Freedom of Will Empirically Considered. 3 



physical necessity have nothing to do with truth. They are 

 facts, not truths. The laws of logic are not laws in this 

 sense, the mind must move logically; but in this sense, the 

 mind must move logically if it is to reach the truth. The 

 implication is that the mind may easily move illogically, 

 and miss the truth; that it shapes its own movement to its 

 own object; that it is free, and that truth is the reward of 

 freedom wisely exercised. 



The beauty of the world involves a like conjunction of lib- 

 erty and activity, though less obviously so. Beauty is fitting 

 thought and feelings rendered in a form wholly suitable to 

 them. Its pursuit involves, therefore, an ideal, and a spon- 

 taneous movement toward that ideal. Impulsion and force 

 are alien to beauty. Attraction and freedom are of its very 

 nature. 



Nor, indeed, does the plain idea of serviceabless — ren- 

 dered as man always will render it — lack this notion of lib- 

 erty. The world is made up of forces that may be used, and 

 of powers in man that may use them. It is made up of the 

 fixed and the flexible, and neither term can be lost and the 

 serviceable process remain. State the case strictly under 

 the forms of empirical forces, and not only do virtue, science, 

 art disappear, use also disappears. We use things in this 

 higher sense when we shape them to our purposes. We use 

 air not when we breathe it spontaneously, but when we fill 

 our air-brakes with it. We use water when we convert it 

 into steam in our boilers, rather than when we drink it un- 

 der an organic impulse. If the world, both in matter and in 

 man, is made up of forces under settled laws of interaction, 

 man no more uses matter than matter uses man. If we in- 

 clude in the natural what is causal and fixed, and in the 

 supernatural what is free and flexible, the natural can 

 never be in any way handled or interpreted or used without 

 the supernatural. Whenever interpretation reaches either 

 comprehension or use it must do so by virtue of the super- 

 natural, and in behalf of the supernatural. To these ideas 

 of knowledge and of service the one is as necessary as the 

 other. The knowing and using agent is not at the same 



