So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and all, to small compass, we are free, others are not; they are free, we are not; and our freedom is bound by duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again, good and evil are each unmixed, and moral acts serve two masters--that is to say, spring from two sources. We may, therefore, [p.049] still believe in morality--yet how can this be? And freedom--yet how is freedom possible?
But finally, as last to be examined, there is the idea of law, just now brought to attention. This idea is a focus for a good many conflicting views. Witness the familiar argument from the knowledge of law in nature to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is widespread, for the bare fact that we know the laws of nature really emancipates us from the blind fate to which the argument points. Can knowledge ever mean anything but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer is this participation or union. The law we know, then, must have all the meaning and the natural authority of a law of our own enactment, and so must actually have the sanction of our will. Will, I say, cannot help sanctioning knowledge, for knowledge is always true to, because conditioned by, the natural action of the knower. But no such message of freedom, or say of human opportunity in natural necessity, is commonly received by men at large from the evidences of law in nature. Superstitiously they see only fate. Clear knowledge and blind fate!
Nor are we commonly satisfied with only so much superstition. We go still further and make the case as bad as possible by treating the law we know as if in its spirit, if not in its letter, it were final. In other words, we view nature, with some of whose ways we [p.050] have become conversant, not merely as a source of blind fate, or external necessity, for our lives, but also as essentially and ultimately a sphere of strictly mechanical routine. Yet here again we are surely reasoning beyond our premises--the very essence of superstition--for the routine we know can never answer substantially, or even formally, to nature as she really is. Our positive knowledge, our knowledge that arrives at specific formulæ, even though these formulæ reach the noble dignity of mathematics, is bound to be in terms of some particular experience, personal or national or racial; it is relative and special; it is partial knowledge; and he is superstitious, and does, indeed, argue beyond his premises, who takes the whole, whose law he does not know, to be literally analogous to the part, whose law he thinks he knows, but can in fact know only partially. No whole ever is one of its parts, or merely analogous to one of its parts; _a_ law never is _the_ law, or even in its lawfulness literally analogous thereto; and mechanicalism, whether as a popular or a philosophical "ism," has no justification save just this false analogy.