The Limits of Evolution/Essay 7
THE HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM
A STUDY IN THE METAPHYSICS OF DIVINE CAUSATION
You have asked me, Mr. President, and members
of the Theological Society,[1] to give my views upon
a question into which I should hardly have made
any public venture of my own motion, at least at the
present time. But as you have been kind enough
to extend the invitation, and also quite urgently,
and as the subject has occupied me much for many
years, with results that may at length have taken
a form definite enough for at least a tentative expression,
I have listened to your hospitable request and
to my interest in the topic, and have perhaps not
let the vastness and the intricacy of the theme give
me the pause they ought. For our subject is the
deep and hitherto very dark question of human
freedom, and its compatibility with the omniscient
and therefore omnipotent supremacy of God.
The historic way of dealing with this has usually been either to assert the Divine Supremacy ruthlessly, to Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/375 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/376 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/377 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/378 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/379 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/380 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/381 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/382 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/383 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/384 cern, namely, that this free Definer, this legislator of predestination upon his world of mere things, is, in accordance with our initial reasoning, himself full of definiteness; he is not undefined, but is self-defining. This is his essence; and so, just because he is free, he is determined, though of course self-determined. He is not and cannot be capricious, formless, whisking in infinitum, self-shattered to chaotic dust and showered into the bottomless void, but is inherently self-planned, purposeful, continuous, coherent, calculable, and thus knowable. So the free being, as self-determined and taken in his whole contents, is definite in both senses of the word: he defines himself, and thus has the definiteness of unpredestination; he defines his empirically real world of things, and thus adds to himself a field of action having the definiteness of predestination, — in a manner arms himself with it, inasmuch as he transcends and controls it.
Our result thus far is, that determinism and freedom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalistic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the definite order characteristic of intelligence; while so far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and freedom proves to be, like determinism, the spontaneous definiteness of active intelligence. And one thing, of the highest importance, we must not overPage:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/386 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/387 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/388 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/389 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/390 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/391 encroachment by denying the freedom of man altogether.
Well, if we grant that finitude is the whole or the characteristic truth about man, then the old theology was wholly right. There is no escaping from the reasoning of an Augustine, a Calvin, an Edwards, except by removing its premise. That premise is the utter finitude of the "creature," resting upon the conception that the Divine functions of creation and regeneration, more especially creation, are operations by what is called "efficient" causation, that is, causation by direct productive energy, whose effects are of course as helpless before it as any motion is before the impact that starts it. Creation thus meant calling the creature into existence at a date, prior to which it had no existence. It was summoned into being by a simple fiat, out of fathomless nothing; and quite so, it was supposed, arose even the human soul, just as all other things arose. In exact keeping with this was the dogma of "irresistible grace": regeneration was the literal re-creation of the divine image, out of the absolute death which it had suffered in the supposed fall of man, — re-creation by just such a miraculous productive efficiency as had originally called the soul out of the void. Human finitude as the summary of human powers, with its consequent complete subjection to Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/393 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/394 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/395 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/396 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/397 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/398 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/399 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/400 democracy,” they will say, “crushes the very spirit of freedom itself, for its exaggerated individualism erases individuality. It is one endless round of dull repetition, a lethal monotone. Universal exaltation to eternity, in destroying God and his differentiating supremacy, has destroyed the interest of existence, has cast a banal blight upon all originality, and so upon all the verve of life. Restore difference, by subordinating man! — or else confess that in a godless exaltation of freedom you have made freedom the deadliest bondage, the bondage to the tame and the stale.” Nor is it sufficient to reply to this, as no doubt one may, with a tu quoque; for though the old-fashioned subordination to the will of the sovereign God also comes to a monotone of death in life, this does not obviate the charge laid at the door of individualism. It simply shows that, to present appearance, neither view contains a solution of the moral-religious problem, and that our search must be pushed farther.
This possible self-contradiction — I do not say it is real; on the contrary, I hope presently to show it is illusory — is not the only difficulty with our moral idealism. In another aspect, the scheme may be charged with polytheism; or again, on other grounds, with atheism. All the members of this required moral system, men or other spirits as well as the supposed God, are unreservedly self-active; Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/402 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/403 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/404 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/405 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/406 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/407 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/408 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/409 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/410 bearing the ominous title Atheism in Philosophy[2] To be sure, monism was in a way Dr. Hedge’s religion, and so pluralism was for him the unpardonable sin. But for every type of the genuinely religious mind, the omission of God must be unpardonable; and what we need in these perplexing discussions is some settlement of what is the central attribute of God, that shall impart to all the others legitimate meaning, and put an end to unmerited charges of atheism.
So that I am now called upon to show that the elevation of the human spirit to genuine freedom, with the consequent placing of the soul in the order of eternal being, so far from transforming men into gods or rendering God superfluous and non-existent, carries us, on the contrary, to just such a central attribute of genuine godhead. I am to show you, too, that in the world of eternal free-agents, the Divine offices called creation and regeneration not only survive, but are transfigured; that in this transfiguration they are merged in one, so that regeneration is implicit in creation, and becomes the logical spring and aim of creation, while creation itself thus insures both generation and regeneration — the existence of the natural order within the spiritual or rational, and subject to this, and the consequent gradual transformation of the natural into the image of the spiritual: Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/412 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/413 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/414 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/415 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/416 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/417 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/418 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/419 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/420 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/421 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/422 to reply: No, you are quite as wrong this time as you were when you called the free system atheism. The system of freedom is genuine monotheism, and the only genuine. All the members of the eternal world except God freely posit themselves as not God, in freely positing God; and God, in positing himself, likewise posits them as not himself. Moreover, this difference from Deity is thought by each spirit's purely thought-put — and therefore free — exclusion of any alternative, as a difference that is defect, the active maintenance or the passive acceptance of which would be sin.
