Some Difficulties of Modern Materialism [pp. 344-372]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
also that questions of passion and interest are especially prominent in that field; and thus there is great room for talking of
the strength of motives and of the necessary victory of the
strongest. In this way both the subject and the debaters often
become sadly confused; and hence it is of advantage to extend
the debate into a different realm. Now the essential nature of
freedom is not the power to act without a motive, but the
ability to choose an end, or law, and to govern one's activities,
mental and executive, accordingly. This government may take
the form of guidance or of repression. The being who cannot
do this is neither moral nor rational. A rational activity demands just such a power. The aim of reason is to bring the de
facto order of mental experience into the dejure order of thought.
The mental mechanism under the laws of association brings us
mental states in any and every order just as experience furnishes
them. As thus produced they are simple facts, and are all on
the same plane of actuality. The distinction of true and false,
rational and irrational, does not yet exist. This first emerges
when the mind comes to transform the actual order of fact into
the ideal order of thought; and to do this the mind must be
free. To bring its experience into rational order, the mind
must be able to test its thoughts, to compare, to retain or reject
them as they agree or disagree with the inner law of reason.
The mind must not accept thoughts as they are thrust into it,
but must sit regnant over the mental mechanism of association,
sifting, testing, and ordering its own course according to the law
of reason. The mind makes reason its norm, searches in the
chaos of sense for the rational and rejects the irrational; and
only thus does it rise to true rationality. It is plain that a mind
which could not do this would be totally untrustworthy. Its
beliefs would sink down into mere facts and below the distinction of truth and error. And even if there be such a thing
as truth, our ability to reach it depends entirely on our power
to control the given in thought, to suspend judgment, to eliminate the irrational, and to transform the chaos of experience into
the transparent order of reason. This does not mean, of course,
that the mind can coerce the conclusion, but that to reach a
sound conclusion it must be able to control and coerce its activities. On the materialistic theory, the mental state, or rather
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