DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL. 307 
Kant can only explain the problem by a distinction which 
Schopenhauer calls “the most beautiful and profound which 
humanity has produced,” between the empirical character, and 
the intelligible character, which Schopenhauer compares with 
his great philosophic distinction between phenomena, and 
things per se. Man is transcendentically free, empirically, or 
phenomenally determined. But this distinction amounts to 
admitting our incapacity to understand the combination. 
It may, however, be objected that this is a poor solution of a 
great subject—simply to point out our ignorance of it. May J 
ask you therefore to consider some reasons why it should be 
the right, and only solution. Human personality resembles the 
Divine, in its incomprehensibility. Our Lord constantly 
reminded men that they were Sons of God. The ancient 
philosophies of the East, equally with the writing of our best 
moderns, have held that a belief in the pre-existence of the 
soul is the greatest proof of future immortality. To live for 
ever & parte post, and not to have done so @ parte ante, they 
pronounce to be inconceivable. “Our birth is but a sleep 
and a forgetting; the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, 
hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar.” Our 
birth and personality then are mysteries; who will say he 
understands either? Does it not follow that the problems 
connected with them must contain mystery? We cannot 
reconcile evil and good, or understand how one omnipotent 
Creator can rule in a world where both seem eternally existent, 
yet we accept the incompatible facts. So with free will and 
determinism, the two seem irreconcilable, yet both must be 
believed. In fact, if we could unify our conceptions of per- 
sonality and make these two opposite principles in us clearly 
apprehensible to our minds, then we might assume that, as 
there was no mystery in our human nature, we did not partake 
of the Divine. 
What then are the practical conclusions to be drawn for our 
daily life from the solution I ask you to adopt? There are first 
the conclusions to be drawn from the fact of freedom, and 
secondly, those deducible from the tact of determinism. 
We must always act as if absolutely free. We do so in many 
affairs in life. If we did not, the world would come to an end. 
Men and women would sit still and do nothing; it is surely 
inconsistent to act as if free in certain relationships of life; and 
to make belief in determinism an excuse for not acting in other 
relationships; and this is what the practical necessitarian does. 
If the house in which a man was living were on fire, would he 
