from its own nature, the dwells cannot be free. man in whom it It lies in the very conception of freedom, that the subject of it should have power to choose his own action, and that this power should involve the possibility of his making a different choice from that which he is led to make in fact. He acts from himself, and for himself, and not in obedience merely to an extraneous power, whether in the sphere of nature, or in the sphere of spirit. The action springs truly and fully out of his own conscious purpose and design, and is strictly the product of that separate living nature which he calls himself. This is what Kant makes so much account of, in his philosophy, as the autonomy of the will. The idea is one of vast importance, notwithstanding the great abuse which has been made of it in his school. The will, in its very nature, must be autonomic in order that it may be free; that is, it must be a law to itself, in such sense that its activity shall be purely and strictly its own in opposition to the thought of everything like compulsion exerted upon it from abroad. It is a world within itself, no less magnificent than that with which it is surrounded in the external universe; and it may not be invaded by any form of power, that is not comprehended from the beginning in its own constitution. All such power, proceeding from earth, or hell, or heaven, must be counted heteronomic, and contradictory to its nature. The will can endure no heteronomy. It must be autonomic, subjectively independent, the fountain of its own activity, wherever it is found in its true and proper exercise. This then is the first grand constituent of Moral Freedom. The idea implies universally the presence of an individual will, which, as such, is perfectly unbound from all heteronomic extraneous restraints, and carries in itself the principle of its own action, in the way of law and impulse to itself. There can be no liberty where there is no subjective independence. But such autonomic will is not of itself at once, as some appear to think, the whole conception of freedom. This requires another constituent factor, no less essential than the first; the presence, namely, of an objective universal LAW, by which the individual will is of right bound, and without obedience to which it can never be true to its own nature. Self-consciousness is itself the power of a life that is general and universal, as well as individual. All life we have already seen to be the union of these two forms of existence in fact; though in the sphere of nature, of course, the fact prevails only in an outward and blind way. With the light of intelligence, however, including in itself the force of self-apprehension and self-action, it must itself enter into the life of the subject under the same charac ter. That is, the union of the general and individual must hold in the form of consciousness itself; so that the subject of this, in coming to know himself properly as an individual being, shall have at the same time the apprehension of a life more comprehensive than his own, and, indeed, truly universal, in the bosom of which his own is carried as the necessary condition of its existence. It is the complete sense of this, theoretically and practically felt, that gives us the fact of personality; which is just the consciousness of an individual life, in the form of reason and will, as the universal truth of the world's life. Reason cannot be something merely particular or private. It is universal in its very nature. It is so theoretically, and it is so, also, of course, practically. In entering the sphere of thought and will, then, as distinguished from that of mere nature, man comes into conscious union with a life which is more than his own, and which exists independently altogether of his particular knowledge or choice. He does not create it in any sense, but is simply received into it as a sea of existence already at hand, and altogether objective to himself as a separate single subject; while he knows it to be in truth, at the same time, the only proper form of his individual life itself subjectively considered. If this were not the case, there could be no room, in his case, for the idea either of intelligence or freedom. A purely particular or single intelligence would be as blind as the stork, which knoweth, we are told, her appointed times in the heaven; and a purely particular or single will, in like manner, would be as little free as the wind, which is said to blow where it listeth, or as a wave of the sea driven of the same wind, and tossed hither and thither without object or rule. Reason and will, to be truly subjective, must be apprehended always as truly objective, also, and universal. This necessity lies, as we have said, in the very idea of consciousness itself, and is the foundation of all personal life in the case of men. But the idea now of such universal reason and will, is itself the conception of law, in its deepest and most comprehensive sense. This is nothing more nor less than this boundless objective authority or necessity, in which the individual life of the human subject is required to enter freely that it may be complete. upheld for a single hour. The world, in its moral no less than in its physical constitution, lives, moves and has its being, only in the presence of the law, as a real existence in no sense dependent upon it for its character. Not