Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/44

Rh of the Oxford Essayists, on the other. The point that absorbed the attention of my Nature reviewer is thus only a subordinate step in my procedure: there, I am simply showing what genuine freedom must really mean; pointing out that the freedom necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility, — such responsibility and such freedom, of course, standing or falling together, — though it excludes predestination, cannot and must not be identified with empty indeterminism, but must be construed as self-determination; and that determinism, on the other hand, need not be taken to mean predestination, but has its conception satisfied rather by definiteness simply, as against the bare indefinite or indeterminate, which is in truth only another name for the unreal, the non-existent. In short, my object in that passage, quite preparatory, is to state in the sharpest way the question of the possible harmonisation of freedom and determinism, and to show that this is clearly possible if (but only if) the two are read off, respectively, as the obverse and the reverse of the conception Self-determination, reduced to identity with Self-definition; by this path I pass to the conception of a pluralistic and libertarian rationalism, as transcending the monistic and neces-