3/8 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



base and of high alike and indifferently ; is eating 

 insatiably of "the tree of knowledge of good and 

 evil," simply for the eating's sake. We must either 

 maintain our judgments of regret, he says, and so 

 pronounce the determinist world accursed to its core, 

 or else quash our regrets and end in a fatuous opti- 

 mism which confounds good and evil by reckoning 

 evil really good — " whatever is, is right." The latter 

 horn of the dilemma, he holds, can only be taken in 

 earnest if "subjectivism" is true; and this, what un- 

 harmed conscience can endure .'' 



But if determinism is but one phase of the free 

 life of each spirit, laying down law upon the world 

 which is the field of its possible higher activity, then 

 the dilemma is dissolved. The pair of alternatives 

 do not then exhaust the possibilities : there is at least 

 one other supposition open. Not mere knowledge of 

 good and evil, for its own shameless sake, but know- 

 ledge for the sake of action, and resulting now in peni- 

 tent and now in benignant reform, is then the genuine 

 alternative to pessimism ; and this moral use of the 

 evil that freedom causes is the atonement, the justify- 

 ing atonement, with which the profounder freedom 

 that wells from the eternal fountain of the spirit ex- 

 piates the surface-freedom's sin. The atonement is 

 in eternity and from eternity, quite as really as the 

 provision of an apparatus for the sin. It passes thence 

 upon the ceaseless process of the natural life. Thus 



