There is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, a question lying at the root of all ethics, a question which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion.”[125] This is “the question of late much agitated, Is life worth living?”[126] I confess that this question does not seem to me at all a radical or pressing one in comparison with another of which Mr. Spencer, in his Data of Ethics, takes no account whatever—the question whether we have any real choice in the way we ought to live so as to make life of value, or in other words whether there is an ‘ought’ in the business at all. Can any man regulate his own living? Is he not, even while he lives and thinks, Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees, as much a helpless victim of external forces as they are? Does the realm of natural _law_ extend to human actions and volitions; and if so, must it not be an illusion to suppose that these can possess any ethical quality whatever? A great deal of the perplexity attaching to the old problem, how to reconcile human free will with divine predestination and omniscience, has, it seems to me, been carried forward quite needlessly into the new problem of the reconciliation of free will with the reign of natural law. The problem in the old form which occupied Milton’s rebel angels has scarcely any meaning for modern thought. Human actions are a part of the world of phenomena, existing in time and space. When we think in that sphere of things we conceive the Deity as the synthesis of all things, and as the intellect can never arrive at this synthesis, it follows that we can never represent the Deity in terms of the intellect. An infinitely wise, infinitely good and powerful Being _has no definable relation to the phenomenal world at all_. Therefore there can be no question either of reconcilement or of opposition between the attributes of each. God has not planned beforehand the course of the world because (speaking in this sphere) God _is_ the world—past, present, and to come; and His being is in process of completion by the world’s development. In another sphere, behind the veils of space and time, of causality and of sense, resides the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Love, approachable indeed by those who come to it “as a little child,” but evading the questionings of the intellect.