The best definition of freedom is perhaps nothing other than the most helpful way of thinking about it; and it seems to me that the most helpful way of thinking about it is to regard it in the light of the contrast between what a man is and what he might be, as our experience of life enables us to imagine the two states. Ideas of this sort are suggested by defining freedom as opportunity, and their tendency is to stimulate and direct practical endeavor. If the word helps us to realize, for instance, that it is possible to make healthy, intelligent, and hopeful children out of those that are now sickly, dull, and unhappy, so much the better. On the other hand, the definition of it as letting people alone, well enough suited, perhaps, to an over-governed state of society, does not seem especially pertinent to our time and country. We have always been taught by philosophy that the various forms of the good were merely different views of the same thing, and this idea is certainly applicable to such notions as those of freedom, progress, and right. Thus freedom may be regarded as merely the individual aspect of progress, the two being related as the individual and the social order were asserted to be in the first chapter, and no more distinct or separable. If instead of contrasting what a particular man is with what he might be, we do the same for mankind as a whole, we have the notion of progress. Progress which does not involve liberation is evidently no progress at all; and, on the other hand, a freedom that is not part of the general onward movement of society is not free in the largest sense. Again, any practicable idea of freedom must connect it with some standard of right, in which, like opposing claims in a clearing-house, the divergent tendencies of each person, and of different persons, are disciplined and reconciled. The wrong is the unfree; it is that which tends, on the whole, to restrict personal development. It is no contribution to freedom to turn loose the insane or the criminal, or to allow children to run on the streets instead of going to school. The only test of all these things—of right, freedom, progress, and the like—is the instructed conscience; just as the only test of beauty is a trained æsthetic sense, which is a mental conclusion of much the same sort as conscience. So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. A free discipline controls the individual by appealing to his reason and conscience, and therefore to his self-respect; while an unfree control works upon some lower phase of the mind, and so tends to degrade him. It is freedom to be disciplined in as rational a manner as you are fit for.