Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/551

FIXITY OF CHARACTEE : ITS ETHICAL INTERPEETATION. 535 even if we have some interest in proving the saint not to be potentially the sinner, such prejudice has a sufficient raison d'etre, when it is seen to be but the expression of the deeper nature of the moral needs of mankind, to have, as I think, high psychological and ethical warrant. We have been slow, perhaps, to see that Self-initiation or choice perpetuates itself : that the Form of the Will IB ever the Child of Freedom, and perpetually owns its parentage ; and that the moral movement, with its presuppositions, the constitutive and regulative aspects of Personality, the Self and the Will to Live, the entire moral process is, as such, an essentially spiritual process, is within the free or spiritual circle of one's own being. Well, there's the point of the whole argument : If we conceive Personality as the " syn- thetic activity " at the heart of morality, with its two and inseparable aspects, constitutive and regulative, then Freedom, as belonging to its constitutive aspect, still remains; the Form of the Will to Live, as regulative, has simply made its possibility its own. What we should contend for, then, is not a Freedom that is "for ever" choosing between good and evil; not even " Freedom on the whole " ; but rather for Freedom as an aspect of Personality to initiate a set of correspondences, to actively identify oneself with and develop a certain definite line of conduct, to live " ' according to the representation of law ' or in free obedience to a consciously conceived Ideal ". Either, therefore, we must hold that both saint and sinner are free at any moment to choose the " law of death " equally with the " law of life," no matter how developed in either direction their respective characters may be ; or that choices "crystallise" and character takes, as it were, the finality or fixity of a creation. But we have repudiated the Absolutist's Freedom as being prima facie superfluous and unmeaningful. Shall we not, then, hold that there are " moral crises " in our lives when our spirits make or must make supreme efforts, and that what follows ever after is their consequence? A lurid meaning for Responsibility surely ! " Every act is implicitly a case of such moral faith- fulness or unfaithfulness." l And herein lies the tragedy of life : that by active identification of Self with evil, men may and do sell beyond redemption their " high human birth- right". 1 J. Seth, op. cit. sup., p. 54.