Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/544

 528 J. D. LOGAN : ^Responsibility and Moral Progress gain a deeper meaning, if only Fixity or Spontaneity, Freedom and Duty be their correlates and conditions. And I doubt that absolute Fixity of Character, as regards either good or evil, " is disproved by that indubitable fact of moral experience which Plato, equally with the Christian theologian, calls ' conversion '". 1 Nay, rather, as I think, "Conversion," whether Platonic or Christian, implies, when real, the impossibility of its own negation, of a " relapse " into barrenness and death. But there, now, is the Absolutist maintaining your Free- dom to be but a disguised Determinism ; Character, as it is said, having destroyed the "power of free and incalculable initiation in the Self". Our answer was at least hinted above, in submitting that while Freedom does still remain, Fixity itself gives a deeper meaning to Eesponsibility and Moral Progress. The difficulty is of the Absolutist's own making, in misconceiving the nature of both Freedom and Fixity, in supposing this power of free and incalculable initiation in the Self to mean or imply at any time, even when growth in character is granted, the possibility of antithesis and revolt as well as of synthesis and continuity, in the matter of the relation of the new to the old, of Nature to Character ; and consequently, in supposing, on the other hand, Fixity conceived as Finality to be the disproof of Freedom, i.e., of Freedom as the Power of choosing alternatives, when, for that matter, as we shall hold, such an element in Freedom is really non-essential. We may contend that there is Fixity of Character only as regards either good or bad ; but that there can never be such a thing as Finality of Character, as regards growth in virtue or vice. I may go from bad to worse, from good to better ; I may not always go from bad to good, and from good to bad. Infinite possibilities in the direction of either good or evil, not infinite fluctuations, such infinite pos- sibility means just the power of free and incalculable self- initiation ! The fundamental error of the Freedomists consists, as I think, in their insisting too much upon the necessity of the possibility of choice of alternatives as the essential element and condition of Freedom. We do better to insist that though the possibility of choice of alternatives admits an incalculable element, an element of contingency is yet non- essential ; while, on the other hand, Freedom of Initiation, as meaning an act of inner constitution and implying simply 1 Jas. Seth, op. cit., p. 57.