That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the "problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over "free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have completely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between appearance and reality, upon the postulation of the metaphysical existence of the value-forms of the unity, spirituality, and the eternity of the world, in the realization of which the wise man founded his wisdom and gained his freedom. Freedom, then, is an ideal that could have arisen only in the face of _obstruction to action directed toward the fulfilling and satisfying of interests_. It is the assurance of the smooth and uninterrupted flow of behavior; the flow of desire into fulfilment, of thought into deed, of act into fact. It is perhaps the most pervasive and fundamental of all desiderates, and in a definite way the others may be said to derive from it and to realize it. For the soul's immortality, the world's unity and spirituality and eternity, are but conditions which facilitate and assure the flow of life without obstruction. They define a world in which danger, evil, and frustration are non-existent; they so reconstitute our actual environment that the obstructions it offers to the course of life are abolished. They make the world "rational," and in the great philosophic tradition the freedom of man is held to be a function of the rationality of the world. Thus, even deterministic solutions of the "problem of freedom" are at bottom no more than the rationalization of natural existence by the dialectical removal of obstructions to human existence. Once more, Spinoza's solution is typical, and its form is that of all idealisms as well. It ensues by way of identification of the obstruction's interest with those of the obstructee: the world becomes ego or the ego the world, with nothing outside to hinder or to interfere. In the absolute, existence is declared to be value _de facto_; in fact, _de jure_. And by virtue of