HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 327 



tinently be said that determinism and freedom are 

 of course compatible enough when they are merely 

 viewed as the two reciprocal aspects of self-activity 

 in a single mind, but that the real difficulty is to rec- 

 oncile the self-determinisms in different free minds. 



Paramount is this difficulty when one of the minds 

 is the supreme God, creator (as he is held) and ruler of 

 all existence. In this case, it becomes plain that the 

 solution of any antagonism between determinism and 

 freedom must depend on solving the conflict appar- 

 ently latent in the contrasted freedoms of God and 

 other beings. If the solution is possible, then, it will 

 only be so by the fact that, on the one hand, perfect 

 intelligence or reason is the essence of God, — who 

 therefore determines all things, not by compulsion, 

 but only in his eternal thought, which views all real 

 possibilities whatever; and that, on the other hand, 

 the spirit other than God also has its freedom in self- 

 active intelligence. This granted, the range of its 

 possibilities is precisely the range of reason again, 

 and so is to God perfectly knowable and known, since 

 it harmonises in its whole with the Eternal Thought 

 that grasps all possibilities, though it is not at all 

 predestined by this. Thus the course of, say, human 

 action, viewed in its totality, since it springs from self- 

 active reason, must in its result, as in its source, 

 freely harmonise with the Reason who is supreme. 



Solution of this knot by any other conceptions of 



