§ 12. True Freedom. — It must not be supposed that anything we have said in this chapter implies a denial of the freedom of the will in the sense in which such freedom is claimed by the ordinary consciousness of humanity. We have only thrown doubt on a certain theory of the nature of such freedom, — the theory which goes by the name of libertarianism, or of contingent choice. By contingent choice is meant a choice which does not issue out of the total process of mental life in accordance with psychological laws, but springs into being of itself as if it were fired out of a pistol. This theory makes free decision arise by a kind of spontaneous generation. Those who oppose libertarianism sometimes call themselves Determinists. Some determinists agree with the libertarians in identifying freedom with contingent choice; they only disagree in denying the existence of such choice. As against both these, we maintain that freedom consists in selfdetermination, and that selfdetermination means self-control. Self-Control, as we have defined it in § 10 (Self Control), consists in "control proceeding from the Self as a whole and determining the Self as a whole. The degree in which it exists depends upon the degree in which this or that special tendency can be brought into relation with the concept of the Self and the system of cognitive tendencies which it includes."* Another way of putting this is to say that acts are free in so far as they flow from the character of the agent ; for character is just the constitution of the Self as a whole. Character exists only in so far as unity and continuity of conscious life exists and manifests itself in systematic consistency of conduct. Animals can scarcely be said to have a character, because their actions flow from disconnected impulse. "If an animal could be supposed to think and speak, it could not refer its actions to itself, but only to its impulse at this or that moment." Character is little developed in savages as compared with civilised men ; for they have relatively little power of considering particular actions in relation to an organised system of conduct. Now the development of character and the development of freedom are two aspects of the same process. A man's acts "are his own only when he is himself in doing them,"— when they express his total character rather than his momentary impulse.

* P. 608.

J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, third edition, p. 95.

Ibid., p. 96. § See especially bk. ii., ch. v., § 12, "The True Self."

It follows from this account that freedom is an ideal which can never be completely realised, and this ideal coincides with that of selfrealisation, as expounded in Professor J. S. Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics. § But the last word about freedom lies neither with Psychology nor with Ethics. Its full discussion involves an examination of the relation between the thought and will of the individual mind, and the reality of the universe. This relation from the point of view of any finite science such as Psychology is utterly inexplicable. The more closely and conscientiously we endeavour to explain it by the ordinary categories of any special science, the more plain it becomes that so regarded it is a miracle, — indeed the miracle of miracles. Psychology cannot explain how it is possible that an individual can consciously mean or intend something. To say that he has a present modification of consciousness which resembles an object is very far from being the same thing as saying that he has a thought of this object, — that he means or intends it. I may now have a toothache, and you may have a toothache exactly like it, but my toothache is not the thought of your toothache. Will and thought are not explicable by such categories as causality, substance, resemblance, or correspondence. Hence, truth and freedom are ultimately topics for the metaphysician. As psychologists, we deal not with the ultimate possibility of will and thought, but only with their mode of occurrence as timeprocesses taking place in the individual mind.