# The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Seth - Freedom as Ethical Postulate

This essay is an attempt to "show the living and paramount ethical interest of freedom." The starting-point is the recognition of the "deep-seated" antithesis between the interests of the scientific or intellectual consciousness on the one hand, and the moral and religious convictions of mankind on the other. This antithesis gives rise to the problem of Freedom. The scientific interpretation of man makes him nothing more than a thing determined or necessitated by other things. But it fails to explain the "characteristic life" of man, or life in "free obedience to a consciously conceived ideal."
Philosophy is called on to "mediate between the seemingly rival claims and interests" of the scientific and the moral consciousness. This task is metaphysical. Examination of pantheism, of materialism, of evolution (biological and mechanical) reveals the fact that the denial or affirmation of freedom follows as a corollary from the general metaphysical theory. Freedom may be vindicated either by the "condemnation of the categories of science as insufficient," or by the "provision of higher and sufficient categories for its explanation." On criticism Kant's proof is found to be but negative. Then, the attempt by the Neo-Hegelian school to give a positive vindication of freedom is passed in review. The question of freedom is found to "resolve itself ultimately into two alternative views of the moral self, viz. the empirical and the transcendental." Criticism of the Hegelian and of the Evolutional accounts of the nature of the self shows that when man is "depersonalized either into God or Nature," necessity is the result. "The reality of freedom is bound up with the integrity of the moral personality."
Then follows a discussion of personality as an ultimate term in philosophical explanation, and personality in its relation to a "scheme of the universe." "The breach between our intellectual and our moral judgments can be only apparent, not real or permanent." Since this is so, we are called on to "understand freedom in its relation to so-called necessity." The reconciliation of freedom and necessity is attempted by an analysis of their meaning. In the writer's own words I give the conclusion of this very able and impartial essay:
Finding that freedom and personality are ultimately one, I accept personality as an ultimate metaphysical conception, like the conceptions of God and the world. . . . These are supreme categories - which include all others, and are not themselves included. With God, they are the three constitutive metaphysical realities. And as Theology takes God, and the Philosophy of Nature takes the World, so must Moral Philosophy take Personality (and with it Freedom) as its supreme and guiding conception.
W. C. Murray.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1945, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 78 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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