IN dwelling at such length, in the third lecture of the present series, upon the contrast between the Temporal and the Eternal aspects of Reality, I was dealing not merely with one of the most frequently misunderstood issues of philosophy, but with one of the most practical of the concerns of life. For in this contrast, and in the unity which underlies it, is involved the solution of the most perplexing problem with which the ethical consciousness of humanity has to deal. I call this problem the general question concerning the sense in which the world is a Moral Order. Our Idealism has declined to accept the world as a real fact merely given, in advance of an analysis of the sense in which the world is to be real. When we therefore now assert that the real has this or that character, our undertaking depends upon a previous analysis of what it is to be real. To be, we have said, means to fulfil a purpose in fact, to fulfil in final, individual expression, the only purpose, namely, the Absolute purpose. Our closer study has shown us that this Absolute purpose is not only One, but also infinitely complex, so that its unity is the unity of many Wills, each one of which finds its expression in an individual life, while these lives, as the lives of various Selves, have an aspect in which they are free, in so far as each, while in many aspects determined, is still in its own measure a determiner of all the rest. We have also further seen that, in so far as we mortals can undertake at all to conceive the expression of the Absolute Purpose, this expression is in one aspect Temporal, in so far as there is a process which has successive stages, such that some are no longer, and others not yet, when the present stage of the world-process is. In another aspect, as we have seen, the same world-process is Eternal, in so far as the whole of it is viewed at one glance by the Absolute, precisely as we view the whole of any brief rhythmic succession at a glance whenever we observe such successions. That the world has all these interrelated characters at once, we assert, yet not because we first recognize that all these characters are given as mere data in a realistic realm, so that only then we proceed to try to unify them after admitting their independent Being. No, we assert these various aspects of the world to be real only in so far as we can see that hereby purpose is fulfilled. Hereby each of these characters is deduced from our general concept of Being, as that concept is illustrated by our experience. One is the Absolute, because in mere multiplicity there would be no finality of insight. Many is the Absolute, because in the interrelationships of contrasted expressions of a single Will lies the only opportunity for the embodiment of wholeness of life, and for the possession of Self-consciousness by the Absolute. For the mystic long ago showed us that simple Oneness meant Nothingness. Individuals are all the various expressions of the Absolute, in so far as they are Many; just because, where the One is individual, every aspect and element of its self-expression is unique. Free, in its own degree, is every individual will amongst all the wills that the world-life expresses, because every such will, as unique, is in some respect underivable from all the others. Temporal, is the world order, because, so far as we can know, time is the universal form of the expression of Will. Eternal is this same world order, because past, present, and future time equally belong to the Real, and their Being implies, by definition, that they are present, in their wholeness, to the final insight. And Time, surveyed in its wholeness, is Eternity.

So far, then, we have merely developed our central concept of Being, and have attempted to interpret experience in the light of this concept. But now we assert that this world which we have been characterizing is a Moral Order. In what sense, and for what reason, do we assert this?

I

Despite the general exposition and defence that the ethical aspects of our conception of Being received in the former series of these lectures, and despite the frequent illustration that this same aspect has already received in the present series, it still seems necessary to face, more carefully than heretofore, familiar objections which, as experience shows, are sure to be directed against such a view as ours, whenever it is considered with reference to the moral consciousness of man. These objections, as I conceive, are founded upon a failure to grasp our doctrine of Being in its wholeness. Persistently dwelling, now too exclusively upon this and now too abstractly upon that aspect of our theory, and neglecting to regard the meaning of all its aspects together, an objector finds it easy to say, sometimes that the universe which we depict is not sufficiently fixed and final in its form of Being to meet the demands of common sense, and sometimes that it is far too fixed and moveless in its type of Being to leave room for any genuinely moral activity. We have defended ourselves against Realism. Have we found sufficient room for the demands of a strictly ethical Idealism? We have maintained the unity of Nature and of Mind. Have we escaped from the danger of making our moral activities the mere incidental phenomena that help to express our own predetermined individual nature? We have vindicated the uniqueness of every human Self. But have we given the Self any sufficiently significant moral task to perform in the universe? We have insisted upon the finality and perfection of the whole life of the Absolute Self? But have we succeeded as yet in rescuing the individual Selves from being mere expressions of a preëestablished harmony? We have assigned both to rigid and unchangeable natural law and to causal determination, a very subordinate place in the universe. But have we avoided a result equivalent to a sort of ethical fatalism? I conceive that, even after all that precedes, such objections will not infrequently be urged by some who may have followed so far our course. The answer, however, to every such objection lies at present extremely near. Our fuller statement, regarding the relations of the temporal and the eternal aspects of Being, has only to be applied to the present issues in order to lead at once to a recognition of the way in which all these ethical doubts are to be met.

For the moment, however, I must give the ethical objector the word. He shall undertake to show what he means by calling the world a Moral Order. He shall attempt to show that the world which we have been depicting is not a Moral Order, or is not a complete and sufficient Moral Order. We shall then see how, from our point of view, such objections are to be met. And first, then, what is a Moral Order? And secondly, has our Idealism place for such a Moral Order?

II

“A Moral Order,” our objector may first maintain, “depends upon recognizing not only that Selves exist, but that they so exist that they can do good or evil of their own accord, and by means of their own free will. In a true Moral Order, there is indeed law and control present in the universe; but each Self has its own sphere. And within this sphere the Self is not merely an unique voice in a symphony whose divine perfection is preëstablished, but an agent in a realm where one not only can go right but also can err, and where perfections are attained, if at all, by means of the will of the individual. In a Moral Order there can be true progress. But progress, where it has an ethical meaning, involves the production of what never existed before,—of the novel, and not merely of the absolute, of the finite, and not merely of the divine. Moreover, in a Moral Order, any ethical agent can say, ‘It is not yet foreordained what I shall accomplish. I must find that out by my own work.’ The ethical agent must also be able to say, ‘I am needed. Even God needs my help. Without my doing of the right, something would remain forever undone.’ The salvation of the individual moral agent must depend in part upon his own free choice. However the divine will may coöperate in the moral world, it is open to the free agent to choose whom he will serve. Above all it is essential, for every moral view of the universe, to conceive that the world can be made better than it is. There is thus an essential opposition, for the moral, even if not for the metaphysical consciousness, between the predicate ought to be, and the predicate is. Perfection, in the moral sense, is something still to be sought, it cannot be merely found. The best world for a moral agent is one that needs him to make it better. The purely metaphysical consciousness in vain, therefore, says of the good, It is. The moral consciousness insists upon setting higher than every such assertion the resolve, Let it be.1 The moral consciousness declines to accept, therefore, any metaphysical finality. It rejects every static world. It is dynamic. Nowhere could it say, ‘I have found that what is is altogether good.’ Its watchword is, ‘Grow better and make better.’

