l.
They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of his
existence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that a
conflict between motives that have different moral values constantly
arises. That conflict between Predestination and Free Will, which is so
puzzling to untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will know
that in the real world of sensory experience, will is free, just as new
sprung grass is green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. In
the abstract world of reasoning science there is no green, no colour at
all, but certain lengths of vibration; no hardness, but a certain
reaction of molecules; no cold and no pain, but certain molecular
consequences in the nerves that reach the misinterpreting mind. In the
abstract world of reasoning science, moreover, there is a rigid and
inevitable sequence of cause and effect; every act of man could be
foretold to its uttermost detail, if only we knew him and all his
circumstances fully; in the abstract world of reasoned science all
things exist now potentially down to the last moment of infinite time.
But the human will does not exist in the abstract world of reasoned
science, in the world of atoms and vibrations, that rigidly predestinate
scheme of things in space and time. The human will exists in this world
of men and women, in this world where the grass is green and desire
beckons and the choice is often so wide and clear between the sense of
what is desirable and what is more widely and remotely right. In this
world of sense and the daily life, these men will believe with an
absolute conviction, that there is free will and a personal moral
responsibility in relation to that indistinctly seen purpose which is
the sufficient revelation of God to them so far as this sphere of being
goes....

The conception they will have of that purpose will necessarily determine
their ethical scheme. It follows manifestly that if we do really
believe in Almighty God, the more strenuously and successfully we seek
in ourselves and His world to understand the order and progress of
things, and the more clearly we apprehend His purpose, the more assured
and systematic will our ethical basis become.

If, like Huxley, we do not positively believe in God, then we may still
cling to an ethical system which has become an organic part of our lives
and habits, and finding it manifestly in conflict with the purpose of
things, speak of the non-ethical order of