indeed as though it might be supposed to exist, with its own separate entity, in no connection with the actual world whatever. As the ideal life of nature, it cannot be sundered from the actual manifestation in which this consists; and as the absolute truth and right of the moral universe, it cannot subsist except through the consciousness of the thinking and willing subjects of which this universe is composed. Abit-stracted from all subjective intelligence, its objective reality is reduced to a nullity. It is only in the form of reason and will, which have no being apart from selfconsciousness, that the law can have any true subsistence whatever. It supposes an intelligible and intelligent universe. But still it is no creature of the universe, no mere image abstracted from its actual constitution. In the order of being, though not of time, it is older than the universe. Without reason and will there could be no law, and yet all reason and will stand in it from the very start, and can enter into no living subject whatever except from its presence, as their ulterior objective source and ground. The law, in this character, is of course an idea, not an abstraction. It has in self, accordingly, the two grand attributes of an idea, universality and necessity. Its universality is not simply this, that it represents collectively all individual wills, or objects of will. On the contrary, it excludes every sort of distinction and comparison. No individual will, as such, can enter into the constitution of the law. It is absolute, and one within itself, merely revealing its presence through the single wills into which it enters, without deriving from them at all its being and force. So, again, its necessity is not simply this, that the world cannot be preserved in prosperity and order without it, or that the world itself may have been pleased to agree in establishing its authority as sacred. It is a necessity which is altogether unconditional, and which rests eternally and unchangeably in the nature of the law itself. As thus universal and necessary, the being of the law is infinitely real. It is not simply the thought or conception of what is right, not a name merely or mental abstraction representing a certain order of life which men are required to observe; but it is the very forms of truth and right themselves, the absolutely independent power by which they exist in the world. As in the sphere of nature, the law is in no respect the product of the forces which are comprehended in nature itself, but forms rather the inmost life of its entire constitution, which could not consist at all if it were not held together by this bond; so here in the sphere of free intelligence also, it is by no other power that the order of life, as thus intelligent and free, can be Concretely real in this way, and not simply an abstraction, the law has its seat primarily, as Hooker expresses it, in the bosom of God. Not so, however, as if God might be supposed, in the exercise of any private arbitrary will of his own, to have devised and ordained it as a proper scheme after which to fashion the order of the universe. The universality of the law excludes, as we have already seen, the idea of all merely private or particular will. even though it were conceived to be in this form the will of God himself. God's will, however, is not private or particular, but absolute; subjective indeed, in such sense as is required by the nature of personality, but objective and universal at the same time; these two forms of existence, subjective and objective, being with Him absolutely commensurate and identical. God is not the author of the law, as something standing out of himself and beyond himself; he does not make it, as a man might frame an instrument to serve some purpose which he has, under another form, in his own mind. Still less, of course, may the law be said, in any sense, to make Him, as though it were a power before Him in authority, determining the manner of his existence. It has its being only in God and from God; not however as something different from the Divine mind itself. It is the necessary form of God's infinitely wise and holy will, as exercised in the creation and support of the actual universe, considered both as nature and spirit. Thus resident primarily in the Divine will, and identical with it throughout, the law at the same time, in its objective character, passes over into the actual order of the world, and reveals itself here also as a power to be acknowledged and obeyed, under the most real and concrete form. In the sphere of nature the universal and singular are brought together, not directly and immediately, but through the medium of the particular, constituting what we denominate the species or kind, as distinguished from the genus. Thus the tree is not what it is, by receiving into itself at once the universal vegetable life; but only as this life has previously undergone a distinction within itself, by which it may be recognized as vegetation under this or that specific form; it can become a tree, only as it puts on at the same time the type of some particular tree, locust, for instance, or ash, or elm, so as to be known accordingly in this character and no other. And just so in the sphere of the moral world, where the law has to do with intelligence and will. As universal or ideal, it is not carried over at once into the