In the straightforward sense of the word, we saw, I am free when I am not made the instrument of another person’s will through physical violence or the threat of it. The subtle questions which may arise with regard to due or undue degrees of influence, by which I may become the instrument of another’s mind, with more or less willingness on the part of my own, are here disregarded. I am assumed to be acting freely so long as I follow the inclination of my mind, apart from any painful conflict forced upon it by the prospect of physical interference with its belongings. But from the earliest ages of ethical reflection, a further sense has been ascribed to the term liberty. It has been pointed out by moralists and philosophers--first, perhaps by Socrates and Plato--that the condition of man as to being himself is fundamentally affected not only by the power to do what he likes without constraint, but by the nature of that which he likes to do. The human {139} mind, it is explained, is never wholly at one with itself, and the common phrases “self-mastery” or “self-control” are adduced by way of presenting what we spoke of above as the ethical paradox of self-government. [1] The mind, then, is treated by a metaphor as if it were two or more persons; and the term liberty, which applies _prima facie_ to the non-constraint of one person by another, is applied to the non-constraint of something within an individual mind by something else within it. Now, apart from further scrutiny, it does not appear why the term liberty, when thus applied, should mean anything of ethical value. As Plato observed, in a passage [2] from which the current use of all these phrases is probably derived, it seems absurd at first sight to speak of self-control as a distinctive predicate of certain states of mind. For surely, within the mind, that which is controlled must be of the nature of self no less than that which controls it, so that, in saying that I have self-control, I am saying that I am self-indulgent; in saying that my mind is free, I am at the same time saying that it is a slave. Within certain limits this paradox represents a truth, and the ethical rank of the elements which coerce and are coerced may be quite oppositely estimated. We may think fit to call ourselves free either when love conquers reason or when reason triumphs over love. Still, as Plato proceeds to point out, the general adoption of the metaphor, the fact that we think and call ourselves “free” or “self-controlled” or “fully ourselves” in some cases and not in others; and that we do not in each of {140} these cases regard the opposite attribution “slave,” “self-indulgent,” “not ourselves” as equally true with the former, indicates that some substantial fact is forcing itself upon us through the metaphor in question. It is the same problem as that which Professor James has wittily stated when he points out that “the sluggard, the drunkard, the coward never talk of their conduct in that way (i.e.