Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/55

44 W. MITCHELL : impossible ideals as the former acting for the latter the ideal of the Absolute Ethics, or the latter acting for the former the ideal of modern Utilitarianism. Both are in essential relation ; and that for which obligation rests on each is just the realisation and thereby the perfection of that rela- tion. Only after discovering what that relation is, are these formulas admissible, and then they are all admissible. The dis- covery can emanate of course only from self-consciousness where we find an identity of nature and interest with one another. Here we discover that the relation is self-relation and that its perfection consists in its infinity in our self-satisfaction or freedom from external determination. The perfection contemplated by Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, is the finite and necessitated ideal of a complete external adjust- ment. The laws of morality are the expressions of this ethical self- relation. What experience does is as little to produce them as to construct the ideal to which they point. It only determines them to greater particularity and definite- ness. They are accordingly a priori without being abstract, and actual or concrete without being an external product. The application of the postulate of Obligation has a double function relatively to moral freedom. In the first place it assures of the reality of that freedom, a thing which 110 demonstration could do (except for metaphysical freedom) in view of possible doctrines of association and unconscious cerebration. In the second place, it establishes the essential characteristics of moral freedom without which no theory of it can be adequate. Confining ourselves to this latter func- tion, we have to ask, What is the necessary characteristic of a moral agent in view of Obligation? The answer can only be that man must, in the first place, have power to perform every obligation, and, in the second place, that the exercise or non-exercise of such power must depend on himself alone. But for the former I should not recognise the law at all ; but for the latter it would be no law for me. We need not examine any of the many theories of freedom that are founded on a psychology which makes the realisa- tion of these conditions impossible. If, as Spinoza s " the mind cannot determine the body to motion or rest or any other state," we need not care to discover wlu'thcr mind is a function of brain or has its dynamical power and the reason of its existence within itself. Our freedom must be able to express itself in the determination of phenomena. So, too, if the metaphysic of knowledge necessarily ex- cludes it. Kant came dangerously near this position and is often actually in it when representing the sensible world