consciousness of each individual subject in an original and independent way; but the case requires necessarily that it should, in the first place, resolve itself into certain particular orders or forms of authority, through which intermediately its presence may afterwards thus actualize itself in full for the single will. As no single man is the human race, but only a part of it, having the truth of his being in the organic relations by which he is comprehended, through the family and state, in the whole; so the law, which is an objective rule and measure for the whole, and only for the parts as comprehended in this, and not as sundered from it, can never come near to any man in the way of an absolutely singular and exclusive revelation. It can reach him really, only by passing through the organic system, in which alone it takes cognizance at all of his existence. Under such view, it has an actual concrete being in the world itself, and is wrought objectively into the very constitution of its rational and moral life, as imbodied in the form of human society and made to reveal itself continually in the process of human history. Such, we say, is the conception in general of the law, which is the other grand factor or constituent of Moral Freedom; the first having exhibited itself to us before in the necessary independence or autonomy of the individual subject. It remains now to consider how these two great forces are joined together in its constitution. Separately considered, they seem to oppose and overthrow each other. If the will be absolutely autonomic and independent in its subjective character, how can it be absolutely bound at the same time by a force that comes from beyond itself, the purely objective authority of law? And if it be thus bound, placed under necessity, comprehended in a power which is broader than itself, and older than itself, how can it be said to be in any proper sense its own law, and the fountain of its own action? It is clear that no merely mechanical union here can escape the power of this contradiction. If we suppose the single will to be, in the first place, something complete by itself, and then think of the law as existing in the same separate way, each including in itself the claims which belong to it, as they have now been described, the two conceptions must necessarily contradict each other, and cannot be brought in such form to any true reconciliation. If the subject feel himself in mere juxtaposition with the law, having it over against his consciousness as a form of existence different from his own, it will not be possible for him to assert his own independence, without resenting and resisting the pretensions of the law at the same time, as a heteronomic, foreign force. Nor will it be possible for the law, in the same circumstances, to acknowledge or respect the independence of the human subject. It must necessarily assume the tone of command, arraying against him the majesty of its own everlasting nature, and with the weight of its terrible categoric imperative, Thou shalt, crushing his liberty completely to the earth. In such a relation, there is no room for the idea of moral freedom. It is slavish in its very nature. The liberty which the subject may still pretend to assert for himself, becomes necessarily licentiousness and sin; while, on the other hand, any obedience he may seem to yield to the law, as being thus forced and external, can have no reality or worth in the view of the law itself. moment, be drawn together with the greater force, and whose union, as it is the result, is also the indispensable condition always of the separation out of which it grows. Such polar distinction enters, in fact, into the very idea of concrete existence. Where there is no distinction, there can be no concretion, but only meaningless and powerless abstraction, or, at best, the ideal possibility of an existence which has not yet become real. Distinction, however, involves opposition, or the setting of one thing over against another. Only where this has taken place, then, is there any room for the union that all proper reality implies. But such union shows the two sides thus sundered, to be at the same time necessary to each other. The opposition is polar only, and as such conservative and not destructional. All or We may be assisted to a right appre Such is the relation which holds in fact between human consciousness and the law in a state of sin. The two forms of existence are still incapable of being absolutely sundered; but they are bound to-ganized, concrete existence, physical or gether only in an outward, unfree way. spiritual, will be found to carry in itself a The law cannot relax its right to rule the polarity of this kind. sinner's will; but it stands over him merely in the attitude of despotic commi-hension of the point in hand, by referring nation. The sinner, too, can never emancipate himself entirely from the sense of the law, for that were to lose his hold upon himself at the same time; but he has it over against him only as an objective might, in whose favor he is required to renounce the separate self, which he has come to regard as his true and proper life. Hence continual rebellion only, and continual guilt. The law, in such circumstances, has no power to bring light or freedom, strength or peace, into the soul. It is necessarily the ministration only of sin and death. Emphatically