to free will, the germ of free will, the capacity, and the necessary demand, for free will, yet we do not, in fact, possess that real freedom of will, which we cannot but, all the while, both imagine and claim. Something we possess which bears witness of it; which may be developed into it; but which, in its present imperfectness, is in many points even sharply contrasted with it.

It is plain also that we grow more and more towards it, in proportion as our dependence upon, and union of Spirit with, Christ, become more vitally real in us. So that it appears that free will itself,-the very first thing which we most fundamentally claimed as showing what we meant by our own personality, or proving that we were personal indeed, can only then, at last, be consummated in us, when our union is consummated with Christ; and the very Spirit of the Incarnate (in penitence alike, or in holiness, annihilating sin,) is the Spirit, which has become the constitutive reality, of ourselves.

Another claim which our personality makes, and by which it vindicates and explains itself to itself, is the claim to reason or wisdom. We rest upon our capacity of reflection, in self-conscious thought, upon the universe and upon ourselves. "Cogito, ergo sum" is the famous phrase

which sums up a vast region of conscious, or unconscious argument as to the meaning of human personality.

If for the moment, we speak of this claim as the claim to rational faculty, we do so in order to ask a little further what this word rational-or reason-means. Probably we imagine it first as a continuing process, of question and answer, and comparison, and inference, and discovery But question about what? and what does the answer convey? what is compared with what? and what is inferred or discovered? It is worth while to insist from the first that whatever difficulties of intellectual exercise, or

We

gradualness of process, or succession of surprises in discovery, may be in fact contained in our experience of rational capacity, these do not belong to the essence of what reason means. All these belong to the fact of its imperfection, not its essence. They belong to the fact that it is learning to develop, and is still at a very early stage of development. They may be compared to the unexpected puzzles, the comical surprises, and the delightful discoveries, which belong to infants in the earliest stage of acquiring the faculty of walking on their own legs. They are all part of the machinery, and part moreover of that grating and creaking of the machinery, which show that it is not really, as yet, in that proper symmetry of mutual relation, which is the ideal significance of even the clumsiest piece of actual machinery. will decline, then, to mean by "rational faculty" anything in the least like the capacity of ingenious playing with logical processes for the sake of dialectical exercise or victory; or even (as in some cases it may be) for the sake of obscuring and avoiding truth. No; we mean reason, not in its infantine capacity of turning ridiculous intellectual somersaults; nor yet in the strugglings and creakings of its own, as yet, imperfectly adjusted machinery; but we mean that which is the real aim and end of all these things, in its most real and serious sense. We mean the capacity of personal insight into reality of all kinds, and most of all into whatever is highest and most inclusive as reality: we mean personal capacity of beholding wisdom and truth. Truth of course is manifold and multiform. There are truths of material fact: truths of abstract statement: truths of historical occurrence: truths of moral experience: truths of spiritual existence and that truth is deepest and truest, which most includes and unifies them all. Nothing whatever will be gained but mystification and error, from starting

with any conception of reason or "rational" which would make its essential meaning less, or other, than wisdom, personal discernment, the penetrative insight of the very self into truth, as true.

Approaching, then, reason or wisdom in this way, we may say, first of all, that there is one aspect in which it will be much easier in the case of this claim, than in the claim to free will, to see at once that the minds of individual persons realize truth, not in proportion as they are independent of, but rather as they perfectly correspond with and reflect, that larger truth of Mind, which is itself equally true whether reflected in individual apprehension or no. Obviously, in this case at least, the personal perfectness depends not on its diversity from, but on its identity with, a certain larger whole of which the personal perfectness is at most but a part. There is a truth, which is anterior to, and outside of, ourselves. It is in the universe; it is in all existence; it is the intelligibleness of everything; it is the principle of motion by which all things move, of life by which life exists, of order which differentiates the universe from chaos. It is in ourselves; and it is by schooling ourselves to its study and discipline; it is in proportion as we learn, with more perfect apprehension, to enter for ourselves into this Mind of truth, of which our existence, whether material or mental, is already in some sense a part, that we ourselves become, more and more, rational and wise. The claim to reach wisdom by some transcendental method of improving upon, instead of by simple subordination to, the apprehension of things which already are, would be felt, on all hands, to be a claim which must really characterize, not so much the exceptionally wise, as the hopelessly insane.

But if there is one obvious sense, from the first, in which it can be said that individual reason or wisdom only realizes itself, in proportion as it becomes a conscious part

of a much more inclusive whole, faithfully mirroring, because it has become so far self-identified with, what was from the first, and still is, beyond itself: this is but an aspect of a truth which needs further supplementing, in other ways.

This is, so far, an abstract statement, which is true of any finite mind as mind, in relation to anything which can be called truth at all. But it is important to observe that truth is of many kinds, and that different kinds of truth appeal to many different strands in the complex consciousness of man. The truths of infantine experience in material surroundings: the truths of arithmetic: the truths of physiology: the truths of metaphysical philosophy or of moral experience, do not appeal to a single faculty in man. It is not so much true to say that they appeal to different parts of his personality, as that they appealpartly to somewhat different combinations, and still more to somewhat different amounts, or degrees, of that complex completeness which is himself. A moral lesson about truth or falsehood, if really apprehended by a child, not as an interesting story only, but as part of that inner store, which is at once mental knowledge and moral resolve, and which we know as character; has in fact required for its apprehension, and has, in the act of apprehension, really touched and enlarged, a much wider range of experiences and capacities, than any lesson of simple arithmetic, or simple science. All knowledge is not equal as knowledge. There is a real hierarchy of truths; and though every truth has its value, yet a deeper and more abiding value belongs to those which affect and include the widest inclusiveness of human faculties. Now, man's moral consciousness is a wider and more inclusive thing, as consciousness, than what we often call, by an effort of logical abstraction (as if we could really eliminate the mental from the moral, or the moral from the mental), his

"merely" intellectual or rational power. And spiritual truth is that which gives its ultimate meaning to the moral, and alone really vivifies and unifies the entire consciousness of man. It is true that fire burns. It is true that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. The law of gravitation, the principle of the conservation of energy, are statements of truth. It is true that man is mortal. It is true that

goodness is happiness. It is true that God is love. It is true that the perfectness of man's capacity is communion with God. But if these propositions are all true, it is manifest that the truth of some of them includes and affects the entire range, and the noblest consummation, of the capacities of man's personality, in a way in which the truth of others does not. It is manifest moreover that just in proportion as these different truths affect, if true, a wider range of man's being: so they require that wider range of man's being and experience, for the possibility of their apprehension as truths. It is a very small part of man's complex nature by which he fully understands that two and two make four. But communion with God, if ever he fully understands it at all, he will certainly not understand with anything less than the total range of all his capacities, mental, moral, and spiritual. And, moreover, in his understanding of it, he will recognize the hierarchical relation of his own faculties; those that are deepest and highest of capacity obviously transcending, and dominating, even while they include,-those whose range, as more limited, is recognized as being really lower in level.1

1 In connection with this section of the present chapter, I may perhaps be allowed to make reference to an essay on the mutual inter-dependence of "Reason and Religiou," in which I endeavoured, a few years ago, to discuss, with somewhat more fulness, the true meaning, and the different manifestations, of reason. I refer to it in the main, simply as a more expanded statement of my present meaning. But whilst doing so I should like to take