“But now,” the objector may continue, “this your idealistic world lacks these essential characteristics of a true Moral Order. In your world everything, including all of what you call the free acts of the morn, agents,—everything is present at one glance to the Absolute. And, for the Absolute, no other world than this one is, or in concrete truth can be. For in this world in its wholeness, the Absolute purpose, by your hypothesis, is embodied. Therefore, the whole, when viewed as a whole, is seen to be static, fixed, changeless. The individual agent knows at any instant, first, that what he really means, even in his blindness, is identical with the Absolute Will. He knows, then, that he can neither produce what ought not to be, nor create by his own deed a needed good that ought to be, and that, without his coöperation, would never come to be. For his deed, as your theory teaches, is never anything but one of the incidents in the process through which the Absolute wins the eternal perfection. The individual agent therefore does not find that the world needs him to make it better, except in the one sense, that, according to you, the world is indeed certain to have one of its own incidental finite perfections embodied in whatever the individual agent does. Your moral agent, so called, is therefore unable to sin, or to go wrong, or to be less, at any temporal moment, than he should be.

“Were he other than he is, then, as you maintain, the whole world would indeed also be other than it is. But, according to you, the world, as known to the Absolute, is known as a world that fulfils the Absolute purpose, and that, in so far, cannot be other than it is. Hence, once more, despite all that you have said about uniqueness and freedom, the individual is certain to be, in his own place, best as he is, whatever be is. And your Idealism is therefore, in its optimism, unable to give any genuine moral meaning to life. For in making whatever is, the final fulfilment of purpose, you have wholly lost sight of that contrast between what is and what ought to be, upon which all the moral consciousness depends. Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones in a mosaic. And if you relieve the individual from absolute causal determination, you do not relieve him from a fatalism none the less all embracing. You relieve him from absolute causal determination by saying that the purpose to explain him by taking account of his relationships to other beings, is always a purpose of somebody else, of some finite observer who is external to the being explained; and you say that this external purpose of the causal explainer of any agent's life is limited, as to its success, by the fact that this individual agent himself is unique, and that therefore, in some aspect, he is always incapable of being explained through any knowledge of his heredity, or of his environment, or of anything which is not himself. Now suppose that all this is granted. Still, by your idealistic hypothesis, any individual agent, if not explicable by means of anything external to himself, is still included in a perfect whole in such wise that he constitutes, despite his uniqueness, an organic part of that perfect whole. From this fate, according to you, he cannot escape. You have said, yourself, in a former discussion, in these lectures: ‘In vain do we wander in darkness. We are eternally at home in God.’ According to you, then, we please God, and are ourselves pleased, in our union with God—and pleased too even with ourselves, whatever we are. And this indeed is our fate. As for foreordination in general,—your doctrine of the temporal and the eternal has still to face the ancient difficulty concerning the reconciliation of the divine foreknowledge, and the free will of man.”

I have allowed the objector, so far, to state his case as well as I am able to indicate, from my own experience of such arguments, what that case is likely to be. I can answer only by pointing out, what, to my mind, are the facts regarding the matter here at issue.

III

And first, whatever our ethical doctrine may be, we shall all agree that the moral Ought, in its primary sense, is a category of temporal application. However eternal the moral law may be, in its validity and in its relation to the knowledge of man or of the Absolute, it is a law whose reference is to acts, and to intended consequences of action, in so far as they follow one another in a time-sequence, or may be conceived as in such a sequence. Whoever says, “I ought to do thus or thus,” stands in a present moment of time, and looks forward to a future. His present decision is to be followed by a course of action. And in a world where there were no succession, there would be no morality. Consequently, the metaphysic of conduct is subject to the same general conditions as govern the metaphysic of any time-process. But, from our point of view, as we have now seen, time has its perfectly definable place in Being. There is succession. And our view of the Eternal has place for just such real view of succession. When one asserts that the future is not yet, our view, equally with the view of common sense, maintains that this assertion has truth. When one also asserts that past and future,—what is no longer and what is not yet, have their place together in the totum simul of the eternal order as the Absolute sees it,—we have already observed how and why there is no conflict whatever between this assertion and the assertion that the past and the future are, temporally speaking, not present. Hence our view, in recognizing the true nature of the temporal order, and in showing the relation of this order to the eternal order, has already defined as real the general condition upon which all moral activity depends, and has asserted that this condition, namely, the temporal succession of the world's events, is as real a fact for the Absolute as for us. The difference between the human view and the Absolute's view of the temporal order is simply that, for men, only very brief series of successive events can be viewed totum simul, while for the Absolute, all events are thus viewed, while all events remain, for such an inclusive view, none the less successive than they are for us.

So far, then, as to the mere temporal form in which alone any moral activity can take place. And now, in the next place, as to the more special conditions of moral activity: Our objector has said that, in a moral world, any moral agent can either do right, or choose the wrong. We accept the statement. Let there be any moral agent, A. We agree with our opponent that A must perform any one of his moral acts at some temporal moment. The act, in order to be a moral act at all, must, despite all of the aspects in which it may be determined by the heredity, environment, etc., of the agent, still possess an aspect in which it is not deducible from any external conditions, but is the agent's own present deed. Moreover, in order to be a moral act, this deed must form part of a succession of intentions, and of deeds, in which the agent's own will is progressively expressed. And this individual will of the agent must be so expressed in the deeds that in some genuine respect it lies with the agent himself to determine what nothing else in the world wholly determines, namely, the right or wrong character of this deed, and its conformity or nonconformity to the standard which constitutes the Ought. All this our opponent asserts. All this, however, we too assert. And we have already in general indicated in former discussions why and how we assert just this to be true. Our present purpose is merely to develope and to apply, more specifically, the former results.

