Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/448

Rh conception of both Freedom and Determinism is set forth, as the aspects, obverse and reverse, respectively, of the complex conception Self-determination, when this is seen to be simply the self-definition inseparable from self-consciousness. It is then shown that moral autonomy, as such self-definition by each mind, not only involves a contrast to others, and therefore a recognition of them (in fine, the essentially federal nature of a self, the presence of a public and universal phase in every conscious life), but also the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the eternal and the temporal, aspects of being; hence, the seating of every moral agent in the eternal world. The consistency of this eternalising of the individual (1) with Theism, and (2) with a purified Monotheism, — in fact, rather, its necessity for both, — is then shown, by means of (a) a new argument for the reality of God, akin to the historic Ontologic Proof, but freed from its defects, and (b) a new and rational interpretation of “creation,” as a metaphor symbolising the eternal office of God as (i.e. at once Conditioning Standard and Goal) in the entire world of minds. By the operation of this Final Causality, each mind other than God involves in its self-definition a contrast to God as well as an attraction toward him. Each non-divine mind thus gives contributory rise to the phenomenal world of changeful consciousness — the world of defect, of natural evil, of possible moral misdeed. Here Freedom, which in its eternal basis is simply spontaneity, the native response to the eternal vision of God and the other intelligences, takes on the added traits of (1) empirical alternative, and (2) power to decide this in favour of the eternal Good, by a resort to the changeless fountain of reason which every spirit is at core.

Thus the theme of Personal Idealism — of an eternal world of many rational beings, all self-active, all arbiters of their own destiny and so alike morally responsible, yet, in