acts in which it appears, and hence is untouched by any actual consequences it may produce. Kant’s teaching leads to something like this: for him freedom is merely inward; we ought to act, he holds, as if we were members of a kingdom of ends. Libertarianism carries the conception to the extreme. Naturally, too, the determinist accepts the same view of freedom, and the rival schools strive within the unity of a common assumption. The indeterminist accepts this underived existence as a fact, while the determinist, on the other hand, is unable to find room for it within the world of knowledge. Now, we must discern that the category of substance is not adequate to freedom: the conception is in truth self-contradictory. Substance makes the most important of all assumptions—it assumes itself. This difficulty is often felt in regard to freedom. One of the arguments for determinism is that the will is bound by the character; actions spring of necessity from the nature of the agent, and he has no control over his character. The utmost reply the indeterminist can make to this is that the agent is not determined by external circumstances, i.e. by environment. But this reply, even supposing its truth, is not sufficient. For the whole man is more than a bare character; he is a living concrete agent, with both structure and function, an indissoluble unity of inward and outward. And when a separation is made between the two aspects, the character is no more equivalent to the man as a whole than is environment; it becomes a force working in him from behind, and its externality is as real as that of circumstances, although that takes a temporal form while this is chiefly spatial.[1] That is to say, for ethical purposes the alleged underived character of man’s nature comes to the same thing as external derivation. The self has no power over itself, and the mysterious inborn nature of it is an alien force.
This is the characteristic defect of the categories of essence. Substance must have accidents, it exists only in its accidents; but yet it gains nothing by going out into them. It is in se and not in alio; yet it is only in going forth into finitude. The two aspects, mediate and immediate, universal and particular, unity and difference, infinite and finite, original
- ↑ Hegel indicates the sublation of the past in the identity of thinghood in the Encyclopaedia, § 125.