Yet now, when our opponent still insists that we have no right to assert that these characters of freedom and of relative self-determination, and of individual power to do right or wrong, belong to the moral agents of our world, we in reply might stubbornly insist, if we chose, that our opponent himself should explain in what sense he regards the freedom and the individual initiative of moral agents as real facts in his own world. We might ask him, in other words, to make articulate his view of the sense in which his Moral Order has any sort of Being whatever. In our former series of lectures, we exhaustively treated the possible meanings of the ontological predicate. Our opponent, if he is to present a rational view, must do likewise. When he asserts the moral agents to be in any sense free, or to have in any sense their individual power of initiative, he becomes responsible for an ontology. He is a realist, or a mystic, or a critical rationalist, or an idealist in his metaphysic, whatever may be the ethical contents whose Being he asserts. We long since saw, then, why he can be consistent in his ontology only in case he is an idealist. But, unless he can set aside our former argument as to the nature of Being, then, whatever his well-warranted enthusiasm for a Moral Order may be, he can assert the Being of that Moral Order only by declaring that it is real simply because the Absolute knows it to be whatever it is, and because the Absolute Will finds in just this individuality, freedom, and initiative of the moral agents, whose acts occur in time, the fulfilment of the highest purpose. Now this is precisely what we ourselves assert. And we assert it for precisely the reason that leads our opponent to assert it,—namely, because, to our view as to his, a world where the temporal succession of acts, despite all its causal connections and its countless general characters, has room for individuality and for initiative, is precisely the sort of world wherein, and wherein alone, the highest purpose can be fulfilled, and the most perfect life expressed.

Yet we shall indeed turn from this more polemic fashion of challenging our opponent to explain in what sense his Moral Order can express any Being at all; and we shall now explain, more fully, in what sense we declare that the temporal acts of individuals involve the power to go right or to go wrong, and in what sense, according to us, what ought to be and what ought not to be, can with equal possibility occur at any one temporal instant, despite, or in fact, just because of the eternal perfection of the whole. The true distinction, and the true connection, between the temporal and the eternal aspects of Being, furnish, in truth, the basis for a solution of this whole problem.

IV

Let us return to the individual moral agent. By his reality, as an individual being, at any moment of time, we now well know what we mean. We mean that just then there is a finite Internal Meaning, which seeks its own Other, and which, in any degree of blindness or of imperfection of insight that you please, is seeking, as this Other, the Absolute itself. We hold that this finite Internal Meaning is, furthermore, the meaning of a Self, which contrasts itself, more or less sharply, with the whole of the rest of the universe, even in seeking to find in this universe its own will expressed. So far we have, if you please so to call it, the fate of every finite Self. To seek anything but the Absolute itself is, indeed, even for the most perverse Self, simply impossible. All life is looking for God, however base the forms of idolatry beneath which the false love of the world may ignorantly hide its own meaning, at any one temporal instant. And now, however you define your moral philosophy, it is indeed true that by the Ought you mean, at any temporal instant, a rule that, if followed, would guide you so to express, at that instant, your will, that you should be thereby made nearer to union with the divine, nearer to a consciousness of the oneness of your will and the Absolute Will, than you would become if you acted counter to this Ought. Now it is enough for our present purpose that a consciousness of such a rule can arise in any Self, at the moment of a moral act. Hereupon, however, there also arises the familiar situation in which conduct counter to the consciousness of the Ought appears, to the temporal Self, to be possible.

This situation, so far as it here concerns us, in this extremely general sketch of the possibility of a Moral Order, is as follows: The Self, inevitably meaning the Absolute as that Other which it seeks to know as the Real, and inevitably seeking, also, to win union with that Absolute wherein its own final will is expressed, and to know the world as its own, and its own life as in harmony with the world, is still, as this present finite Self, conscious of its contrast with that world which it views as beyond its present range of experience, or as beyond the circle wherein its Internal Meaning is now consciously expressed. Common sense expresses this contrast by saying that I have one will; while the world seems to have another will, which may to any extent oppose mine. The Ought, under these conditions, comes to our finite consciousness in the form of some principle which, in general, however we may formulate it, says: “Harmonize thy will with the world's Will. Express thyself through obedience. Win thy victory by accepting thy task. The world is already thy Will absolutely expressed. Learn this truth by conforming thy deed to an absolute law.” It is enough for us here that this consciousness of the Ought can and does arise; while the essence of it is that the Self is to accomplish the object of its search through obedience to an order which is not of its own momentary creation.

But, as we have said, the Self is known through a contrast-effect. Its own will, as it now is consciously present, is not yet known as in harmony with the Other wherein it inevitably seeks to find its own expression. It is always abstractly possible, therefore, for the Self to conceive its search for self-expression as simply an undertaking not to obey, but to subdue, to its own present purpose, the world which is beyond. Instead of developing its momentary Internal Meaning into harmony with its own External Meaning, it may, in its narrowness, seek to convert the latter into the former. Instead of assuming the attitude that Tennyson expresses by saying:—

“Our wills are ours to make them thine,”

the Self may seek its self-expression explicitly in the form of rebellion. Nor is such a rebellious attitude by any means wholly evil. Conscious choice of a total evil is, indeed, impossible. For the Self, at its worst, seeks finality of self-expression, and seeks this self-expression through a life that is at once Other than its present Internal Meaning, and perfected in its form and content. Yet because the consciousness of the Self depends upon a contrast, the overcoming of the oppositions involved in that contrast, while never conceivable in an utterly evil shape, can be conceived, by the finite Self, as in conflict with what a clearer insight knows to be the Ought, since the consciousness of the Ought demands of the Self an overcoming of the opposition through a rational obedience to the law of the Absolute, while the consciousness opposed to the Ought seeks to master the world in the service of the mere caprice of the Self.

