304 ARCHDEACON B. POTTER, M.A., ON 
law. If man is not free, God is not free. Consequently there 
is no difference between mind and matter. All are under 
necessity. In fact the great argument for belief in God 
disappears. The world is not subject toa mindand heart. It is 
under universal self-caused law. It is of no use for me to 
exercise my will, or to try to do anything, for every action is 
predetermined by a foree which cannot be resisted. I cannot 
make my character, because in making it I am ruled by 
motives, and these motives if not there, I cannot place there. 
Is this then the result at which we are to arrive as a result of 
deep-thinking on this mysterious problem ? 
There are also strong feelings in man which imply freedom, 
e., remorse. How can a man be tortured by remorse if in 
sinning he had no power over his actions? Why should he be 
condemned to punishment for sins he was bound to commit ? 
Why should we feel angry with a person who has wronged us, 
if in doing so he was the slave of character; and if in the 
formation of that character he could have had no part ? 
Let me now endeavour to place before you some of the 
ways in which different thinkers have tried to reconcile our 
consciousness of freedom with the apparent law that every act 
is deterinined by character, or motive, or circumstance. 
We may divide these classes of explanation into two heads. 
First, those which try to explain away free-will and make it an 
illusion ; secondly, the opposite line of thought which tries to 
reconcile a real freedom in the will with the facts making for 
Determinism. My own belief is, as I have said, that both 
efforts fail; and that the real fact is that these apparently 
totally opposed phenomena of human personality are both true, 
and yet both irreconcilable by the human intellect. 
Riehl claims to have solved the problem. His words are: 
“Modern philosophy may claim to have discovered the laws of 
motive for the will, and to have reached the true conception of 
mind.” One agrees with Riehl in saying that “morality stands 
and determinism is a scientific truth.” But one differs from 
him in thinking that the combination is comprehensible to us. 
If it be true, as he and Spinoza say, that the will only appears 
free because the causes which move it do not come into 
consciousness, can we understand the use of appealing to the 
will, and of a person trying to exert will? If the will is 
determined by character, how can the will influence character ? 
In its motives to improve itself it is ruled by a pre-existing 
condition. If that condition had not existed, it could not act 
so as to improve its character. Riehl distinguished between 
