Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/240

230 of its birth. But in doing so he laid it under a second and dire causality, the causality of sin; and this is the causality under which we are born. Whenever, therefore, we too have trampled on the laws and conditions of our natural selves; have striven, by an act of resistance against evil, to return into the bosom of good, to replace ourselves under the old causality of holiness, to take up such a position that the influences of Christianity may be enabled to tell upon our hearts, in short, have violated our causality just as Adam violated his; then may the problem of human liberty be said to be practically resolved, for there are no conceivable kinds of causality except those of evil and of good, and both of these shall have then been broken through in the historical development of our species.

And here, let it be observed, that although, in putting forth this act of resistance against evil, we return under the old causality of good, and thus make ourselves obedient to its influences, yet the relation in which we stand towards that causality is very different from the relation in which the first man stood towards it. He had good forced upon him; we have forced ourselves upon it by a voluntary submission; and in this kind of submission true freedom consists; because, in making it, the initiative movement originates in our own wills, in an act of resistance put forth against the evil that encounters us in our natural selves, whichever way we turn; and thus, instead of this kind of causality exercising a strictly causal force