Or, to state the conflict in its simplest terms: I always will to become one with my world, and so, with God. But when I explicitly follow the Ought, I seek to transform myself as I now am into the likeness and the expression of God. And when I oppose what a clearer insight would see to be the Ought, I seek to fashion the truth after the image, and to make God the mere tool of myself as I now am. In both cases it is indeed impossible for me to avoid seeking a good, and expressing a truth as I act. For as a fact, I can only assert my finite Self by actively transforming myself; so that I actually obey, in some measure, even while I rebel. For the finite Self cannot seek its own, without passing over into new life. And there is self-sacrifice involved in even the most stubborn rebellion; and courage and endurance are exercised, unwillingly, even by the most cowardly of pleasure-seekers. The soul of goodness in things evil lies deeper than those admit who see not the tie that binds all Being in one. Even in the depths of hell the lost, if such there were, would still, despite themselves, serve God amidst their darkness. Nor can any being wander so far as to escape not only the presence, but the indwelling, of the Absolute. Moreover, even when the finite Self rebelliously seeks to subdue all Being to its own present conscious caprice, it actually expresses, in its own way, a truth. For there is indeed no life, however slight, which makes no difference to the rest of the world; nor is there any caprice, however perverse, that is not an aspect, however fragmentary, of God's perfect meaning. So that when the Self rebels, it can rebel only because the Spirit dwells in it; and when it would fashion all things to its own will, it utters a truth, viz. the truth that, in its own degree, it is the object and expression of the divine interest. But if the rebellious Self expresses thus unwillingly a truth that is already divine, the obedient Self, willingly seeking, even in what is Other, its own will, and surrendering in order that it may possess, acts willingly in accordance with a truth that is final, and is conscious of its own meaning in a form that is far more significant than the, one in which the life of the rebellious Self is embodied.

Now it would belong to a system of ethical doctrine to develope what I thus only hint, namely, the positive content of the moral act, and the deeper nature of the contrast between what ought to be and what ought not to be. Here I am only interested in defining the alternative courses of action that are possible in a finite being sufficiently to show that a moral act, when once its content has been defined, can be conceived as occurring at any temporal instant, and in the life of any finite Self. But having defined the general situation which any moral agent faces, we again ask the question, Can our theory find room, in the temporal world, for free moral choices that conform or do not conform to the Ought? In other words, can a finite Self, knowing the Ought, in any sense freely choose to rebel or to obey? And is such free choice to do ill consistent with our theory of the perfection of the whole, and the finality of the eternal order?

V

Our question, as thus formulated, assumes several aspects, each of which must now be considered in its turn. Our own statement, in a former lecture, concerning the individuality and freedom of the finite Self, turned upon saying that in the unique whole of the Absolute life, every finite life, as related to that whole, and as one of the aspects of this whole, must be itself unique. Since this uniqueness of each finite life, in other words of each Self, is itself the embodiment of an aspect of the Absolute Will; this aspect in turn appeared as itself an unique will, not elsewhere precisely duplicated, and so as the individual will of this finite Self. As the unique cannot be wholly defined through its external relations, or deduced from them, or causally explained by means of them, we found each finite Self to be, in some aspect of its nature, free. And viewing the same facts in the light of the distinction between the temporal and the eternal, we now assert that each finite Self, in so far as it is an ethical individual, having a continuity of purpose in its life, expresses itself in a series of deeds, each one of which, as a deed that has an unique place in an unique life, is itself, in some measure and in some aspect, however slight,—free,—so that the individuality of every act sets a limit to the possibility of the causal explanation of this act by an external observer. We have now to see how this former theory of the general nature of finite and temporal freedom applies to the case of the moral act, as that act has here been defined. That every such finite freedom of action is a strictly limited freedom, we clearly see. Our question is whether such freedom is sufficient to give finite acts their needed character as a choice between what ought to be done, and what ought not to be done, by the individual agent at any moment.

Our objector may hereupon say: “What you have called the freedom of the finite Self certainly cannot be moral freedom. For, according to you, the Self always wills the same essential aim, namely its final union and harmony with its Other, or, in other words, its fulfilment through its oneness with the Absolute. As for the conflict between the Ought, on the one hand, and the rebellious attitude of the finite Self on the other hand,—a conflict whose decision, as you assert, constitutes the content of the moral act,—such a conflict can depend solely upon ignorance. The Self seeks its own realization. It can seek nothing else. This realization means oneness with God. No other aim is possible. But ignorance of how to reach the goal is possible in a finite being. And, according to you, the rebellious Self is thus ignorant of its own true good, and states its fragment of truth in a false form. The Self that follows what a higher insight sees to be the Ought, on the other hand, merely knows the truth, and knowing follows. Your so-called moral acts are thus mere expressions of knowledge or of ignorance,—not of freedom.”

To this objection I reply that, by our hypothesis, whenever an individual acts, his deed is at once, and inseparably, an act of knowledge and an expression of purpose,—an insight and a choice. And the sense in which it is both knowledge and will at once is just here best indicated by remembering the sense in which every act of will, and every process of knowledge, involves what the psychologist calls Attention. To attend, is to be at once guided in your momentary deed by what you know, and determined in your knowledge by what you do. And, as Professor James has so successfully pointed out, and as we ourselves have maintained from the outset of the present series, the central feature of every voluntary deed, the constitutive principle of every finite life, is a process of Attention. An idea arises in your mind. The idea already involves a nascent deed. Attend to that idea rather than to any other, and at once the idea, filling the whole circle of your consciousness, turns into its appropriate completed deed. In a moment of temptation, the man who has his opportunity to embezzle, begins to think of how he could misappropriate the funds intrusted to him. The idea, already possessed of its ominous Internal Meaning, comes to consciousness as already the nascent deed of a Self rebellious against what is, for a higher insight, the Ought,—against the law of honor that here binds the Self to the truth, and to the Absolute. Does the conceived deed win possession of the whole field of consciousness? Then, indeed, by what thenceforth appears to the externally observant psychologist as an altogether automatic process, the deed is carried out in the man's conduct. In other words, if the man thinks of nothing so much as of his opportunity to embezzle, then, if the opportunity also persists, and the physical power to accomplish the deed remains, he inevitably embezzles. On the other hand, if he thinks rather of the law of the obedient Self, of his honor, and of the tie that, when fully comprehended, is seen to be a tie that binds him to God, the deed remains undone, and the nascent evil Self is suppressed by the wiser Self. The only field of choice, in such a case, is therefore the field of attention.

