one avoid platitudes without avoiding truth? And truth here is the obvious fact that since human nature is the point of existence to which good and evil refer, what is called value has its seat necessarily in human nature, and what is called existence has its seat necessarily in the nature of which human nature is a part and apart. Value, in so far forth, is a content of nature, having its roots in her conditions and its life in her force, while the converse is not true. All nature and all existence is not spontaneously and intrinsically a content of value.
Only that portion of it which is human is such. Humanly speaking, non-human existences become valuable by their efficacious bearing on humanity, by their propitious or their disastrous relations to human consciousness. It is these relations which delimit the substance of our goods and evils, and these, at bottom, are indistinguishable from consciousness. They do not, need not, and cannot connect all existence with human life. They are inevitably implicated only with those which make human life possible at all. Of the environment, they pertain only to that portion which is fit by the implicated conditions of life itself. It may therefore be said that natural existence produces and sustains some values,--at least the minimal value which is identical with the bare existence of mankind--on its own account, but no more. The residual environment remains--irrelevant and menacing, wider than consciousness and independent of it. Value, hence, is a specific kind of natural existence among other existences. To say that it is non-existent in nature, is to say that value is not coincident and coexistent with other existences, just as when it is said that a thing is not red, the meaning is that red is not copresent with other qualities. Conversely, to say that value exists in nature is to say that nature and human nature, things and thoughts, are in some respect harmonious or identical. Hence, what human nature tries to force upon nature must be, by implication, non-existent in nature but actual in mind, so that the nature of value must be held inseparable from the nature of mind.[87] It follows that value is, in origin and character, completely irrational. At the foundations of our existence it is relation of their conditions and objects to our major instincts, our appetites, our feelings, our desires, our ambitions--most clearly, to the self-regarding instinct and the instincts of nutrition, reproduction, and gregariousness. Concerning those, as William James writes, "Science may come and consider their ways and find that most of them are useful.
But it is not for the sake of their utility that they are followed, but because at the moment of following them we feel that it is the only appropriate and natural thing to do. Not a man in a billion when taking his dinner, ever thinks of utility. He eats because the food tastes good and makes him want more. If you ask him why he should want to eat more of what tastes like that, instead of revering you as a philosopher, he will probably laugh at you for a fool. The connection between the savory sensation and the act it awakens is for him absolute and _selbstverstaendlich_, an _a priori_ synthesis of the most perfect sort, needing no proof but its own evidence...To the metaphysician alone can such questions occur as 'Why do we smile when pleased, and not scowl?
Why are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend? Why does a particular maiden turn our wits upside down?' The common man can only say '_of course_ we smile, _of course_ our heart palpitates at the sight of a crowd, _of course_ we love the maiden, that beautiful soul clad in that perfect form, so palpably and flagrantly made from all eternity to be loved.' And so, probably, does each animal feel about the particular things it tends to do in the presence of particular objects...To the broody hen the notion would probably seem monstrous that there should be a creature in the world to whom a nestful of eggs was not the utterly fascinating and precious and never-to-be-too-much-set-upon object it is to her." In sum, fundamental values are relations, responses, attitudes, immediate, simple, subjectively obvious, and irrational. But everything else becomes valuable or rational only by reference to them.
Study them or others empirically,[88] and they appear as types of specific behavior, simple or complicated, consisting of a given motor "set" of the organism, strong emotional tone, and aggregates of connected ideas, more or less systematized. In the slang of the new medical psychology which has done so much to uncover their method and mechanism, they are called "complexes"; ethics has called them interests, and that designation will do well enough. They are the primary and morally ultimate efficacious units of which human nature is compounded, and it is in terms of the world's bearing upon their destiny that we evaluate nature and judge her significance and worth.
Now in interest, the important delimiting quality is emotional tone.
Whatever else is sharable, that is not. It is the very stuff of our attitudes, of our acceptances and rejections of the world and its contents, the very essence of the relations we bear to these. That these relations shall be identical for any two human beings requires that the two shall be identical: two persons cannot hold the same relation to the same or different objects any more than two objects can occupy absolutely the same space at the same time. Hence, all our differences and disagreements. However socially-minded we may be, mere numerical diversity compels us to act as separate centers, to value things with reference to separate interests, to orient our worlds severally, and with ourselves as centers. This orienting is the relating of the environment to our interests, the establishment of our worlds of appreciation, the creation of our orders of value. However much these cross and interpenetrate, coincide they never can.
