Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/108

94 and to commit ourselves to chance. The free-will theory, as it is stated by its recent defenders, is nothing more or less than a return to the old freedom of indifference. To admit any kind of indetermination whatever is to admit that certain acts are not determined by their antecedents, and hence have no complete reason. James's theory, by which the duration or intensity of a representation becomes all at once and at pleasure, increased or lessened, presupposes an action of the will, which does not result from the relations between the states of consciousness and for which the reason is not found in the Ego. On this hypothesis the will acts neither according to motives nor contrary to them, but it is able to change without reason its present motives into subsequent contrary motives. There is always a change, which, as such, is without motive. However complex or heterogeneous psychical states may be, causality is not thereby excluded. The law of causality does not require that the same causes and effects shall be repeated, but that any effect whatsoever shall be contained in a totality of reasons which determine it as it is present. Choice is always relative (1) to our character, (2) to our motives, which are the actual reaction of our character upon circumstances, (3) to the intensity with which our Ego conceives its independent power and opposes it to external motives. There are, indeed, cases where we are conscious of a real power which can balance all intellectually conceived motives, but this force itself is twofold. It is, firstly, the sub-conscious or unconscious strength of our inclinations, the force of our character. One is able to determine one's self contrary to reasons, but not without causes, only the causes themselves may be unreasonable, or at least foreign to reason. Secondly, we are able to balance all objective reasons, at least momentarily, through the medium of an idea of our own independence, of the autonomy of our Ego. We have always this disposable force, this idea of the I, to oppose to our other ideas. But this idea of the self is always a reason. Liberty is not without law, but it has its own laws, though these are very different in nature from physical laws. They are the laws of intellectual teleology, which permit the self to make itself an end, and in the moral sphere to take as an end the universal being. Freedom does not consist in getting rid of the laws of intelligence, but in fulfilling those laws.

J. E. C.

The search for a basis of separation between the aesthetic and the hedonic fields has given no satisfactory psychological result. There is no pleasure or class of pleasures which we are able to say must be