But an act of attention, I repeat, is at once an act by which we come to know a truth, and an act by which we are led to an outward deed. Such outward deed may be (as in the case earlier dwelt upon in our discussion of the World of Description), a deed whereby we come to seem, to an external observer, inactive, and merely observant of our world. But such inactivity, if it be deliberately chosen, is itself a sort of activity. As a man attends, so is he, so he knows, and so too, he acts, or voluntarily refrains from action. Therefore it is vain, in case of any true choice, to separate, at just that instant, the knowledge which guides and the voluntary activity which then and there expresses this knowledge. What I potentially know, can indeed be, for any one abstract purpose, pretty sharply sundered from what I am able to do. Thus my memory has stores of possible knowledge that I do not now recall. And on the other hand, my acts could create outer objects that I have never yet made. And when one thus views the realm of what I can know, as for instance my storehouse of memories; and the realm of what I can do, namely, the possible new objects that my will could produce, knowledge and will seem far apart. But, in our present consciousness, knowledge and will are, as we long ago saw, merely two aspects of the present unity of conscious life. What we now know means whatever is at present a discriminated fact in the unity of consciousness. What we now do means whatever we win through the present expression of our purposes in knowing. But the process whereby our present knowledge alters to meet our purposes, and is known as thus altering, is the process of attention. This process involves, then, an alteration of present knowledge to suit our purpose. It also, and inevitably, involves an acting according to our present knowledge.

In the second lecture of the present series, we considered our discriminating attention in its theoretical aspect, as something relatively opposed to definite action. But this opposition, as we saw, comes to light in cases where we so far lack the knowledge that is sufficient to guide us in a definite course of action. Here, however, we have to consider attention in so far as it means a deliberate and free dwelling upon, or ignoring of, plans of action which we are supposed already to possess. In this case, our attention appears not in its theoretical, but in its practical aspect. This attention is our choice to narrow the field of our own consciousness in a particular way at a particular moment.

It is indeed true that, according as a man now views the relation of the Self to the world, so, just now, he acts. It is equally true that, since every conscious act is a present act of attention, which is directed to some aspect of the relation between the Self and the world, therefore, according as a man now consciously acts, so, at this instant, he comes to view this very relation between the world and his individual Self. A morally ignorant man, who has never learned the law, or conceived in some particular sense of his own higher good, we acquit of moral defect, just in so far as he acts in this so far invincible ignorance. He must first get knowledge, as we say, before he can choose the right course of acting. It does not, however, follow that his knowledge of the good, when it comes, will deprive his good deeds of their free character. For in performing any one good deed, if he acts voluntarily, he will act by virtue of his own conscious attention to the good. So long as he clearly thinks of nothing so much as of his already known relation to the world and to God, he will indeed inevitably act accordingly, and be not the rebellious, but the obedient Self; precisely as while the tempted man thinks of nothing so much as of his temptation to embezzle, he will inevitably steal whenever the opportunity offers. But, in both cases, knowledge will determine outer deed, precisely in so far as the inner deed of attention gets its purpose expressed in a particular kind of present knowledge.

To our objector we consequently here reply: According to our view, all beings, everywhere, serve the Absolute purpose precisely in so far as then and there they know that purpose. Nor can any, even the worst beings, act without in some measure relating their momentary deed to what, however blindly, they then and there know of that purpose. But, on the other hand, all conscious beings, at any instant, know what they are conscious of, precisely in so Jar as they attend to an ideal. But the act of attention of just this instant, taken together with the resulting knowledge, is peculiarly apt to be the expression of just this instant's unique, and accordingly free, will. In one aspect, as we saw before (in our second lecture), our consciousness at this instant is made narrow, our attention is centred upon just these facts, by virtue of conditions which we cannot now control. But in another aspect, our voluntary narrowing of the field of our attention, at this instant, does alter the range of what we now know. Now it is in this aspect that our attention, and so our will, can be, at any one instant, morally free. Hence when a being, by virtue of his training, and of the present grade of his consciousness, has at any instant present to him some form of the conflict between the Ought and the rebellious Self, what he then does turns upon, and is the expression of, the way in which he then and there attends to one or to the other of the warring interests. If he chooses to think of nothing so much as that it is just the private Self, as it now is, whose fulfilment, at any cost, he seeks, he comes to lack, in so far, the moralizing knowledge. His caprice, for himself, becomes then the only hint of the divine that tends to remain in sight. In so far as this tendency excludes everything else from sight, he forgets God as God, forgets the Ought as the Ought, and acts with a viciously acquired naïveté. Such a deed can never be wholly bad, simply because nothing absolutely evil exists, and because, as we metaphorically said, even in the depths of hell they still unwillingly serve God. But if, on the other hand, the attention fixes nothing so much as the truer relation of the present temporal Self to the Other, upon whose definition the Ought depends, then just such attention wins its expression in the obedient and self-surrendering deed. What is in any such case done is, therefore, indeed the expression of present knowledge. But in this case the present state of knowledge is the expression of the present attention. And the attention is the will of the instant. Our theory is, that, despite all the causal dependence of the Self upon its own past, and upon all its social and natural conditions, just this act of attention, at this temporal instant, never occurred before, and will never occur again, and is, in so far, unique, individual, incapable of any complete causal explanation, and is, in consequence, the free act of this self. And thus, despite all the objections, we vindicate for our theory the power to deduce the possibility of temporal acts that possess a true moral significance.

The sole possible free moral action is then a freedom that relates to the present fixing of attention upon the ideas of the Ought which are already present. To sin is consciously to choose to forget, through a narrowing of the field of attention, an Ought that one already recognizes. For while I cannot avoid acting in accordance with the Ought so long as I clearly know it, I can, through voluntary inattention, freely choose to forget it. And while, again, the truth as far as I know it compels my deed, I do the good freely in so far as I freely choose to continue my already existent attention to the already recognized truth concerning the good. All sin, then, is sin against the light by a free choice to be inattentive to the light already seen. Or again, all sin is a free choosing of the sort of narrowness which, in our second lecture, we found to be, in one aspect, the natural fate of the human being. That is, sin depends upon a narrowing of consciousness, so that a present ignorance of what one ought to know occurs. Now a certain narrowness of consciousness we before found to be our fate. But freely chosen and vicious narrowness,—a deliberate forgetting of what one already knows of God and the truth, this is of the very essence of sin. All free choice of the good, on the other hand, is voluntary persistence in attending to the good already known. Moral freedom is simply this freedom to hold by attention, or to forget by inattention, an Ought already present to one's finite consciousness. But such freedom is, upon our view, possible and actual.

