Brutus:--

Have you not love enough to bear with me
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

And Brutus answers with a smile:--

Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so!

{154} But, after all, we none of us do exclusively things for which we
wish to escape being blamed; there is hardly anyone who could not name
some occasion on which he has made some sacrifice, foregone an unfair
advantage, declined to listen to selfish promptings, or held some baser
impulse in check. None of these things were done for the sake of
receiving praise; nevertheless, and quite inevitably, the doer felt
praise_worthy_, conscious of an inner accord whose self-attesting power
stamped it a reality, and not an illusion. But Determinism leaves no
room for this emotion, any more than for that of remorse or
blame-worthiness; we cannot get rid of the sense of sin, yet retain the
sense of righteousness. The determinist sponge passes over the whole
moral vocabulary, not only over the inconvenient parts; it obliterates
the terms self-indulgence, dishonesty, cowardice, but the same fate
overtakes self-conquest, integrity, bravery. To vary the phrase
slightly, we must not, on the determinist hypothesis, insult God by
taking credit to ourselves for what He has done. Are we prepared to
surrender the approval of our conscience, the new-won self-respect which
rewards the successful resistance offered to temptation, as having no
basis in fact? And if we are not, what is this but to affirm our freedom
and our responsibility alike in doing and forbearing?

{155}

And this inner sense of peace or discord, according as we have acted thus
or thus--this immediate consciousness that it lay with us to choose
aright or amiss--is both anterior and superior to all argument; it
asserts itself victoriously against all merely intellectual perplexities,
such as are apt to arise when we ask ourselves how man could be free to
commit or not to commit an act, in view of the Divine omniscience. The
contradiction seems a stubborn one, yet in practice we never feel our
freedom circumscribed by it. Probably our difficulty arises largely from
the mistake of applying time-relations to God at all, and thinking of
eternity as an enormously long period instead of timeless Present,
excluding both "unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday." We, of course