base and of high alike and indifferently; is eating insatiably of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” simply for the eating’s sake. We must either maintain our judgments of regret, he says, and so pronounce the determinist world accursed to its core, or else quash our regrets and end in a fatuous optimism which confounds good and evil by reckoning evil really good — “whatever is, is right.” The latter horn of the dilemma, he holds, can only be taken in earnest if “subjectivism” is true; and this, what unharmed conscience can endure?
But if determinism is but one phase of the free life of each spirit, laying down law upon the world which is the field of its possible higher activity, then the dilemma is dissolved. The pair of alternatives do not then exhaust the possibilities: there is at least one other supposition open. Not mere knowledge of good and evil, for its own shameless sake, but knowledge for the sake of action, and resulting now in penitent and now in benignant reform, is then the genuine alternative to pessimism; and this moral use of the evil that freedom causes is the atonement, the justifying atonement, with which the profounder freedom that wells from the eternal fountain of the spirit expiates the surface-freedom’s sin. The atonement is in eternity and from eternity, quite as really as the provision of an apparatus for the sin. It passes thence upon the ceaseless process of the natural life. Thus
