“Freedom and determinism are only the obverse and the reverse of the two-faced fact of rational self-activity. Freedom is the thought-action of the self, defining its specific identity, and determinism means nothing but the definite character which the rational nature of the action involves. Thus freedom, far from disjoining and isolating each self from other selves, especially the Supreme Self, or God, in fact defines the inner life of each, in its determining whole, in harmony with theirs, and so, instead of concealing, opens it to their knowledge — to God, with absolute completeness eternally, in virtue of his perfect vision into all possible emergencies, all possible alternatives; to the others, with an increasing fulness, more or less retarded, but advancing toward completeness as the Rational Ideal guiding each advances in its work of bringing the phenomenal or natural life into accord with it. For our freedom, in its most significant aspect, means just our secure possession, each in virtue of his self-defining act, of this common Ideal, whose intimate nature it is to unite us, not to divide us; to unite us while it preserves us each in his own identity, harmonising each with all by harmonising all with God, but quenching none in any extinguishing Unit. Freedom, in short, means first our self-direction by this eternal Ideal and toward it, and then our power, from this eternal choice, to bring our temporal life into conformity with it, step by step, more and more.”

— George Holmes Howison

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.375-6

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George Holmes Howison 135

American philosopher 1834–1916

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“So the conciliability of determinism and freedom depends on the fact, if this be a fact, that determinism simply means definiteness (instead of constraining foreordination), while freedom means (instead of unpredictable whim) action spontaneously flowing from the definite guiding intelligence of the agent himself. In short, the desired harmony will fail unless the determinism and the freedom are both alike defined in terms of the one and identical definiteness of the rational nature; but it will be secured if they can be so defined, and are.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.320

“Solution of this knot by any other conceptions of freedom and determinism than these, there plainly can be none. But the solution is secure if God and other spirits are alike rational, simply by their inner and self-active nature; in other words, if the solution is by spontaneous harmony from within, and not by productive and executive domination from without”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.327-8

“In this fact we have reached the essential form of every spirit or person — the organic union of the particular with the universal, of its private self-activity in the recognition of itself with its public activity in the recognition of all others. That is, self-consciousness is in the last resort a conscience, or the union of each spirit's self-recognition with recognition of all. Its self-definition is therefore definite, in both senses of the word: it is at once integral in its thorough and inconfusible difference from every other, and yet it is integral in terms of the entire whole that includes it with all the rest. Thus in both of its aspects — and both are essential to it — in a commanding sense it excludes alternative, and there is universal determinism, that is, universal and stable definiteness, just because there is universal self-determination, or genuine freedom. But this universal self-defining implies and proclaims the universal reality, the living presence in all, of one unchangeable type of being — the self-conscious intelligence; and this, presented in all really possible forms, or instances, of its one abiding nature.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.353-4

“We are not to evade, then, the eternity of free beings that is implied in any serious demand for freedom. If the souls of men are really free, they coexist with God in the eternity which God inhabits, and in the governing total of their self-active being they are of the same nature as he, — they too are self-put rational wholes of self-conscious life. As complete reason is his essence, so is reason their essence—their nature in the large—whatever may be the varying conditions under which their selfhood, the required peculiarity of each, may bring it to appear. Each of them has its own ideal of its own being, namely, its own way of fulfilling the character of God; and its self-determining life is just the free pursuit of this ideal, despite all the opposing conditions by which it in part defines its life. Moreover, since this ideal, seen eternally in God, is the chosen goal of every consciousness, it is the final — not the efficient—cause of the whole existing self. All the being of each self has thus the form of a self-supplying, self-operating life; or, in the phraseology of the Schoolmen and Spinoza, each is causa sui. This is what its "eternity" exactly means.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.338-9

“Our result thus far is, that determinism and freedom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalistic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the definite order characteristic of intelligence; while so far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and freedom proves to be, like determinism, the spontaneous definiteness of active intelligence.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.324

“It might pertinently be said that determinism and freedom are of course compatible enough when they are merely viewed as the two reciprocal aspects of self-activity in a single mind, but that the real difficulty is to reconcile the self-determinisms in different free minds.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.326-7

“Autonomy is not "total self-sufficiency" but "the entitlement of each interactive entity to determine for itself what its contributions to others will be and, likewise, to determine for itself what use it will make of the self-determined contributions of other entities.”

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Imagination, Understanding, and the Virtue of Liberality, ch. 4

“The created, as well as the Creator, creates. Self-activity that recognises and affirms self-activity in others, freedom that freely recognises freedom, is universal: every part of this eternally real world is instinct with life in itself. Each lives in and by free ideality, the active contemplation of its own ideal; and this ideal embraces, as its essential, prime, and final factor, the one Supreme Ideal.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.356

“So the free being, as self-determined and taken in his whole contents, is definite in both senses of the word: he defines himself, and thus has the definiteness of unpredestination; he defines his empirically real world of things, and thus adds to himself a field of action having the definiteness of predestination, — in a manner arms himself with it, inasmuch as he transcends and controls it.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.324

“It may take either of two forms, according as the sinking into sense directly involves only the violation of the spirit's own self-reverence or the graver assault upon the sacredness of others. In either case it is dishonour of God. The risk of it lies in the nature of our being, goes back to the conditions of our existence, of our self-definition in freedom; is constituent in our freedom as this is defined against the freedom of God. This risk is therefore "original" in a sense even deeper than that in which traditional theology makes sin to be original,”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.368-9

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