Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/238

228 about by a free act, an act not out of, but against God; let us now ask how man stands in relation to the great problem, the working out of which we are superintending, Human Liberty. Has the Fall brought along with it the complete realisation of his freedom? By no means. He has certainly realised his own personality by becoming conscious of good. He has thus opposed himself to good, and performed an act which he was not forced or predetermined by his Maker to perform. He has thus taken one step towards the attainment of Liberty: one step, and that is all. The paradisiacal man has evolved one epoch in the development of human consciousness; and has thus carried us on one stage in the practical solution of the problem we are speaking of. Being born good and perfect, he has developed the antagonism of consciousness against goodness and perfection; and thus he has emancipated the human race from the causality of goodness and perfection.

But this antagonism against good, though it freed the human race from the causality of holiness, laid it at the same time under the subjection of a new and far bitterer causality, the causality of sin. For the consciousness of good, or, in other words, an act of antagonism against good, is itself but another name for sin or evil: and thus evil is evolved out of the very act in which man becomes conscious of good. And this is the causality under which we, the children of Adam, find ourselves placed. As he was born the child of goodness and of God, so are we,