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affirmation, springing from a region unaffected by inductive evidence. It will also be always met by the recoil of the feelings of mankind from the doctrine of non-responsibility for action, the logical outcome of that denial. It may be safely affirmed that, allowing for hereditary tendency, and the influence of constraining circumstances, the race will continue to apportion its praise and its blame to individuals on the ground that human action might take shape in either of two contrary directions, according to the choice and determination of the will. No action ever arises absolutely de novo, unaffected by antecedent causes, both active and latent; neither is any action absolutely determined from without or from behind. In each act of choice the causal nexus remains unsevered, while the act itself is ethically free and undetermined. In other words, affirming the moral autonomy of the will, we deny the liberty of libertarian indifference; and affirming the integrity of the causal nexus, we reject the despotism of necessitarian fate: and maintain that in so doing we are not affirming and denying the same thing at the same time, but are true to the facts of consciousness, and preserve a moral eclecticism which has its evidence in the personality of the agent. The two rival schemes of Liberty and Necessity, both "resistless in assault, but impotent in defence," are practically overthrown by the ease with which each annihilates the other. To exhibit the rationale of this would require a long chapter. Leaving it, therefore, and assuming the freedom we make no attempt to demonstrate, the speciality of the conscience which legislates in the region of mixed motive and variable choice is at once its absoluteness and its independence of the individual. It announces itself, in Kantian phrase, as the "categorical imperative." It is ours, not as an emotion or passion is ours. We speak in a figure of the voice of the conscience; implying, in our popular use of the term, its independence of us. It is not our own voice; or, if the voice of the higher self, in contrast with the lower which it controls, it is an inspiration in us-the whispered suggestion of a monitor "throned within our other powers." If it were merely the remonstrance of one part of our nature against the workings of another part, we might question its right to do more than claim to be an equal inmate of the house. In any case disregard of it would amount to nothing more serious. than a loss of harmony, a false note marring the music of human action, or a flaw in argument that disarranged the sequence of thought. But in the moral imperative which commands us categorically, and acts without our order, and cannot be silenced by us, which is in us yet not of us, we find the hints of a Personality that is girding and enfolding ours. As admirably expressed by Professor Newman

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"This energy of life within is ours, yet it is not we.

It is in us, it belongs to us, yet we cannot control it.

It acts without our bidding, and when we do not think of it.
Nor will it cease its acting at our command, or otherwise obey us.
But while it recalls from evil, and reproaches us for evil,
And is not silenced by our effort, surely it is not we;
Yet it pervades mankind, as one life pervades the trees."

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It is not that we are conscious of the restraints of law, of a fence or boundary laid down by statute. But in the most delicate suggestions and surmises of this monitor we are aware of a Presence "besetting us" (as the Hebrews put it) "before and behind," penetrating the soul, pressing its appeals upon us, yet withdrawing itself the moment it has uttered its voice, and leaving us to the exercise of our own freedom. The most significant fact, if not the most noticeable, in the relation of the conscience to the will, is its quick suggestion of what ought to be done, and the entire absence of subsequent compulsion in the doing of it. When the force of the moral imperative is felt most absolutely, the hand of external necessity is withdrawn, that we may act freely. Consciously hemmed in and weighed down by physical forces which we are powerless to resist, the pressure of this girding necessity is relaxed within the moral sphere, and we are free to go to the right hand or the left, when duty appeals to us on the one side and desire on the other. This has been so excellently put by Mr. Richard Hutton, in his essay on "The Atheistic Explanation of Religion," that I may quote a sentence which sums up the ethical argument for the Divine Personality better than any other that I am aware of :

"Accustomed as man is to feel his personal feebleness, his entire subordination to the physical forces of the universe, in the case of moral duty he finds this almost constant pressure remarkably withdrawn at the very crisis in which the import of his actions is brought home to him with the most vivid conviction. Of what nature can a power be that moves us hither and thither through the ordinary course of our lives, but withdraws its hand at those critical points where we have the clearest sense of authority, in order to let us act for ourselves? The absolute control that sways so much of our life is waived just where we are impressed with the most profound conviction that there is but one path in which we can move with a free heart. If so, are we not then surely watched? Is it not clear that the Power which has therein ceased to move us has retired only to observe ? The mind is pursued into its freest movements by this belief, that the Power within could only voluntarily have receded from its task of moulding us, in order to keep watch over us, as we mould ourselves."†

Thus the distinction or dualism which is involved in all our knowledge comes out into sharpest prominence in its moral section. We rise at once above the uniformity of mere pheno

* Theism, p. 13. Cf. Fénélon, De l'Existence de Dieu, Part I. c. 1, § 29; also J. H Newman, Grammar of Assent, Part I. c. 5, § 1.