Our interests, furthermore, are possibly as numerous as our reflex arcs.
Each may, and most do, constitute distinct and independent valuations of their objects, to which they respond, and each, with these objects, remains an irreducible system. But reflex arcs and interests do not act alone. They act like armies; they compound and are integrated, and when so integrated their valuations fuse and constitute the more complex and massive feelings, pleasures and pains, the emotions of anger, of fear, of love; the sentiments of respect, of admiration, of sympathy. They remain, through all degrees of complexity, appraisements of the environment, reactions upon it, behavior toward it, as subject to empirical examination by the psychologist as the environment itself by the physicist.
With a difference, however, a fundamental difference. When you have an emotion you cannot yourself examine it. Effectively as the mind may work in sections, it cannot with sanity be divided against itself nor long remain so. A feeling cannot be had and examined in the same time. And though the investigator who studies the nature of red does not become red, the investigator who studies the actual emotion of anger does tend to become angry. Emotion is infectious; anger begets anger; fear, fear; love, love; hate, hate; actions, relations, attitudes, when actual, integrate and fuse; as feelings, they constitute the sense of behavior, varying according to a changing and unstable equilibrium of factors _within_ the organism; they are actually underneath the skin, and consequently, to know them alive is to have them. On the other hand, to know _things_ is simply to have a relation to them. The same thing may be both loved and hated, desired or spurned, by different minds at the same time or by the same mind at different times. One, for example, values whiskey positively, approaches, absorbs it, aims to increase its quantity and sale; another apprehends it negatively, turns from it, strives to oust it from the world. Then, according to these direct and immediate valuations of whiskey, its place in the common world of the two minds will be determined. To save or destroy it, they may seek to destroy each other. Even similar positive valuations of the object might imply this mutual repugnance and destruction. Thus, rivals in love: they enhance and glorify the same woman, but as she is not otherwise sharable, they strive to eliminate each other. Throughout the world of values the numerical distinctness of the seats or centers of value, whatever their identity otherwise, keeps them ultimately inimical. They may terminate in the common object, but they originate in different souls and they are related to the object like two magnets of like polarity to the same piece of iron that lies between them. Most of what is orderly in society and in science is the outcome of the adjustment of just such oppositions: our civilization is an unstable equilibrium of objects, through the cooeperation, antipathy, and fusion of value-relations.
Individuals are no better off; personality is constructed in the same way. If, indeed, the world had been made for us, we might have been spared this warfare to man upon earth. Life might have been the obvious irrational flow of bliss so vividly described by William James; nature and human nature would have been one; bridging the gulf between them would never have been the task of the tender-minded among philosophers.
Unfortunately our mere numerical difference, the mere numerical difference of the interests which compose our egos, makes the trouble, so that we are compelled to devote most of our lives to converting the different into the same. The major part of our instincts serve this function recognizably, e.g., nutrition, and the "higher powers" do so no less, if not so obviously. Generalization is nothing more, thinking nothing else. It is the assimilation of many instances into one form, law, or purpose; the preservation of established contents of value, just as nutrition is the preservation of life by means of the conversion of foreign matter into the form and substance of the body. By bowels and by brain, what is necessary, what will feed the irrationally given interest, is preserved and consumed: the rest is cast off as waste, as irrelevance, as contradiction.
The relation may, of course, also reverse itself. Face to face with the immovable and inexorable, the mind may accept it with due resignation, or it may challenge its tyranny and exclude it from its world. It may seek or create or discover a substitute that it is content to accept, though this will in turn alter the course and character of the interest which in such an instance defines the mind's action. Thus, a way out for one of the lovers of the same girl might be to become a depressed and yearning bachelor, realizing his potential sexuality in the vicarious reproduction of reverie and sentiment; another might be to divert the stream of his affections to another girl, reorganizing his life about a different center and acquiring a new system of practical values determined by this center; a third might be a complete redirection of his sexual energies upon objects the interest in which we would call, abnormal and anti-social in one case, and in another lofty and spiritual. In the latter case sexuality would have been depersonalized; it would have changed into poetic and humanitarian passion; it would have become love as Plato means us to take the word.
