Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/543

 FIXITY OF CHARACTER : ITS ETHICAL INTERPRETATION. 527 Will, might be w/iformed and reformed by the same power"; 1 and that character is but a " garment in which the spirit clothes itself, a garment which clings tightly to it, but which it need not wear eternally ". 2 Well, just there is the situation, dilemmatic enough, in our feeling that the reality and the deeper meaning of moral experience demand, on the side of goodness at any rate, Fixity of Character. On the side of goodness we vehe- mently insist upon our ethical paradox of Freedom passing away into Spontaneity. Responsibility gains its full meaning, and Moral Progress seems guaranteed, if only Freedom and Duty, Fixity and Spontaneity, are their correlates and con- ditions. " The condition and attribute of the highest life, we readily admit, is not to hold oneself aloof from good and evil, and ' free ' to choose between them." And the Human Spirit feels nothing more or less than outraged by the Nature of Things of which it is an integral part, if its progress in the good life does not mean its " perfect and established union with the higher and the good ". And yet all this seems but the creation of our own prejudices : as if we had some interest in proving that the saint is not or cannot be potentially the sinner. For while we conceive the possi- bility of the final redemption of a man "however evil," we cannot, on the other hand, conceive or, at least, we refuse to conceive the possibility of a saint's choosing through a free act of Will the " law of death". That is to say, " holi- ness " means the negation of the possibility of (a return to) evil, whereas the progress in evil may not mean so we think ! the absolute negation of the possibility of a future good life. In the evil life the character is but a garment which the spirit need not wear eternally. But can we con- ceive the " good man " Plato's and Aristotle's " good man " as forsaking the higher life for the life of sin ? There is for the evil man, we hold, the possibility of a change from death to life. But how can it be possible our spirits absolutely refuse to think its possibility ; the Universe, the Eternal Reality cannot see its own put to confusion ! well, how can it be possible for him who communes with God to change that life for death, " dark death "? I have seen higher, holier things than these, And therefore must to these refuse my heart/' Can it be, then, that the Universe is, after all, relentless, merciless, unjust to its own ? or is our attitude here nothing more than mere prejudice? I do most sincerely doubt it. 1 Op. cit., p. 57. 2 Ibid., in loco. :i A. H. Clough, TO KoAoi/.