338 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



rationally, — with judgment at once private and yet 

 public ; their own, yet all-embracing and benign. 

 Potency for such judgment, whether yet actualised 

 in time or not, — power to make it real under what- 

 ever conditions, be they of time or of space, be the 

 victorious realisation never so delayed or so gradual, 

 — this is what moral freedom in reality means; as 

 Edwards maintained, power to do, not alone to 

 choose. For moral freedom, the spontaneous activity 

 of reason, chooses its own ideal, not in time, but in 

 eternity. Its own ideal nature is its only absolute 

 or eternal choice ; and its eternal choice is its nature. 

 If \\./ias a task in time, — as indeed it has, — it is there 

 not to choose its aim again, but to make its eternal 

 purpose, its chosen ideal, effectual ; to make it so 

 in the face of that opposing Check which, as we 

 shall presently see,i it introduces into its being by 

 its primal act of self-definition. 



We are not to evade, then, the eternity of free 

 beings that is implied in any serious demand for 

 freedom. If the souls of men are really free, they 

 coexist with God in the eternity which God inhabits, 

 and in the governing total of their self-active being 

 they are of the same nature as he, — they too are 

 self-put rational wholes of self-conscious life. As 

 complete reason is his essence, so is reason their 

 essence — their nature in the large — whatever may 



1 Compare pp. 362-364, below. 