But each of these processes would have been a conversion, through the need defined by an identical instinct, of the _same into the different_; the human nature which existed at the beginning of the change would be deeply other than the human nature in which the change culminated. In each case a condition thrust upon the spirit by its environment would have occasioned the creation and maintenance of an environment demanded by the spirit. Yet in so far as it was not truly _the same_ as that envisaged in the primitive demand, it would still imply the tragedy of the world not made for us and the "problem of evil," in which the life of the spirit is persistently a salvage of one of two always incompatible goods, a saving by surrender.
And this is all that a mind is--an affair of saving and rejecting, of valuing with a system of objects of which a living body and its desires and operations, its interests, are focal and the objects marginal, for its standard. Mind, thus, is neither simple, nor immutable, nor stable; it is a thing to be "changed," "confused," "cleared," "made-up," "trained." One body, I have written elsewhere,[89] "in the course of its lifetime, has many minds, only partially united. Men are all too often "of two minds." The unity of a mind depends on its consistent pursuit of _one_ interest, although we then call it narrow; or on the cooeperation and harmony of its many interests. Frequently, two or more minds may struggle for the possession of the same body; that is, the body may be divided by two elaborately systematized tendencies to act. The beginning of such division occurs wherever there is a difficulty in deciding between alternative modes of behavior; the end is to be observed in those cases of dual or multiple personality in which the body has ordered a great collection of objects and systematized so large a collection of interests in such typically distinct ways as to have set up for itself different and opposed "minds." On the other hand, two or fifty or a million bodies may be "of the same mind."
Unhappily, difference of mind, diversity and conflict of interests is quite as fundamental, if not more so, as sameness of mind, cooeperation and unity of interests. This the philosophical tradition sufficiently attests. To Plato man is at once a protean beast, a lion, and an intellect; the last having for its proper task to rule the first and to regulate the second, which is always rebellious and irruptive.[90] According to the Christian tradition man is at once flesh and spirit, eternally in conflict with one another, and the former is to be mortified that the latter may have eternal life. Common sense divides us into head and heart, never quite at peace with one another. There is no need of piling up citations. Add to the inward disharmonies of mind its incompatibilities with the environment, and you perceive at once how completely it is, from moment to moment, a theater and its life a drama of which the interests that compose it are at once protagonists and directors. The catastrophe of this unceasing drama is always that one or more of the players is driven from the stage of conscious existence. It may be that the environment--social conditions, commercial necessity, intellectual urgency, allies of other interests--will drive it off; it may be that its own intrinsic unpleasantness will banish it, will put it out of mind; whatever the cause, it is put out. Putting it out does not, however, end the drama; putting it out serves to complicate the drama.
For the "new psychology"[91] shows that whenever an interest or a desire or impulsion is put out of the mind, it is really, if not extirpated, put into the mind; it is driven from the conscious level of existence to the unconscious. It retains its force and direction, only its work now lies underground. Its life henceforward consists partly in a direct oppugnance to the inhibitions that keep it down, partly in burrowing beneath and around them and seeking out unwonted channels of escape.
Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness.
Now, empirically and metaphysically, no one interest is more excellent than any other. Repressed or patent, each is, whether in a completely favorable environment or in a completely indifferent universe, or before the bar of an absolute justice, or under the domination of an absolute and universal good, entitled to its free fulfilment and perfect maintenance. Each is a form of the good; the essential content of each is good. That any are not fulfilled, but repressed, is a fact to be recorded, not an appearance to be explained away. And it may turn out that the existence of the fact may explain the effort to explain it away. For where interests are in conflict with each other or with reality, and where the loser is not extirpated, its revenge may be just this self-fulfilment in unreality, in idea, which philosophies of absolute values offer it. Dreams, some of the arts, religion, and philosophy may indeed be considered as such fulfilments, worlds of luxuriant self-realization of all that part of our nature which the harsh conjunctions with the environment overthrow and suppress.
Sometimes abortive self-expressions of frustrated desires, sometimes ideal compensations for the shortcomings of existence, they are always equally ideal reconstructions of the surrounding evil of the world into forms of the good. And because they are compensations in idea, they are substituted for existence, appraised as "true," and "good," and "beautiful," and "real," while the experiences which have suppressed the desires they realize are condemned as illusory and unreal. In them humanity has its freest play and amplest expression.
