HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 367 



Nature is not, indeed, in itself sin ; there is no 

 guilt in its mere existence. It is simply part and 

 parcel of the self-definition of the soul, and it has an 

 affirmative as well as a negative aspect, a possible 

 movement upward, toward the free spirit's Ideal, as 

 well as its primary tendency downward and away 

 from this. But it carries with it the risk of sin ; for 

 in admitting the negative principle of defect into its 

 being, the free consciousness opens the possibility 

 that in the antagonism between the two tendencies 

 in its nature it may side with the negative, and not 

 keep alert to the affirmative and its ideal Spring. It 

 may lose, for the time being, its response to the Divine 

 Ideal, and, as Plato says, become ensnared in the 

 natural. Hence, so far as concerned with its merely 

 natural life, it is liable to become slothful, an ignava 

 ratio in a real sense, to repose inert in the form 

 that belongs to it at any given date, and to say, as 

 Mephisto craftily hopes that Faust may be tempted 

 to say of some passing temporal moment, and so be 

 lost, Verweile dock, dii bist so scJidn ! — ■ 

 Oh stay ! thou art so fair. 



course suggest manifold difficulties to the critical mind, difficulties that 

 particularly concern the usually assumed single-unit character of Nature, 

 the possibility of a communal natural life for souls, and especially the 

 possibility and the meaning of wedlock, birth, heredity, and social lia- 

 bility, or " imitation." To go here into these would lead us too far afield. 

 I will merely say that they are no greater than those involved in any 

 system of idealism, and that I hope to deal with them in another place. 



