Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/461

400 senses: that of spontaneous decision and action, eternally and unchangeably adhering to the cause of Right alone; and that of choice in alternatives, as these continually present themselves in time, — the ever recurring alternative between the one eternal choice of Right and the manifold and ever varying forms of temporal defect and wrong.

Not a single one of these causally real individuals is determined to his acts by any extraneous efficient causation, not even God’s, but each is led wholly by ideal influences, by final causation purely, as these ideal influences are by each apprehended and interpreted. The responsibility of each goes back, in the last resort, to his responsibility for right knowledge and right judgment, the sources of which he possesses in his essence, as knowing a priori.

The complete reality of freedom is found, however, in the possibility of realising a moral order in the world of experience. By this I do not mean the mere maybe-so of such an order, but the real power of bringing it about; and the new system provides for this, and alone provides for it, first, by the objective aspect of its theory of Freedom, and secondly, by its supplying a thorough proof for the doctrine of Immortality. But these two matters carry us into further conditions of the moral life, and require separate treatment.

(2) The objective nature of the self-active consciousness, — objective by virtue of its intrifisically social and federal character. Without this, the moral ideal would be nothing but an empty egoism, incapable of transcending solipsism, and leading only to a self-centred culture. Justice and benevolence would have no place in such a life, but only aesthetic self-refinement and self-poise — what the Greeks called, which we try quite in vain to translate by temperance, moderation, self-control, sobriety, modesty, and what not. But the new theory puts altruism into the very being of each spontaneous self, and lodges his