onscious reference of the mind to it as
good or evil, then the agent who is capable of giving this advantage to
that member of the system may properly be called moral. The man who
willed to marry, and yet willed not to go through the marriage ceremony,
was, as we have seen, irrational. Similarly, if any agent wills an
action without being able to consider any of the consequences which it
may involve as either moral or immoral, such an agent is what we must
properly call unmoral. Even in such an agent, however, the Will may be
free; only it would act without reference to any moral environment, just
as the lunatic above supposed might endeavour to act without reference
to any social environment.

Let us look at the whole matter in yet another light. We have repeatedly
seen that the question of free-will, and therefore of moral
responsibility, depends upon the question as to whether a man's action
in the past might have been other than it was, notwithstanding that all
the conditions under which he was placed remained the same. Now, to this
question only one answer can be given by a dualistic theory of things,
whether materialistic or spiritualistic. For it belongs to the essence
of a dualistic theory to regard the principle of causation as a
principle external to, and independent of, the human mind; consequently,
all the conditions of mental causation being given, a certain result in
the way of volition is necessarily bound to ensue--or, in other words,
at any given time in a man's mental history, his action cannot have
been other than it was. But now, according to the monistic theory, all
causation has a psychical basis--being but the objective expression to
us of the psychical activity of the World-eject. Consequently, according
to this theory, the course of even strictly physical causation is
inevitable or necessary only in so far as the psychical activity of the
World-eject is held to be uniform, or consistent within itself. And
forasmuch as all our knowledge of physical causation is necessarily
empirical, we have but very inadequate means of judging how far this
empirical index is a true gauge of the reality. We can, indeed, predict
an eclipse centuries in advance; but we can only do so on the
supposition that such and such physical conditions remain constant, and
we have no right to affirm that such must be the case. Our knowledge of
physical causation, being but empirical, is probably but a very
inadequate translati