† Essays, Theological and Literary, pp. 41, 42.

menal succession, and out of the thraldom of necessity, by our recognition of a transcendent element latent in the conscience. We escape from the circle of self altogether in the "otherness" of moral law. It is in the ethical field that we meet with the most significant facts, which prevent us from gliding through a seductive love of unity into a solution of the problem of existence that is pantheistic or unitarian. The fascination of the pursuit of unity through all the diversities of finite existence has given rise to many philosophical systems that have twisted the facts of consciousness to one side. But unity by itself is as unintelligible as diversity minus unity is unthinkable. If there were but one selfexisting substance of which all individual and particular forms of being were mere tributary rills, the relation of any single rill to its source, and to the whole, would be merely that of derivation. Moral ties would thus be lost in a union that was purely physical. On this theory, the universe would be one, only because there was nothing in it to unite; whereas all moral unity implies diversity, and is based upon it. There must be a difference in the things that are connected by an underlying and under-working affinity. And we find this difference most apparent in the phenomena of the moral consciousness. While therefore the moral law legislates and desire opposes, in the struggle that ensues between inclination and duty we trace the working of a principle that has not grown out of our desires and their gratification. We discover that we are not, like the links in the chain of physical nature, mere passive instruments for the development of the increasing purpose of things; but that we exist for the unfolding, disciplining, and completing of a new life of self-control, and the inward mastery of impulse, through which at the crises of our decision a new world of experience is entered.

We cannot tell when this began. Its origin is lost in the golden haze that is wrapped around our infancy, when moral life is not consciously distinguishable from automatic action. But as the scope of our faculties enlarges, a point is reached when the individual perceives the significance of freedom, the meaning of the august rules of righteousness, and the grave issues of his voluntary choice. It is then that conscience

"Gives out at times

A little flash, a mystic hint"

of a Personality distinct from ours, yet kindred to it, in the unity of which it lives and has its being. Whence come those suggestions of the Infinite that flit athwart the stage of consciousness, in all our struggle and aspiration after the ideal, if not from a personal source kindred to themselves? We do not create our own longings in this direction. On the contrary, as we

advance from infancy to maturity, do we not awaken by progressive steps to the knowledge of a vast overshadowing Personality unseen and supersensible, recognized at intervals, then lost to view -known and unknown-surrounding, enfolding, inspiring, and appealing to us, in the suggestions of the moral faculty? In addition, our sense of the boundlessness of duty brings with it a suggestion of the infinity of its source. We know it to be beyond ourselves and higher than we, extra-human, even extra-mundane; while on other grounds we know it to be also intra-human and intra-mundane. We find no difficulty in realizing that the Personality revealed to us in conscience may have infinite relations and affinities, because in no district of the universe can we conceive the verdict of the moral law reversed. Nowhere would it be right not "to do justly, and to love mercy," though the practical rules and minor canons of morality may, like all ceremonial codes, change with the place in which they originate, and the circumstances which give rise to them. If, therefore, the suffrage of the race has not created this inward monitor, and if its sway is coextensive with the sphere of moral agency-its range as vast as its authority is absolute, in these facts we have corroborative evidence of the union of the Personal with the Infinite.

WILLIAM KNIGHT.

PROFESSOR CAIRNES ON VALUE.

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OST members of the Political Economy Club must be familiar with an anecdote of Sydney Smith, who not many months after joining the club announced his intention to retire, and, on being asked the reason, replied that his chief motive for joining had been to discover what Value is, but that all he had discovered was that the rest of the club knew as little about the matter as he did. That this sarcasm, however severe, was probably not unmerited, may be inferred from the haze with which the object of Sydney Smith's curiosity is still surrounded, and from the, at best, but very partial success of the recent attempt made by so powerful a thinker as my lamented friend, the late Professor Cairnes, to pierce the cloudy envelope.

In common parlance, the word Value has more than one signification, but, at the outset of his "Leading Principles,"* Cairnes represents all economists as agreed that in economic discussion, the term should be restricted to "expressing the ratio in which commodities are commercially exchangeable against each other -against each other, be it observed, not against some selected commodity and this ratio he proposes to call "exchange value." Evidently, according to this definition, "a general rise or a general

Some Leading Principles of Political Economy newly Expounded. By J. E. Cairnes, M.A. Macmillan & Co.

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