370 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



might have done right instead of wrong. The 

 question of our effectual freedom in the world of 

 experience is simply the question whether we have 

 not a living source of right within us, our own 

 eternal choice, of fuller flood than the counter- 

 current tending to arrest it. But, on the other 

 hand, the presence in us of this essential counter- 

 stream brings the constant risk that the movement 

 in response to the absolute Ideal may in the time- 

 world actually suffer arrest. Nevertheless, this 

 arrest cannot annihilate the potential for goodness 

 that lies in our eternal vision of the Supreme Ideal. 

 That lives on ; and our sin is, that we fail in our 

 time-world to avail ourselves of it, because we 

 temporarily lose experimental realisation of it, and 

 consequently become absorbed in that side of our 

 life which arises directly from our principle of 

 difference — our difference from God. 



Our sense of alternative is the sense that the tran- 

 scending view which connects us with our Divine 

 Ideal, and which moves us evermore toward har- 

 mony with that, is really ever-living, and so affords 

 resources to reduce our defective difference and 

 carry us beyond all temporal actualities. So that 

 when we halt in any stage of these, and act as if 

 our aim and object ended there, and we were there 

 fulfilled, we know that this is false. We know that 

 we have belied our real being, that in our true 