it works wrath. In distinction from all such merely outward and mechanical conjunction of the two opposing forces, liberty and authority, from which can proceed at best only a powerless, unfree morality, the true idea of human freedom, we say now, requires their internal organic union as constituent elements of one and the same life. The opposition of the two forces, in this case, remains in its full strength; each is left in the possession of its separate independent character; neither is permitted to exclude or overwhelm the other; but the opposition is simply that which belongs to the contrary poles of the magnet, which fly asunder only that they may, at the same again to the constitution of life, as we have Bring all this into the sphere of con sciousness, so that the union in question shall be, not blind and unavoidable, but the movement of clear, spontaneous intelligence, acting from itself and for itself, and we have the conception of Moral Freedom. The existence here is not a mere object, wrought upon by an action strange to itself, but a subject which has come to be possessed of its activity as the very form of its own being. It is as though the planet, moving in its appointed orbit, were made to awake within itself to the clear knowledge of its own nature, with full power at the same time to pursue any course through the heavens that to itself might seem best; while it should still continue true notwithstanding, as before, to the path prescribed for it, no less bound by objective law, but bound always only by its own consent. Should such a rational planet, in the exercise of its liberty, strike off from its orbit, affecting to play the part of some wandering comet, it must, in the same moment, become unfree; as much so, at least, as when carried forward in its true course by the force of mere blind natural law. Only the power of choice making it possible for it to become a comet, but yet spontaneously embracing the true planetary motion in fact, identified thus with the sense of law, could constitute it the subject of freedom. Neither as bound simply, nor as simply unbound, would the planet be free; but only as bound and unbound, at the same time, and in the same continuous action; the two forms of existence joined together as the power of a single fact, in the sphere of consciousness; the law coming to its proper expression only in the independence of the subject, and the independence of the subject having no reality, save under the form of obedience to the law. What may be thus imagined in the case of a planet, to illustrate the conception in hand, is the very constitution of man in his normal state. He is formed for freedom, and becomes complete only in this character, by the possibility he carries in himself of such a living, conscious free union, as has now been mentioned, of the great polar forces of the world's life. He has a will of his own, and he is at the same time under a law which is not himself; he is conscious of both, as making realities in his existence; and, to crown all, he is capable of so acknowledging both, that they shall actually grow into each other as the same consciousness. The union of the two powers, in such case, is not mechanical, but organic and real; as truly so as the flowing together of the ideal and actual, in the constitution of a plant or tree; only with the difference, that what is blindly necessary there, has become here the self-comprehending activity of the living nature itself. This is Freedom. In no other form can it exist for men at all. It is the action of the individual will, moving of its own accord and apart from all compulsion, in the orbit of the law, with clear sense of its authority, and clear private election in its favor, at the same time. This implies, of course, that the will is of the same nature with the law. They are thus related, in fact, as we have already seen. In obeying the law, the will obeys in reality its own true constitution; as much so as fire does, for instance, in exhibiting the properties which show it to be fire, and not water. So, in breaking away from the law, it necessarily becomes false to itself, to the same extent. Thus all apparent contradiction is resolved in the idea of freedom as now described. Authority involves necessity, while liberty is the very opposite; and still both are here inseparably joined together, in such way, indeed, that neither can exist at all, in its true form, without the other. Freedom, in order that it may be free, must be bound. But in this case it is self-bound; not arbitrarily, however, to a rule of its own invention, which would be again to be unfree, but in obedience to the law, as the necessary form of its own existence. The will of the subject is ruled by a force that comes from beyond itself, and yet it is strictly autonomic at the same time; even as the rose blooms forth always its proper single life, though it is only as filled with the general law of vegetation that it has power to bloom at all. The law so enters the subject, as to become within him a continually self-originated obligation; while his private will is so comprehended in the law, as to find in it no foreign constraint whatever. Such is the proper theory of human freedom, whether considered as religious or as simply political. It is formed by the union of liberty and authority, so joined together that neither is allowed to exclude |