372 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



which it springs, and of the primal self-defining 

 Check upon perfection, out of which this liability 

 arises, discriminates every soul from God, indelibly 

 and forever. God is God alone, there is but one 

 God, and the souls are at best but his prophets. 



VII 



But now we come upon another objection, which 

 I judge will be the last you can raise. You will say, 

 I suspect, that this world of freedom, self-equipped 

 for sin, is indeed a world which "lieth in wicked- 

 ness," that in truth there is no real hope of good 

 in it : it is a world of inherent and inexpugnable 

 wrong, and not only damnable, but in fact already 

 damned. Yet stay a little : yoii at least, like your 

 classic spokesman Professor James, — to whose essay 

 on the "Dilemma of Determinism" we have been 

 referred, in your list of reading for this year's studies, 

 as the authority upon freedom, — yoii at least are 

 souls that have no complicity with the accursed thing 

 — you have renounced it and its evil ways altogether! 

 Still, you and he are certainly of it ; and so are all 

 men who have attained in their temporal conscious- 

 ness to this mighty "judgment of regret," as he poeti- 

 cally calls the sweeping condemnation of the world. 

 You and he and they are of its process, quite as 

 surely as his Brockton murderer, quite as surely as all 



