62 WiscoTisin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



NATUEB AND FKEEDOM. 



BY JOHN J. ELMENDORF. S. T. D., 

 Professor in Racine College. 



Problems which concern the will have always been favorite 

 questions with American psychologists. There has seemed to be 

 a special fascination in the problem of reconciling the thought 

 ot an infinite, omnipotent Being with what men know, or think 

 that they know of freedom in themselves ? I do not hope to 

 add anything towards the solution of the question : on the con- 

 trary, I only allude to it because I desire, as far as possible, to 

 exclude it, in order to consider the relations of man to nature, of 

 the free thinker to that phenomenal world which is one of the 

 most attractive objects of his contemplation and study. 



I notice at present a wide divergence between philosophy in its 

 strictest sense, as based on analysis of the necessary thought of 

 the free ego, and sciences of nature ; i. e., of the world of phenom- 

 ena which are observed, classified, and made the objects of induc- 

 tion, along with an attempt at founding a philosophy upon them 

 exclusively. 



The spheres of the two seem to me to be far apart, and their 

 mexhods, though each involving the other, essentially different. 

 On the one side is the domain of intelligence, freedom, will, con- 

 sciousness, morality, duty, activity. Here is an intelligence so 

 absolute that it hardly seems to be individual, because its note is 

 an absolute oneness in all men ; here is a will, an activity, which 

 is identified with our own personality which attends to and observes 

 all outward phenomena, all inward states, seeks to find their unity 

 and their laws, and demands the liow and the why in all things. 

 It criticises itself, and sits in judgment on its own faculties. To 

 understand it, our method is necessarily introspective, and ana- 

 lytic of any concrete act of volition or of intelligence. 



On the other side is a world of phenomena in which apparently 

 rule blind necessity, unvarying, inflexible order. We are sensi- 



