Josiah Royce
(1855-1916)
How are our finite wills related to this freedom? Are we predestined to our place in the world-order? Are we "impotent pieces of the game he plays?" Our wills are part of his freedom. And hereby we too are free. Our conscious volition is a fragment of the freedom of the World-Will.(SMP, p.430)
But how, one may ask, can I be in any sense thus free? How explain such a paradox? In answer I appeal afresh to that double aspect which the world has already presented to us. The order of nature...because it does all of it express one law, just because it must all be absolutely foreknown, is present in one time-transcending instant to the insight of the Logos. (SMP, p.430)
You are not morally free to change laws in this world. But you are moral and free because you are in the eternal sense a part of the World-Creator.
"I believe evil is part of a good order." "The true devil isn't crime, then, but brute chance." "The worst tragedy of the world is the brute chance to which everything spiritual seems to be subject among us - the tragedy of the diabolical irrationality of so many among the foes of whatever is significant." It is "the blind irrationality of fortune that seems to drive God out of our thoughts when we look at our world." (SMP, p.465-469)
"An open enemy you can face." "Moral evil in the willful sinner himself, you can look in the face and defy, and that too even if you are yourself the sinner." But the "mechanical accidents of nature, where is there room for anything but pity for its worthlessness?"
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