Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/57

46 W. MITCHELL I phenomenal representation of causality. We find that causality is more than a mere time-relation. It is a deter- mination of an object before it receives before it can receive the determination of time or of any other phenomenal relation. It is the logical prius of a phenomenon as such the first predicate of every possible object of sensible experience. No phenomenon could be a phenomenon at all without it. On the one hand, then, we can represent the sensible world as complete and determined ; and, on the other hand, we can point to the freedom of the cogitable world as expressed in it. In the former sense, we say motives cause volitions or resolves ; in the latter, that I alone am their cause. Motives, I can say, become resolves just as I can say that a certain combination of gases becomes water. But analyse the antecedents in either case as I may, I can find no trace of the effect or of any causal nexus in them, for no phenomenon is adequate to express more than it is in itself. The causal nexus is not phenomenal. Before the time-relation of becoming, or, as we say, physical or phe- nomenal causation, is predicable of an object, the object must, like all phenomena, be causally determined by a tran- scendental unity implied in all systems of relation. The self-conscious agent in that unity / is the cause that determines my motives, my resolves and actions to be what they are. Motives become volitions and volitions become actions not in respect of any abstraction like a phenomenal succession, but by reason of the unity which gives them their first determination and which we have called the causal determination to be phenomena at all. Such a function moral obligation postulates for will as the first of its two characteristics, namely, that it have power to fulfil its obligations. We proceed to the second, that the exercise and non-exercise of such power must de- pend on the agent the subject of obligation. Under the former we have seen how he is free in his phenomenal rela- tions, i.e., How he can. We must now discover how he is free in his essential or self-relation, i.e., How lie can. As it is the confusion of will and desire which creates the difficulty of conceiving the personal manifestation of freedom, so it is the confusion of will and knowledge which makes it difficult to keep man in his individuality. The history of ethics shows that it is hardly possible to escape from identi- fying will and desire without identifying will and knowledge. Thus the earliest moral speculators, the Sophists, committed the former error, being immediately followed by Socrates who committed the other ; and so on through all the ancient systems. The modern course was opened by Descartes with