ive, i.e., we should actualize our potentialities and
die.

But, once more alas, our environment is not completely favorable, and
there's the rub. That disorderly constellation of instincts and
appetites and interests which constitutes the personality of the best of
us does not work itself out evenly. At the most favorable, our
self-realizations are lopsided and distorted. For every capacity of ours
in full play, there are a score at least mutilated, sometimes
extirpated, always repressed. They never attain the free fullness of
expression which is consciousness, or when they do, they find themselves
confronted with an opponent which neutralizes their maturation at every
point. Hence, as I have already indicated, they remain in, or revert to,
the subterranean regions of our lives, and govern the making of our
biographies from their seats below. What they fail to attain in fact
they succeed in generating in imagination to compensate for the failure;
they realize themselves vicariously. The doctrine of immortality is the
generic form of such vicarious self-realization, as frequently by means
of dead friends and relatives to whose absolute non-being the mind will
not assent, as by means of the everlasting heaven in which the mind may
forever disport itself amid those delights it had to forego on earth.
Much of the underlying motive of the doctrine is a _sehnsucht_ and
nostalgia after the absent dead; little a concern for the continuity of
the visible living. And often this passion is so intense that system
after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it,
and even the most disillusioned of systems--for example, Spinoza's--will
preserve its form if not its substance.

That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory
desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the
spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon
this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The
assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the
destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom
from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the
"problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over
"free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of
responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the
relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have
com