III This has been, and still to a very great extent remains, most specifically true of philosophy. The environment with which philosophy concerns itself is nothing less than the whole universe; its content is, within the history of its dominant tradition, absolutely general and abstract; it is, of all great human enterprises, even religion, least constrained by the direction and march of events or the mandate of circumstance. Like music, it expresses most truly the immediate and intrinsic interests of the mind, its native bias and its inward goal. It has been constituted, for this reason, of the so-called "normative" sciences, envisaging the non-existent as real, forcing upon nature pure values, forms of the spirit incident to the total life of this world, unmixed with baser matter. To formulate ultimate standards, to be completely and utterly lyrical has been the prerogative of philosophy alone. Since these standards reappear in all other reconstructions of the environment and most clearly in art and in religion, it is pertinent to enumerate them, and to indicate briefly their bearing on existence.
The foremost outstanding is perhaps "the unity of the world."
Confronted by the perplexing menace of the variation of experience, the dichotomies and oppositions of thoughts and things, the fusion and diversifications of many things into one and one into many, mankind has, from the moment it became reflective, felt in the relation of the One and the Many the presence of a riddle that engendered and sustained uneasiness, a mystery that concealed a threat. The mind's own preference, given the physiological processes that condition its existence, constitution, and operation, could hardly come to rest in a more fundamental normation than Unity. A world which is _one_ is easier to live in and with; initial adjustment therein is final adjustment; in its substance there exists nothing sudden and in its character nothing uncontrollable. It guarantees whatever vital equilibrium the organism has achieved in it, ill or good. It secures life in attainment and possession, insuring it repose, simplicity, and spaciousness. A world which is many complicates existence: it demands watchful consideration of irreducible discrete individualities: it necessitates the integration and humanization in a common system of adjustment of entities which in the last analysis refuse all ordering and reject all subordination, consequently keeping the mind on an everlasting jump, compelling it to pay with eternal vigilance the price of being. The preference for unity, then, is almost inevitable, and the history of philosophy, from the Vedas to the Brahma Somaj and from Thales to Bergson, is significantly unanimous in its attempts to prove that the world is, somehow, through and through one. That the oneness requires _proof_ is _prima facie_ evidence that it is a value, a desiderate, not an existence. And how valuable it is may be seen merely in the fact that it derealizes the inner conflict of interests, the incompatibilities between nature and man, the uncertainties of knowledge, and the certainties of evil, and substitutes therefore the ultimate happy unison which "the identity of the different" compels.
Unity is the common desiderate of philosophic systems of all metaphysical types--neutral, materialistic, idealistic. But the dominant tradition has tended to think this unity in terms of _interest_, of _spirit_, of _mentality_. It has tended, in a word, to assimilate nature to human nature, to identify things with the _values_ of things, to envisage the world in the image of man. To it, the world is all spirit, ego, or idea; and if not such through and through, then entirely subservient, in its unhumanized parts, to the purposes and interests of ego, idea, or spirit. Why, is obvious. A world of which the One substance is such constitutes a totality of interest and purpose which faces no conflict and has no enemy. It is fulfilment even before it is need, and need, indeed, is only illusion. Even when its number is many, the world is a better world if the stuff of these many is the _same_ stuff as the spirit of man. For mind is more at home with mind than with things; the pathetic fallacy is the most inevitable and most general.
Although the totality of spirit is conceived as good, that is, as actualizing all our desiderates and ideals, it would still be felt that, even if the totality were evil, and not God, but the Devil ruled the roost, the world so constituted must be better than one utterly non-spiritual. We can understand and be at home with malevolence: it offers at least the benefits of similarity, of companionship, of intimateness, of consubstantiality with _will_; its behavior may be foreseen and its intentions influenced; but no horror can be greater than that of utter aliency. How much of religion turns with a persistent tropism to the consideration of the devil and his works, and how much it has fought his elimination from the cosmic scheme! Yet never because it loved the devil. The deep-lying reason is the fact that the humanization of Evil into Devil mitigates Evil and improves the world. Philosophy has been least free from this corrective and spiritizing bias. Though it has cared less for the devil, it has predominantly repudiated aliency, has sought to prove spirit the cause and substance of the world, and in that degree, to transmute the aliency of nature into sameness with human nature.