VI

Yet the objector's strongest argument remains still insufficiently emphasized. “Not thus,” he may say, “do you escape from the moral fatalism which was urged against you at the outset. What you have so far made out, if your argument be altogether granted, is, that, at any one point of time, a given moral agent, A, may freely so act, through his attentive process, as to emphasize either a false, or else a true view, of his relations to the Other that he seeks, namely, to the final expression of his whole will in the eternal order. The consequence may be a deed that a moralist will call an evil act or a good one, according as the agent decides by his choice in attending or not attending to the Ought as he knows it. But you have (lone well to admit that according to your metaphor, even in hell they unwillingly serve God. Those who make the hellish choice serve God ignorantly. But then, according to you, God knows that they do so. And in him even their own whole intent, together with the more conscious and obedient intent of those whom the moralist calls the good, is completely brought to light, and is eternally fulfilled, in an unique whole which, as you have repeatedly insisted, is such that no other fulfils or, speaking in terms of the concrete will, can fulfil, the one absolute purpose. In this unique whole, as you have also pointed out, every finite life and intent has its own individual place, a place that no other could take. And this place is, by hypothesis, a place in an absolutely perfect whole. The sinners, then, even by all their worst efforts to forget the good, cannot accomplish anything that makes the world less than perfect. Nor can the good do anything but express by their persistent attention their own consciousness that the whole is perfect. They cannot make the world better. Now where the world is such that the eternal perfection is predetermined, whatever the moral agent does, the situation is one of a moral fatalism.”

I reply that here at last we reach the point where the distinction of the temporal and the eternal order becomes of most critical importance. Moral acts, as I have pointed out, occur in time. It is with reference to time, and in particular, to the time which any moral agent views as his future, that the agent himself, or any one who judges him, estimates any act as good or as ill. The free agent, whose temporal act (as an attentive choice between a persistence in knowing the Ought, and a free forgetting of Ought in favor of the evil), we have already characterized, is told by the moralist, that by his deed he can make his world better, or worse. The emphasis here is laid, and rightly laid, upon his world, upon the world as he can view it in relation to his deed,—upon an aspect of Reality as such, and not upon the eternal whole of Reality taken as a whole. The moral agent is explicitly this Self as contrasted with other Selves. He is this individual among other individuals. You cannot indeed separate him from other individuals; but you recognize him as this individual by contrasting what he intends and effects, with what other individuals intend and effect.

Now once considering the individual as acting in time, what you have a right to say to him is, that, if he intends evil results,—let us say, repeating our former example,—if he intends embezzlement, in a region of the temporal world where embezzlement is possible, and is accordingly an evil,—then, just in so far as he succeeds in carrying out his end, he produces what, at just that point of time, is indeed an actual evil. Now, in one of the lectures of our former Series, in speaking of death and similar evils, we already briefly considered how our Idealism has to view the general nature and the possibility of actual finite ills. Our examples of such ills were chosen, at that stage, not from the region of human conduct, but from our experiences of what seem to be natural ills,—ills whose source and true meaning are in large part unknown to us. Of such natural ills, death is a classic instance, and we used it, in the discussion to which I here refer, as our principal instance. Let us recall the main features of our view as there stated, reminding ourselves, for the moment, not so much of the sense in which moral ills or sins are possible, but rather of the general sense in which any evil can be said to have a place in Being.

A finite ill is a fact of experience whose fragmentariness makes our universal search for the Other, for what lies beyond, for the context, explanation, justification, and supplement of this fact, peculiarly pathetic and eager. In the most general sense of the word evil, all finite facts, viewed as such, are indeed evil, precisely in so far as, when taken in themselves, they have no complete meaning, and leave us in disquietude, searching still for the Other, i.e. for true Being in its wholeness. To this aspect of finite life we long since called attention. It is not satisfactory to be finite. On the other hand, for our view, no finite fact is a total evil, for taken in its eternal context, as aspect of the whole, it ultimately implies, demands, or, if you please, means all other finite facts, and forms together with them, the total life in which the Absolute Will is fulfilled. In the more special sense of the word, however, we apply the term evil to facts which are so disquieting that they especially emphasize, as it were, their own finitude and ours, in so far as our experience is confined to them. When we face such facts anywhere in the temporal order, and are conscious of them as evils, we very especially desire to change our own experience of them. This we desire, just because these facts send us so imperatively to some Other, wherein we hope to find the features by virtue of which the positive value of the world shall become plain to us. In the presence of such ills, as for instance, pain and death, we inevitably say, “If this were all, then indeed better no world at all than this one.” And thus, in so far, an evil is a fact that very loudly proclaims, as it were, to our consciousness. “In me, Being in its wholeness and finality is not to be found. Elsewhere, elsewhere, lies the experience of the final truth.”

Now how such ills can have any place in Being, we in a measure have seen from the very moment when, in refuting the abstractions of pure Mysticism, we first observed that unless the finite is real, the Absolute itself has no Reality. If Being is a final whole of experience, there must be that experience of which it is the whole, that striving of which it is the finality, that imperfection of which it is the completion. Or, to state the matter in less technical terms, unless the Absolute knows what we know when we endure and wait, when we love and struggle, when we long and suffer, the Absolute in so far is less and not more than we are. For all these states of ours mean something. The meaning of the world is the meaning of life, not of the lifeless; and attainment is not won except as the attainment of the goal of painful endeavors. And the more significant the endeavors, the deeper the experience of finitude, and so of evil, that they include. But nothing that is known to the finite is lost to the Absolute; and finitude is a condition for the attainment of perfection, in precisely the sense in which the temporal is a condition for the consciousness of the eternal, or, to use our former simile, precisely as the successive chords of the music are a condition of the beauty of the whole succession when it is viewed as a whole. What ills find their place in finite Being, and what place any particular evil finds,—these are topics for special consideration. But of ill in general, this is the idealistic theory.

But from such an indication as to the nature of ill in general, we return to the special case of moral evil. If evil in general can exist, in any finite and temporal region of our idealistic world, then evil can be the work of some finite moral agent. And this is as true for us as for our opponents. For when we call the evil the work of any agent, we mean that it expresses that agent's will, as he embodied his will at some temporal moment of his life. Now for us it is as true, as for our opponents, that the will of a finite being can win an actual temporal expression. And in consequence of what we have already said concerning the uniqueness and the individuality of the free agent's temporal act, it is quite as possible for us as it is for our opponents to conceive that a just observer, aware of the facts, could say to a given finite agent, regarding a particular ill: “This is what you have done. And but for you, and for you only, amongst all those who act in the world, this ill,—just this temporal fact that dissatisfies, never would have been.”

