n Kant's famous
dictum: that which is "the only good thing in the world--_a good will_."

In one sense, paradoxical as it may sound, much of the strenuous modern
advocacy of Determinism or semi-Determinism is a kind of inverted
acknowledgment of man's consciousness of freedom, _viz._, where that
consciousness appears as the sense of sin. Of course, when a writer like
Mr. Dole assures us that "there is no objection to a moral and spiritual
Determinism that binds all things over into the unity of good," [6] we
merely reply that on the contrary there is the very serious objection
that "all things" are not good. But most advocates of the determinist
position are, to do them justice, well aware of the existence of wrong
and discord in human life; and their object is, by emphasising the
influence of heredity and environment, to remove or at least materially
to lighten, the crushing burden of the sense of sin. The same intention
underlies the effort, occasionally made, to persuade men that, seeing
they are such as God created them, it is not for them to repine at being
what they are, nor to "take too serious a view" of any "penchant for
{151} revolt"--another delightful phrase--they may discover within
themselves; as a recent writer has it, "The responsibility of its
presence _and action_ does not rest with us, nor are we justified in
insulting God who made us, by repenting of what He has done. _We might
as well repent of the tiger and the snake, the earthquake and the tempest
in nature._" [7] What are we to say of this attempt to make God
answerable, not merely for the presence, but for the action, of whatever
impulse to "revolt" of which we may be conscious?

To be quite frank, we cannot think the utterance we have just quoted
other than extraordinarily ill-considered. The simple fact that we
cannot follow _all_ the impulses which arise in us, but have to choose
between higher and lower--the fact that we are well aware of this
conflict of unharmonisable elements within ourselves, some of which can
only triumph at the expense of others--seems sufficiently to dispose of
this writer's main contention. We may not be responsible for the
presence of these warring instincts, but we are undoubtedly responsible
for translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in
check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for
mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or
pr