Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/357

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the will comprehend neither psychology nor freedom. Psychology deals, not with the moral Self, but with the empirical creature called a man, viewed merely as he chances to be.

Meanwhile, the freedom of the moral individual in the moral world is, by virtue both of its metaphysical relationships and of the requirements of a moral order, a distinctly limited freedom. This it is; this it ought to be. This it is, since the moral individual stands in moral relationships. From the absolute point of view, these, as indicated above, are expressible in terms of ideas of relationship. These ideas, viewed as relational equations, permit any one moral individual, when others are supposed to be determinate, to be one of many — possibly, of infinitely numerous — abstractly possible individuals. But the possibilities are still limited by the nature of the ideas. There may be an infinite number of ways in which the individual A could be represented, in his place in the moral world, by other individuals, had A chosen to be other than he is. But on the other hand, A’s moral relationships make certain that there is an infinite number of abstractly possible individuals whom A was not free to be, in view of his determinate place in the moral order. And the relation of A to the rest is itself determined by the consistency of the ideal divine plan, by what has been called the Divine Wisdom, which is neither God’s choice nor A’s. In his empirical life, this limitation of the possibilities for A will appear, in relatively significant form, and apart from psychological considerations, as the fact that A is in the most complex fashion dependent