With unity and spirituality, _eternity_ makes a third. This norm is a fundamental attribute of the One God himself, and interchangeable with his ineffable name: the Lord is Eternal, and the Eternal, even more than the One, receives the eulogium of exclusive realness. To the philosophical tradition it is the most real. Once more the reason should be obvious. The underlying urge which pushes the mind to think the world as a unity pushes it even more inexorably to think the world as timeless. For unity is asserted only against the perplexities of a manyness which may be static and unchanging, and hence comparatively simple. But eternity is asserted and set against mutability: it is the negation of change, of time, of novelty, of the suddenness and slaughter of the flux of life itself, which consumes what it generates, undermines what it builds and sweeps to destruction what it founds to endure. Change is the arch-enemy of a life which struggles for self-_preservation_, of an intellect which operates spontaneously by the logic of identity, of a will which seeks to convert others into sames.
It substitutes a different self for the old, it falsifies systems of thought and deteriorates systems of life. It makes unity impossible and manyness inevitable. It upsets every actual equilibrium that life attains. It opens the doors and windows of every closed and comfortable cosmos to all transcosmic winds that blow, with whatever they carry of possible danger and possible ill. It is the very soul of chaos in which the pleasant, ordered world is such a little helpless thing. Of this change eternity is by primary intention the negation, as its philological form shows. It is _not-time_, without positive intrinsic content, and in its secondary significances, i.e., in those significances which appear in metaphysical dialectic, without meaning; since it is there a pure negation, intrinsically affirming nothing, of the same character as "not-man" or "not-donkey," standing for a nature altogether unspecific and indeterminable in the residual universe. By a sort of obverse implication it does, however, possess, in the philosophic tradition, a positive content which accrues to it by virtue of what it denies. This content makes it a designation for the persistence and perdurability of desiderated quality--from metaphysical unity and spirituality to the happy hunting-grounds or a woman's affection. At bottom it means the assurance that the contents of value cannot and will not be altered or destroyed, that their natures and their relations to man do not undergo change. There is no recorded attempt to prove that evil is eternal: eternity is _eternity of the good alone_.
Unity, spirituality, and eternity, then, are the forms which contents of value receive under the shaping hands of the philosophic tradition, to which they owe their metaphysical designation and of which the business has so largely and uniquely been to _prove_ them the foundations and ontological roots of universal nature. But "the problem of evil" does not come to complete solution with these. Even in a single, metaphysically spiritual and unchanging world, man himself may still be less than a metaphysical absolute and his proper individuality doomed to absorption, his wishes to obstruction and frustration. Of man, therefore, the tradition posits _immortality_ and _freedom_, and even the materialistic systems have sought to keep somehow room for some form of these goods.
To turn first to immortality. Its source and matrix is less the love of life than the fear of death--that fear which Lucretius, dour poet of disillusion, so nobly deplored. That he had ever himself been possessed of it is not clear, but it is perfectly clear that his altogether sound arguments against it have not abolished its operation, nor its effect upon human character, society, and imagination. Fear which made the gods, made also the immortality of man, the denial of death. What the fear's unmistakable traits may be has never been articulately said, perhaps never can be said. Most of us never may undergo the fear of death; we undergo comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow, intoxication and reaction, love and disgust; we aim to preserve the one and to abolish the other, but we do not knowingly undergo the fear of death.
Indeed, it is logically impossible that we should, since to do so would be to acquire an experience of death such that we should be conscious of being unconscious, sensible of being insensible, aware of being unaware.
We should be required to be and not to be at the same instant, in view of which Lucretius both logically and wisely advises us to remember that when death is, we are not; and when we are, death is not.
