340 
In Christendom for more than a thousand years, from Prosper to 
Bradwardine, from him to Calvin, Jansenius, and Jonathan 
Edwards, a fatalistic literature has greatly infected our Religious 
philosophy, supposed by its adherents to be “ doing honour to 
God,” and scarcely protested against except among the Jesuits. 
Once let us get men to grasp in thought, (as they are obliged to do 
in practical life), that the “ Ego ” is a force, and that “ volition ” 
is but a word that idealizes the going forth of that force, and then 
the first step to higher thinking is taken. We have not at the 
outset to formulate, important as it is, the prm-phenomenal — of 
which we have been obliged here to speak. The nearer fact is 
the “Ego” as a Conscious Force, and its latent sense of 
Responsibility. We know, if we know anything, that we are, 
in some things, the praiseworthy or blameworthy Originators of 
what we rightly call our own acts,” and we repudiate the acts 
of others as “not ours.” Men may equivocate; but without 
this there is no Moral world at all, and they had better say so.* 
34. This conscious force, “ the Ego,” is, we all know, a 
The phiioso- variable force, acting in the midst of a world of many 
must again'bc unconscious forces, which may be invariable; and it 
examined. voluntarily and from itself displays phenomena dif- 
ferent in kind from the invariable, as being outward results of 
its own free inner being; for which results it is approved or dis- 
approved by itself, and by beings of a common Nature and 
common Reason, and above all by the Supreme. 
Such, we repeat, is the pervading fatalism of modern litera- 
ture, that nothing but a philosophy beginning at the beginning 
will meet it. No pious-seeming theox-ies must turn us aside, 
if our Christianity is to be upheld hereafter on moral grounds. To 
commence, (as Mr. Mill), with “ attributes of God,” when we 
have not, in our time, even attempted an Ontology or thought 
of the Pi-xe-phenomenal, can only mislead. The yvwpiga 
will no doubt introduce us to the yvcopi/ia (nrXioq, but slowly 
we learn the 7 viopipa ipireipiae, because -rrX riOog Se \povov 
7toiu rr/v Igirupiav (Eth. } vi. 8 ). 
When any are prepared again to maintain the popular and 
ever-attractive quasi-fatalism in Religion, they will find coad- 
jutors like Mr. Mill, when they will least wish for them; and 
they will have to vindicate at last the position that, whatever be 
the appearances, God has not made free originators of Respon- 
sible action, and that finite conscious beings, freely choosing 
“good or evil,” are probably impossible in the nature of things! 
— Let them prepare for that. 
* See “ The Analysis of Moral Responsibility,” (Vol. IV. of the Trans- 
actions of the Victoria Institute) ; as to the “ True-alwavs.” 
