as conquering their impulses and temptations) or say they resist their energy, overcome their sobriety, conquer their courage, and so forth.” [3] [1] P. 55. [2] _Republic_, 430 E. [3] _Principles of Psychology_, ii. 548. It is most important, we may venture to observe in passing, not to understand the substantive fact, or Plato’s presentation of it, as if it lay in an alternative between two psychological factors, say intelligence and desire, the one of which was to be preferred and the other to be repudiated, through some quasi-ethical conception of rank, such as the supposed affinity of the one factor with divine or of the other with animal life. We are speaking of the sense in which it can be asserted that the human self is, comparatively speaking, free in one kind of life and unfree in another, both being assumed to be chosen, in the absence of constraint by an external will. It is plain that the only ground on which such an assertion can really be sustained is that the one life more than the other gives effect to the self as a whole, or removes its contradictions and so makes it most fully what it is able to be, or what, by the implied nature of each and all of its wants, it may be said really to want to be. The claims of intelligence and desire in their various phases must be {141} criticised according to this principle, and not advocated upon presuppositions drawn from external comparisons. But our question at the present moment is not as to the deeper nature of that which we call the self _par excellence_, but as to the bearing of the metaphor by which the assertion of such a self is identified with liberty or absence of constraint. And the point is plainly this; [1] that in the conflict between that which stands for the self _par excellence_ and that which, at any time, stands opposed to it, we have the clear experience that we are capable of being determined by a will within our minds which nevertheless we repudiate and disown, [2] and therefore we feel ourselves to be like a slave as compared with a freeman if we yield, but like a freeman compared with a slave if we conquer. We may be determined by something which not only is not ourself--for in the greatest moments of life, when our being touches its maximum, we, in a sense, feel an impulse which is not ourself--but it is not ourself as something which has got hold of us by force, and operates upon us by conflict and violence, without having the kind of power needed to carry us away and sweep our whole self harmoniously into its current. That we can be determined by a will in us which neither is ourself nor represents it at a higher level, and which we loathe and disown, is the experience on which the metaphor of freedom and slavery is {142} based, when applied to the life of man considered apart from external constraint. [3] [1] See Green’s _Principles of Political Obligation_, p. i.