Experience and feeling are, however, neither logical nor wise, and to these death is far from the mere non-being which the poet would have us think it. To these it has a positive reality which makes the fear of it a genuine cause of conduct in individuals and in groups, with a basis in knowledge such as is realized in the diminishing of consciousness under anaesthetic, in dreams of certain types, and most generally in the nascent imitation of the _rigor mortis_ which makes looking upon the dead such a horror to most of us. Even then, however, something is lacking toward the complete realization of death, and children and primitive peoples never realize it at all. Its full meaning comes out as _an unsatisfied hunger in the living_ rather than as a condition of the dead, who, alive, would have satisfied this hunger. And the realization of this meaning requires sophistication, requires a lengthy corporate memory and the disillusions which civilization engenders. Primitive peoples ask for no proof of immortality because they have no notion of mortality; civilized thinking has largely concerned itself about the proof of immortality because its assurance of life has been shaken by the realization of death through the gnawing of desire which only the dead could still. The _proof_ which in the history of thought is offered again and again, be it noted, is not of the reality of life, but of the unreality and inefficacy of death. Immortality is like eternity, a negative term; it is _im_mortality. The experienced fact is mortality; and the fear of it is only an inversion of the desire which it frustrates, just as frustrated love becomes hatred. The doctrine of immortality, hence, springs from the fear of death, not from the love of life, and immortality is a value-form, not an existence. Now, although fear of death and love of life are in constant play in character and conduct, neither constitutes the original, innocent urge of life within us. "Will to live," "will to power," "struggle for existence," and other Germanic hypostases of experienced events which the great civil war in Europe is just now giving such an airing, hardly deserve, as natural data, the high metaphysical status that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and company have given them. They follow in fact upon a more primary type of living, acting form, a type to which the "pathetic fallacy" or any other manner of psychologizing may not apply. The most that can be said about this type is that its earlier stages are related to its later ones as potential is to kinetic energy. If, since we are discussing a metaphysical issue, we must mythologize, we might call it the "will to self-expression." Had this "will" chanced to happen in a world which was made for it, or had it itself been the substance of the world, "struggle for existence," "will to live," and "will to power," never could have supervened. All three of these expressions designate data which require an opposite, a counter-will, to give them meaning. There can be a struggle for existence only when there are obstacles thereto, a will to live only when there are obstructions to life, a will to power only when there is a resistance against which power may be exercised. Expression alone is self-implying and self-sufficient, and in an altogether favorable environment we might have realized our instincts, impulses, interests, appetites and desires, expressed and actualized our potentialities, and when our day is done, have ceased, as unconcerned about going on as about starting.
Metchnikoff speaks somewhere of an instinct toward death and the euphoria which accompanies its realization. He cites, I think, no more than two or three cases. To most of us the mere notion of the existence and operation of such an instinct seems fanciful and uncanny. Yet from the standpoint of biology nothing should be more natural. Each living thing has its span, which consists of a cycle from birth through maturation and senescence to dissolution, and the latter half of the process is as "fateful" and "inevitable" as the former! Dying is itself the inexpugnable conclusion of that setting free of organic potentialities which we call life, and if dying seems horrid and unnatural, it seems so because for most of us death is violent, because its occasion is a shock from without, not the realization of a tendency from within. In a completely favorable environment we should not struggle to exist, we should simply exist; we should not will to live, we should simply live, i.e., we should actualize our potentialities and die.
But, once more alas, our environment is not completely favorable, and there's the rub. That disorderly constellation of instincts and appetites and interests which constitutes the personality of the best of us does not work itself out evenly. At the most favorable, our self-realizations are lopsided and distorted. For every capacity of ours in full play, there are a score at least mutilated, sometimes extirpated, always repressed. They never attain the free fullness of expression which is consciousness, or when they do, they find themselves confronted with an opponent which neutralizes their maturation at every point. Hence, as I have already indicated, they remain in, or revert to, the subterranean regions of our lives, and govern the making of our biographies from their seats below. What they fail to attain in fact they succeed in generating in imagination to compensate for the failure; they realize themselves vicariously. The doctrine of immortality is the generic form of such vicarious self-realization, as frequently by means of dead friends and relatives to whose absolute non-being the mind will not assent, as by means of the everlasting heaven in which the mind may forever disport itself amid those delights it had to forego on earth.
Much of the underlying motive of the doctrine is a _sehnsucht_ and nostalgia after the absent dead; little a concern for the continuity of the visible living. And often this passion is so intense that system after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it, and even the most disillusioned of systems--for example, Spinoza's--will preserve its form if not its substance.
That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the "problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over "free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have completely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between