When it comes to the question of morality and religion, the agnostic again exercises his freedom of choice: he wills to believe in the former and not in the latter--the evidence for and against either being equally _nil_. It is not, therefore, the evidence which determines his choice; and he shows that it is not his previous history, not the momentum which his psychological mechanism gained during the period when he had no conscious or no self-conscious control over it, which determines his choice, for in the first place he denies that it ought or must influence him, and next he shows that it does not, by willing differently in the case of the two principles. In both cases his will is equally self-determining, though his will is to believe in the moral principle or ideal and not to believe in the religious. If we wish either to define progress or to make it, we must choose, arbitrarily or otherwise, some particular goal and say, definitely and decidedly, any movement which being continued in the same straight line leads to that goal is progress, every other movement is regress, being necessarily away from the goal. If we choose, by a great act of faith or otherwise, to say the ideal is the goal, then we have therein a principle both of belief and action: we have a standard by which to test everything offered for judgment, a general principle to apply to every particular case; and we have an object to aim at, a principle to carry out in every act of our lives, an ideal to strive for. But whether we choose the ideal as the goal or something else, our choice is the free act of a self-determining will. Progress, on the human side, is--as indeed is regress--the expression of the free will of human beings, whose choice, though free, is limited to the alternatives offered to them. Those alternatives reduce themselves ultimately to aiming at the ideal or at something else.