For inasmuch as its characteristic difference is by each spirit thought against the Ideal who is absolute Perfection, the Unity of all possible perfections, all difference from this must include some degree of imperfection, self-posited in the very being of each self-definer. The active consciousness of each is therefore really answerable for the presence of this in his being, but also answerable, by the terms of its being and his, for the rational control of it: answerable, just because the free self-definer is himself the source of it, and yet by his total nature, which eternally contemplates and mirrors God, transcends it. On this ground, the absolutely singular and unrepeatable personality of each soul lies in the exactly identical manner, one and only, in which his thinking differentiates him (1) from Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/424 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/425 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/426 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/427 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/428 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/429 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/430 might have done right instead of wrong. The question of our effectual freedom in the world of experience is simply the question whether we have not a living source of right within us, our own eternal choice, of fuller flood than the countercurrent tending to arrest it. But, on the other hand, the presence in us of this essential counter-stream brings the constant risk that the movement in response to the absolute Ideal may in the time-world actually suffer arrest. Nevertheless, this arrest cannot annihilate the potential for goodness that lies in our eternal vision of the Supreme Ideal. That lives on; and our sin is, that we fail in our time-world to avail ourselves of it, because we temporarily lose experimental realisation of it, and consequently become absorbed in that side of our life which arises directly from our principle of difference — our difference from God.
Our sense of alternative is the sense that the transcending view which connects us with our Divine Ideal, and which moves us evermore toward harmony with that, is really ever-living, and so affords resources to reduce our defective difference and carry us beyond all temporal actualities. So that when we halt in any stage of these, and act as if our aim and object ended there, and we were there fulfilled, we know that this is false. We know that we have belied our real being, that in our true Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/432 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/433 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/434 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/435 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/436 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/437 Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/438 base and of high alike and indifferently; is eating insatiably of “the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” simply for the eating’s sake. We must either maintain our judgments of regret, he says, and so pronounce the determinist world accursed to its core, or else quash our regrets and end in a fatuous optimism which confounds good and evil by reckoning evil really good — “whatever is, is right.” The latter horn of the dilemma, he holds, can only be taken in earnest if “subjectivism” is true; and this, what unharmed conscience can endure?
But if determinism is but one phase of the free life of each spirit, laying down law upon the world which is the field of its possible higher activity, then the dilemma is dissolved. The pair of alternatives do not then exhaust the possibilities: there is at least one other supposition open. Not mere knowledge of good and evil, for its own shameless sake, but knowledge for the sake of action, and resulting now in penitent and now in benignant reform, is then the genuine alternative to pessimism; and this moral use of the evil that freedom causes is the atonement, the justifying atonement, with which the profounder freedom that wells from the eternal fountain of the spirit expiates the surface-freedom’s sin. The atonement is in eternity and from eternity, quite as really as the provision of an apparatus for the sin. It passes thence upon the ceaseless process of the natural life. Thus in the course of ages here and hereafter it is sure to be effectual. But the way is hard, the road of discipline and penitence is long, is across deep and appalling abysses, with many a frightful fall to their bottom, and of this tragic side of our being it is strictly true that —
- The moving Finger writes, and having writ
- Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
- Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
- Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Here speaks the fact of Fate — the changeless bond among experiences, the “irrevocable fixity of the past” embosomed within our very freedom: we “sow in Atê’s fields” and reap the fitting crop. Remorse, remorse! But Fate is the indispensable means to freedom in a shifting world of experience, is therefore a consistent product of freedom, and the passing over of the “judgment of regret” into this judgment of remorse, stirred in us by the sense of Fate, is exactly what makes in our time-world the signal of our eternal freedom, and points to the coming better judgment of repentance and reform. We cannot, indeed, recall the past that is behind any specific present; but it is only a past thus arbitrarily isolated that is fixed. The real past is a flowing whole, and we are forever pouring the future into the flood, through the gate of the present. Our past is really always changing, and it is we who initiate the change; and so the past, though no part of it can be recalled, is perpetually being re-created and transformed, now for the worse, now for the better, as its whole goes on unfolding. But the whole, it is within the compass of our freedom to bring into fuller and fuller harmony with our active vision of our Ideal, in which at source the freedom consists.
This is the life of the responsible universe, the World of Souls: its freedom is only existent in terms of GOD, who, despite the Inexorable Finger, hears in eternity the sigh of the penitent, and accords to him eternally an indwelling fountain of salvation, from “before the foundation of the world.” Thus does He “still the cry of the afflicted”; thus age by age, to ages everlasting, “wipe away all tears,” and grant to each sinning and sorrowing spirit the bliss of repentance consciously free, a redemption that arises out of the soul itself, the merit of virtue that is its own, and a peace that is indeed WITHIN.