“But,” says our opponent, “according to you, the nature of Being, viewed in its wholeness, is fatally so constituted that this ill, which a given finite agent does, is so supplemented, so overcome, so included in a richer life, so taken up into the Other which this ill, even as it is, already means and implies,—that the whole is perfect despite the ill.” Yes, I reply, but how is this ill included and reconciled within the perfect whole? Not, according to our hypothesis, by virtue of the fact that the evil deed expresses the finite agent's evil will, but because his will is supplemented, is overcome, is thwarted, is overruled, by what expresses some other will than his finite will was, in so far as he himself, at the moment of acting, consciously defined that will. For the supposition is that what he intended, just in so far as he opposed what he then viewed as his own interest to the world's interest, and just in so far as this deed expressed his will, was the ill, and not the Absolute life; the finite rebellion, and not the final harmony,—the embezzlement, for instance, and not the Ought. If per impossibile he had won might over Being, as he did win in his own measure and time, a momentary self-expression, the whole universe would have been an ill, and in fact, since nothing finally ill can exist as a whole at all, the universe would have been destroyed. For, by the very nature of Being and of evil, every sin, in its intention is, in essence, world-destroying. For in conscious intent, as an act of choosing to narrow attention so as to ignore what ought to be known and then to act in accordance with this vicious ignorance, it is inconsistent with the very conditions which make Being as a whole possible. What the ill-doer accomplished, then, was an actual ill, and an ill that would not have been, and that need not have been, but for his individual choice in narrowing his attention as he did. And in so far as his will was effective, there was that in the universe that had to be atoned for, and thwarted. Only through the conquest over this evil-doer and his deed, is the final perfection won. His deed is related to the goodness of the whole, much as the dread that in itself is cowardly, and is destructive of courage, is related to the courage that consists in enduring and in overcoming this dread, and that in so far depends, for its very perfection, upon that dread.

In the temporal world, then, the evil-doer's will is, according to our hypothesis, possessed of a measure, both of individuality and of freedom. It is in its own time and degree morally effective. What it produces is, in its temporal reality as this act or series of finite acts, an evil. This evil is due to the evil-doer, and without his choice it need not have occurred at all. Therefore, any free moral agent, in so far as he is free, may either choose or avoid evil deeds by choosing to attend to the good that he now knows, or to narrow his attention and ignore this good. Consequently, such an agent's own world, that is, the world of the facts which express his finite will, precisely in so far as he himself distinguishes himself from all the rest of the Absolute life,—his world, I say, is, for our doctrine, as for our opponent's doctrine, a world which this finite agent can make worse or better if he chooses, and, within his own range of efficacy, as he chooses. The means by which he can freely do this we have seen, viz. his free attention or inattention to the good. As for the consequences of this free choice of his, they may, in a closely linked world, prove to be as grave, extended, and as lasting as temporal conditions may determine.

So much then for the possibility of free and significant moral choices of good and of ill. Consequently, as to the charge that our view is a moral fatalism, what we say to the moral agent is this: You act as you will, just in so far as you are free. And you are free in the before-defined sense. That is, you are free to attend or not attend to the Ought as you already, at any moment, have come to know it. If you do ill, the world-order will, indeed, in the end make good the ill you have done, and in that sense will make naught of your deed,—yet not because you are unable to do any ill at all, but because elsewhere, in the temporal order, other agents, seeking to overcome the disquieting ill which your will has chosen as its expression, will somewhere and somehow succeed. You yourself may,—yes, doubtless will, in the end, come to join in this self-conquering task. The moral order of your idealistic world means, then, not that no moral ill can be done, but that, in the temporal order, every evil deed must somewhere and at some time be atoned for, by some other than the agent, if not by the agent himself, and that this atonement, this overcoming of the evil deed, will in the end make possible that which in the eternal order is directly manifest, namely, the perfection of the whole.

Now it is decidedly the condition of a moral order that evil should be, in the end, overruled for good. And precisely this is the result that our own theory defines and necessitates. When we then say that, in the eternal order, the whole is good, we do not say that this evil-doer is wholly good, or that his deed has no ill effects, or that any fate predetermines how he shall take his place in the good order. We assert that he becomes a part of the perfect whole in so far as his evil deed is overruled for good, either by another, or later, by his individual Self.

VII

We have herewith in substance dealt with our opponent's case. We may return, however, in conclusion, to his original statements in their order as we stated them. “For the Absolute,” our objector (referring to our own view of the Absolute) said,“no other world than this one is, or in concrete truth can be.” Hence, as our opponent insisted, the whole, when viewed as a whole, is “static, fixed, changeless.” And therefore the deed of any moral agent is powerless to change this perfect world for good or for ill. Our reply here runs that the world, seen from the eternal point of view, is indeed not further subject to change. Yet this is only because the eternal point of view includes in its single glance the whole of time, and therefore includes a knowledge and estimate of all the changes that finite agents, acting in time, really work in their own world, namely, in the temporal world that is future to their own deeds, and subject to their own will. The totality of temporal changes, forms indeed, in one sense, a static whole, namely, in so far as no further series of events succeeds the whole of the temporal order of succession. But in another sense our world is as full of morally significant novelties as the nature of any world in any wise permits. For at every instant of time, according to our hypothesis, something novel, significant, individual, and in its own measure free, occurs, and leads to new results for which the choices of finite moral agents are responsible.

Our objector further insisted that, for our view, “The individual knows at any instant that what he really means, even in his blindness, is identical with the Absolute Will.” Our reply is that here all turns upon the sense in which the word identical is used. The identity of the finite and the Absolute meaning is, for us, no mere identity without difference. I now know that, however blindly I strive, I suffer, or sin, my meaning, when fully interpreted in the light of all other life, of all the events that I now ignore, of all the future through which I and my fellows are yet to pass, of all the atoning deeds that shall yet reconcile my stubborn will to God's will, and of all the acts that shall overrule for good my worst intent,—that my meaning, I say, when included in one whole with all these endless differences, is identical with God's will. But taken by myself, as now I am, I am, indeed, remote enough, in my passing consciousness, both from my own self-expression, and from my final conscious union with my Other, namely with the Absolute.

