22. So far as this state is reached, the man may be said to be reconciled to 'the law of his being' which (as was said above) prevents him from finding satisfaction in the objects in which he ordinarily seeks it, or anywhere but in the realisation in himself of an idea of perfection. Since the law is, in fact, the action of that self-realising subject which is his self, and which exists in God as eternally self-realised, he may be said in this reconciliation to be at peace at once with himself and with God. Again, he is 'free,' (1) in the sense that he is the author of the law which he obeys (for this law is the expression of that which is his self), and that he obeys it because conscious of himself as its author; in other words, obeys it from that impulse after self-perfection which is the source of the law or rather constitutes it. He is 'free' (2) in the sense that he not merely 'delights in the law after the inward man' (to use St. Paul's phrase), while his natural impulses are at once thwarted by it and thwart him in his effort to conform to it, but that these very impulses have been drawn into its service, so that he is in bondage neither to it nor to the flesh. From the same point of view we may say that his will is 'autonomous,' conforms to the law which the will itself constitutes, because the law (which prevents him from finding satisfaction anywhere but in the realisation in himself of an idea of perfection) represents the action in him of that self-realising principle of which his will is itself a form. There is an appearance of equivocation, however, in this way of speaking, because the 'will' which is liable not to be autonomous, and which we suppose gradually to approach autonomy in the sense of conforming to the law above described, is not this self-realising principle in the form in which this principle involves or gives the law. On the contrary, it is the self-realising principle as constituting that effort after self-satisfaction in each of us which is liable to be and commonly is directed to objects which are not contributory to the realisation of the idea of perfection,--objects which the self-realising principle accordingly, in the fulfilment of its work, has to set aside. The equivocation is pointed out by saying, that the good will is 'autonomous' in the sense of conforming to a law which the will itself, _as reason_, constitutes; which is, in fact, a condensed way of saying, that the good will is the will of which the object coincides with that of practical reason; that will has its source in the same self-realising principle which yields that consciousness of a possible self-perfection which we call reason, and that it can only correspond to its idea, or become what it has the possibility of becoming, in being directed to the realisation of that consciousness.