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534 presentation of all that the act implies, of its results and of the consequences that will ensue if it is not done,—he does or forbears to do it. Since human knowledge is extremely limited, and men's actions are usually the result in part, at least, of impulse and habit as well as of reason, it follows that absolute freedom is an ideal rather than a reality. But if the view just suggested be the correct one, it is evident that the more rational a man's actions are—the more they correspond to an intelligent survey of all the facts—the more 'free' is the agent. Not only, then, does the determinist retain the notion of freedom in his ethical system, but he emphasizes to the full its significance and value.

One effect, then, of the thoroughgoing application of the category of causation to ethical notions, will be to lay stress on clearness of consciousness as an essential differentia of free activity. A knowledge of an end in view is what distinguishes reason from instinct, and a knowledge of what we are doing distinguishes the conscious and deliberate act from the sub- conscious working of habit. If we do not know what we are doing, nor why we are doing it, we are in so far merely an unconscious part of the vast machinery of nature. And such involuntary performances have, taken in themselves, no moral worth. Their interest, from the moralist's point of view, consists in the evidence they give as to what have been the true voluntary acts—those done with an approximately perfect consciousness—in the past, and as to what future voluntary acts will occur in the case of the man whose instinctive or otherwise involuntary actions are of such and such a kind. The thousand and one little mannerisms, the accent, the walk, the tricks of gesture, are the outward crystallizations of the individual's past life-history,—a history many passages of which consist of deliberate resolutions and choosings. On the other hand such unconscious, or only sub-conscious, actions form a not unimportant factor in determining the nature of those future deeds, which, being voluntary, are capable of bearing a directly moral stamp. If the flower of the moral character is found in the intelligent act, deliberately