“But,” said the objector, “the agent's deed, as your theory teaches, is never anything but one of the incidents in the process through which the Absolute wins the eternal perfection. Therefore your agent is unable to sin, or to go wrong, or to be less, at any temporal moment, than he should be.” I respond, The conclusion does not follow. Whatever I do, in my finitude, at this point of time, is, indeed, an incident in a process. The moral question is, What sort of incident? Viewed in itself the incident may be an evil deed. In that case, by the very definition of evil, and because the process, in its eternal completion, is good, the incident will be one that is turned to the good only by a further temporal process of overcoming the consequences of this deed, and of atoning therefor. The agent, then, according to us, is able to go wrong and to sin. If he sins, the eternal perfection includes his condemnation and the overcoming of his evil will, just as the hero condemns and overcomes his own dread, and thereby attains the perfection of courage.

“Were the agent other than he is,” urges the objector, “the whole world would, indeed, be other than it is. But according to you, the world as known to the Absolute, is known as a world that fulfils the Absolute purpose, and that in so far cannot be other than it is.” Hence the individual, as our objector also urged, cannot, without a failure of the Absolute purpose, be other than he is, and “is certain to be, in his own place, best as he is, whatever he is.”

Our answer here insists simply upon a closer examination of the situation before us. There is an agent, A, whose will is, in some aspect, determined by nothing external to or other than himself, as he, at some moment of time, consciously is and acts. Were he other than he is, all the rest of the universe would in some sense be altered. Now he is an element in a perfect whole. But he is so merely because, in so far as evil appears in any region of that whole, this evil, by its very nature, demands, and finds, some Other, which so supplements it that it is overruled for good. As an evil, it cannot exist in isolation. Its supplement appears in the form of deeds of atonement, reparation, control, condemnation, and in the end, fulfilment. Such deeds in general are made necessary, by the evil deed, although their actual accomplishment will involve, by our hypothesis, the expression of individuality that is in some sense or aspect other than the individuality that accomplishes the evil deed. These amending deeds will themselves, therefore, possess, in some measure, the character of free will acts. They will occur, in the temporal order, subsequently to the evil deed. They will, as common sense would word the situation, “make good” the evil done. Only by virtue of these deeds, and because in the end they not merely offer external palliations to the ill done, but so include and control the will of the evil-doer himself that he comes to be related to the whole much as the dread of the hero is to the hero's courage,—only thus does the evil-doer enter into and become one with the perfect whole. In himself considered, however, the evil-doer, as evil-doer, is not, for our view, “best as he is.” And if he had done otherwise, just these amending, atoning, reconciling, and perfecting deeds need never have occurred. If the evil-doer replies, “Yes, but the Absolute Will wrought even in and through me when I did ill,” we reply, The Absolute Will wrought in you, as Absolute Will, in so far as it was indeed well that you, as temporal individual actor, should just then be, in your own measure, free and individual. For freedom and individuality are aspects of every element in a perfect whole. But the Absolute Will, as such, was just what, in the evil deed, in so far as it was your free deed, you denied at the moment of your act; for, declining to attend to it, you made as if it were not. The amending and atoning deeds are not yours, in so far as you temporally chose the ill, but are acts either of your own Self at a later time, or of the other Selves. In brief, the Absolute Will wins through your condemnation and overcoming of your ill, and not through your coöperation, so long as, and whenever, your temporal act is not one of coöperation.

“But you lose sight,” continues the objector, “of that contrast between what is and what ought to be, upon which all the moral consciousness depends.” My reply here is that what ought to be and what is, can and do indeed fall asunder at any one instant of the temporal order.

For that is the very nature of time, viz. that what is just now, at this instant of time, is not yet what ought to be, but needs Another to supplement it. Therefore is time the very form of the restless, finite Will. But what ought to be at any or at every point of the temporal order, is real in the eternal order in its wholeness. The world is not now good, nor is Being at this instant a temporally present whole, nor does either God or man at this instant of time see what now is as a fulfilment, or as right. Hence the future is needed to supplement the present. Hence it is that hope springs eternal in every finite instant. Hence it also is that, as the pessimists so mournfully observe, every hope for temporal good brings always its measure of disappointment. Nowhere in time is the good finally found. It is found, as the final good, only in the eternal order.

“According to you,” the objector had still insisted, “we please God, and are ourselves pleased, in our union with God,—and pleased too with ourselves, whatever we are.” I respond, God is pleased, if so you wish to express the fact, and we too, in our union with God, are pleased, with the eternal triumph of the good over the evil. But this final satisfaction presupposes and includes just that dissatisfaction with evil, which requires that every temporal evil deed shall meet its true adjustment to the good order through the deeds of atoning efficacy, or, in general terms, through the presence of that Other which every evil deed, when once seen as evil, demands. We are indeed pleased, in our union with God, in the eternal order, to see that our own evil deeds have been overruled for good. But just herein lies the essence of the moral order of the universe, viz. in that we, too, however we wander, come in eternity freely to our home.

“Yet your doctrine,” the objector finally urged, “has still to face the ancient difficulty concerning the reconciliation of the divine foreknowledge and the free will of man.” My response to this last objection is that, for our Idealism this ancient difficulty simply does not exist. We do not conceive that God, first preëxisting and foreknowing, then in time creates a world that is real beyond himself, and that, in time, is subsequent in its events to his preëxistent foreknowledge. For us, God does not temporally foreknow anything, excepting in so far as he is expressed in us finite beings. The knowledge that exists in time is the knowledge that finite Selves possess, in so far as they are finite. And no such foreknowledge can predict the special features of individual deeds precisely in so far as they are unique. Foreknowledge in time is possible only of the general, and of the causally predetermined, and not of the unique and the free. Hence neither God nor man can perfectly foreknow, at any temporal moment, what a free-will agent is yet to do. On the other hand, the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past, and future. This knowledge is ill-called foreknowledge. It is eternal knowledge. And as there is an eternal knowledge of all individuality, and of all freedom, free acts are known as occurring like the chords in the musical succession, precisely when and how they actually occur.

So much then for the detail of our objector's arguments, so far as we here need recall them. His general principles have before been duly met. We conclude then, that our idealistic realm is a moral order, wherein any moral agent has his place, his task, his effectiveness, his freedom, and his individual worth, and has all these just by virtue of his unity with all Being, and with God. His acts are his own, even because God's Will is in him as the very heart of his freedom. And his deeds are not indifferent to the whole universe, which wins through his free aid when he coöperates, and through the overruling of his caprice when he withstands. Yet it wins by regarding and including his freedom.

• 1.

  See Mr. Wm. Salter's Ethical Religion, p. 13, for an eloquent expression of this attitude.