Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/549

 FIXITY OF CHAEACTER: ITS ETHICAL INTERPRETATION. 533 Now in the process of any potentiality to its actuality there is at all stages of its progress a constant positive reference to the principle that initiated the process. There must be no violent separation of possibility and actuality, just because the latter is but the definite and complete ex- pression of the potentiality and the energising principle together working towards their final end. But, again, from the fact that man's first nature is but a "potentiality of opposites," and that Personality is constitutive and dynamic, there arises for man the possibility of a second or higher nature, a definite fixed actuality, as regards either good or bad, evolved by a process of Choices or Self-initiations, and even by a single choice. There's the significance of Respon- sibility ! The question is, therefore, not as Janet has it paradoxically, "Are we free to be free?" but, "Are we fundamentally and distinctively Persons that function, as in Self-initiation, towards the creation of a fixed definite actuality, and fixed merely as regards the direction or general Form of Will?" Now in the moral life this definite fixed actuality which we have named Character, is to be conceived merely as a Form of "Will, and as in itself, again, dynamic, inevitable, spon- taneous. In this " spontaneity " of the moral life Freedom of initiation is always implied, but at this stage the accent must be properly on the spontaneity, as being now the new Form of the ideational centre or initiating principle. The Character or Form of the Will is, however, always less than the Self which has the character. But it is just because the Self is always more than any empirical Form of the Will, nay, just because the Form of the Will itself is what it is, that true moral progress is assured and that I may not always, therefore, become something to-day irrespective of what I was yesterday, become, i.e., now good, and now evil. It is just because, on the one hand, the self is more than its character, and because, on the other hand, the present Form of the Will, as it were, " informs " the mind of the Self, that the Self can "transcend and judge his own character, that genuine moral Freedom and moral Eesponsibility become possible and actual 'V The fact of Personality, and with it Freedom, as we understand them, are thus most clearly exhibited in Fixity of Character, since this implies an act of " Constitution," of conscious and complete self-surrender to good or evil. This active identification has created a second or higher nature, has placed the moral life under a 1 Prof. Upton; quoted by Prof. Seth, op. cit., p. 381, from New World, L, 152.