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Updated: May 8, 2025
Even matter may have its own power of insistence and resistance how much more mind and will. This consideration may give us a yet clearer clue to the mysteries of failure, miscarriage, and waste. A world that was to produce self-conscious, self-determining personalities needed to have freedom through the whole of its development; and the consequent risk and possible cost were inevitable.
Everything referring merely to utility, externality, and the like, must be excluded from its philosophic treatment. That the State is the self-determining and the completely sovereign will, the final decision being necessarily referred to it that is easy to comprehend. The difficulty lies in grasping this "I will" as a person. By this it is not meant that the monarch can act arbitrarily.
For that declaration of the very inmost essence of the divine nature is not merely the declaration, in half metaphysical terms, of a self-substituting, self-determining Being, high above limitation and time and change, but it is a declaration that when He loves He loves freely and unmodified save by the constraint of His own Being.
Idealism has really contributed nothing to the solution of the difficulty which is persistent as long as God is known only as a Sovereign and Infinite Personality among a multitude of finite personalities, and until revelation hints at the possibility of a higher "unity which transcends personality, by which He is to be the reconciling principle and home of the multitude of self-determining agents."
Such, in my opinion, is the existence of a distinction between right and wrong, different from and higher than the distinction between pleasure and pain, and subsisting in all human nature in spite of great diversities of opinion about the acts and qualities that are comprised in either category; and such also is the kindred belief in a self-determining will.
And when I compared the human will to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization, education, condition.
Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend the "Autocrat," which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by omitting the very word which gives it its significance, the word fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will, holds it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.
It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious compages or frame-work has survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity; that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select the very locality where this audacious generalization has been acted upon.
The same self-determining power which that doctrine attributes to volitions, was supposed by the ancients to be possessed also by some other natural phenomena: a circumstance which throws considerable light on more than one of the supposed invincible necessities of belief.
It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious compages or frame-work has survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity; that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select the very locality where this audacious generalization has been acted upon.
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