To the older idealism as to the new the essence of mind or spirit is freedom. But the guarantee of freedom is to be sought for not in the denial of law, but in the whole nature of mind and its relation to the structure of experience. _Without mind no orderly world_: only through the action of the subject and its "ideas" are the confused and incoherent data of sense-perception (themselves shot through with both strands) built up into that system of things we call Nature, and which stands out against the subject as the body stands out against the soul whose functioning may be said to have created it. On the other hand, _without the world no mind_: only through the action of the environment upon the subject is the idealizing activity in which it finds its being called into existence. Herein lies the paradox which is also the deepest truth of our spiritual life. In interpreting its environment first as a world of things that seem to stand in a relation of exclusion to one another and to itself, then as a natural system governed by rigid mechanical necessity, the mind can yet feel that in its very opposition the world is akin to it, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. What is true of mind is true of will. Idealism starts from the relativity of the world to purposive consciousness. But this again may be so stated as to represent only one side of the truth. It is equally true that the will is relative to the world of objects and interests to which it is attached through instincts and feelings, habits and sentiments. In isolation from its object the will is as much an abstraction as thought apart from the world of percepts, memories and associations which give it content and stability. And just as mind does not lose but gain in individuality in proportion as it parts with any claim to the capricious determination of what its world shall be, and becomes dominated by the conception of an order which is immutable so the will becomes free and "personal" in proportion as it identifies itself with objects and interests, and subordinates itself to laws and requirements which involve the suppression of all that is merely arbitrary and subjective. Here, too, subject and object grow together. The power and vitality of the one is the power and vitality of the other, and this is so because they are not two things with separate roots but are both rooted in a common reality which, while it includes, is more than either.