Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/356

This page needs to be proofread.

Viewed with reference to your goal, they are part of you. In the long run, what they are, you are; and no will besides your own, no Divine choice beyond yourself, determines what, in the most individual aspect of your being, you are.” It follows, of course, that we can say all this only to the moral individual as such, and not to every chance empirical creature who happens to assume human shape, unless we presuppose him to be a true Self.

On the other hand, it is a wholly different thing to view the individual psychologically. Here one studies, not at all the constitution of the real world as such, that is, of the eternal world as eternal, of the Absolute Moment in its unity, but the sequences of facts in fragmentary regions of temporal experience. Of these, one studies, not the significance, but the sequence and the phenomenal physical relationships. These are matters of natural history. One explains them as one can. For reasons that belong not here, one explains them only in so far as one detects uniformities of sequence in them, and one has every reason to say that, in so far as one views them in the light of empirical science, one can admit no freedom — that is, here, no capriciousness of sequence — as occurring in their phenomenal manifestations. But the moral freedom of the eternal world does not mean the capricious sequence of the temporal, at least as any capriciousness that could be recognised from the point of view of a successful empirical science. The empirical psychologist therefore knows nothing about freedom, as such, and those who seek for psychological proofs for the freedom of