and tossed, he knows nothing as yet of the perfect law of liberty.
Thus we may sum up our account of freedom by the statement, that the act is a free one in so far as it is consciously and deliberately performed, and that the agent is free in so far as the act we call his is really his own—the expression of an intelligent purpose, which purpose is an outcome of his own essential personality. It is the recognition that his deeds are the expression of his own character which constitutes his sense of responsibility; and it is the consciousness that such deeds will, and must, have certain effects, by him more or less clearly foreseen, upon himself and others, that constitutes them intelligent or voluntary actions. So far, then, from determinism being opposed to a belief in freedom, it is the knowledge of the relation of cause to effect, or the clear recognition of the necessary connection which subsists between phenomena, which is the essential condition of free action. In a well-known passage in Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, that writer quotes Spinoza's saying, that a stone set flying through the air would, if it had consciousness, attribute its flight to its own volition. "To which," says Schopenhauer, "I only add that the stone would be right. The impulse given the stone is for it what the motive is for me, and what in its case appears as cohesion, gravitation, and rigidity, is the same in its inner nature as that which I recognize in myself as will, and which the stone too, had it the same knowledge, would recognize as will." Schopenhauer's purpose, of course, is to establish the identity between what we call force in the external world and what we know as will in the human mind. But the great pessimist's restatement of the Spinozistic doctrine needs a further correction. For that freedom which he relegates to the sphere of an unintelligent and capricious will has its true existence in reason. Freedom is not an escape from the law of causation, but an intelligent submission to that law; it is not a concept that must be banished into the outer darkness of the Kantian noumenal world,—it exists in and through knowledge, and it is in proportion to the increase in the
