man leads to the same result. History, like the course of things, is a logical process, the process of the universal reason; in the one case as the other, the real is the rational, and all things follow from the necessity of the divine nature. As to the self, it is accounted for by being referred to the absolute Reality of which it is the passing manifestation. If the biological and mechanical Evolutionists, refusing to regard the individual self as ultimate and self-explaining, trace it to a past beyond itself, and see in it the highly complex resultant of vast cosmic forces, the Absolute Idealist, seeing in the universe the evolution of divine reason, finds in the life of the self the manifestation or reproduction in time of the eternal Self-consciousness of God. only one Self-the universal or divine; this all-embracing Subject manifests itself alike in the object and in the subject of human consciousness, in nature and in man. Both are God, though they appear to be somewhat on their own account. Obviously, if we are thus to interpret man as only, like nature, an aspect of God, we must de-personalise him; it is his personality that separates, like a 'middle wall of partition,' between man and God. Nor is this conclusion shunned. Personality is explained to be mere ' appearance'; the ultimate Reality is impersonal. This is Mr Bradley's view. "But then the soul, I must repeat, is itself not ultimate fact. It is appearance, and any description of it must contain inconsistency." The moral life is governed by two "incompatible ideals," that of self-assertion and that of self-sacrifice. To reduce the raw material of one's nature to the highest degree of system, and to use every element from whatever source as a subordinate means to this object, is certainly one genuine view of goodness.