Still, not upon this real difficulty in our moral judgments would I now lay greatest stress, although it is real enough and important. In yet another way our moral consciousness is at war with itself. In estimating the worth of human conduct, so far as this is determined by its initiation, we are in an almost hopeless tangle. We are more than likely to think of other people as influenced by their environment in what they do, of ourselves as quite original and responsible, as independent of any such influences; or, more fully and more exactly, we are given to referring our own bad deeds to environment, our good deeds to ourselves, while for others we are prompted to do just the reverse, referring their good deeds to environment, their bad deeds to themselves. Such is human nature--not, to be sure, at its best, but common human nature; and even when we escape the foregoing personally invidious distinctions, we still--and this is the main point--treat self and environment as two naturally conflicting, altogether independent sources of conduct. Two different and independent sources of anything, [p.047] however, can only make for conflict and contradiction. If only our courts of law could judge responsibility either wholly from the determinations of environment or wholly from those of personal will, or again, if only the will and the environment could be seen as not so radically opposed, what a simplification would ensue, and how much freer and more certain justice would be. To venture on a variation of an aphorism, where there's another way there is always a loophole; where there's environment there is always a shifted responsibility; where there's a "free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly performed deed.
So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious difficulty, which, when it is understood, is not unlike that of the two powers or selves or classes, but even more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments. Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our own freedom in good or our neighbour's freedom in evil, or in general of man's freedom to act without regard to the determinations from environment, but we have also a strange though possibly a fortunate way of qualifying the very freedom that we claim. We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the same breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the freedom, but only the duties make it worth anything. A startling paradox this, so familiar to us all: "I am free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the [p.048] necessities of environment and the necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. In the case, for example, of the disposition to distinguish between one's own acts and another's, with respect to their initiation by will or by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with one's own supposed freedom is equivalent in effect to denying one's neighbour's freedom because of the restraints of his environment. But such considerations, however promising for future reflection upon the conflicts in our moral consciousness, are not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once more find hope in the reflection that the faults of experience may balance themselves, but we have no occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or meaningless. Contradictions that balance each other, errors that are mutually corrective, are still contradictions, are still errors.