pletely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free
man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all
in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no
desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction
of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or
hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever
a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between
appearance and reality, upon the postulation of the metaphysical
existence of the value-forms of the unity, spirituality, and the
eternity of the world, in the realization of which the wise man founded
his wisdom and gained his freedom. Freedom, then, is an ideal that could
have arisen only in the face of _obstruction to action directed toward
the fulfilling and satisfying of interests_. It is the assurance of the
smooth and uninterrupted flow of behavior; the flow of desire into
fulfilment, of thought into deed, of act into fact. It is perhaps the
most pervasive and fundamental of all desiderates, and in a definite way
the others may be said to derive from it and to realize it. For the
soul's immortality, the world's unity and spirituality and eternity, are
but conditions which facilitate and assure the flow of life without
obstruction. They define a world in which danger, evil, and frustration
are non-existent; they so reconstitute our actual environment that the
obstructions it offers to the course of life are abolished. They make
the world "rational," and in the great philosophic tradition the freedom
of man is held to be a function of the rationality of the world. Thus,
even deterministic solutions of the "problem of freedom" are at bottom
no more than the rationalization of natural existence by the dialectical
removal of obstructions to human existence. Once more, Spinoza's
solution is typical, and its form is that of all idealisms as well. It
ensues by way of identification of the obstruction's interest with those
of the obstructee: the world becomes ego or the ego the world, with
nothing outside to hinder or to interfere. In the absolute, existence is
declared to be value _de facto_; in fact, _de jure_. And by virtue of
this compensating reciprocity the course of life runs free.

Is any proof necessary that these value-forms are not the contents of
the daily life? If there be, why this unvarying succession of attempts
to _prove_ tha