1. _The Prerequisites of a Moral World._ For our human thinking, assuredly, there are certain prerequisites, that the world may be at all a sphere for moral training and action. What are these prerequisites for a moral world? There must be, in the first place, a _sphere of universal law_, to count on, within which all actions take place. In a lawless world, action could hardly take on any significance--least of all ethical significance. That freedom itself should mean anything in outward expression, there must be the possibility of intelligent use of means toward the ends chosen. There must be, in the second place, some _real ethical freedom_, some power of moral initiative. We need not quarrel about the terms used; but, as Paulsen intimates, no serious ethical writer ever doubted that men have at least some power to shape their own characters.[16] Without that assumption, we have a whole world of ideas and ideals--many of them the realest facts in the world to us--that have no legitimate excuse for being, that are simple insanities of the most inexplicable sort. The very meaning of the personality, indeed, which the social consciousness must demand for men, is some real existence for self, that is, some real self-consciousness and moral initiative. And freedom is not enough; there must be also _some power of accomplishment_. To ascribe mere volition to man seems, it has been justly said, sophistical. Results are needed to reveal the character of our acts, even to ourselves--to make that character real. Lotze's charge that the world is imperfect because it might have been so made that only good designs could be carried out, or so that the results of evil volitions would be at once corrected,[17] is itself similarly sophistical. Such a world, in which the outward results of action never appear, would be but a play-world after all--only a nursery of babes not yet capable of character. It could be no fit world for moral training. And still more, not less, must this law of the necessary results of actions hold in our relations to other persons. There can be, least of all, a moral universe where we are not _members one of another_. Character, in any form we can conceive it, could not then exist. Our best, as well as our worst, possibilities are involved in these necessary mutual relations. Moral character has meaning only in personal relations. The results, therefore, which follow upon action, if the character of our deed is to have reality for us, must be chiefly personal. The realm of character has fearful possibilities. This _is_ no play-world. We can cause and be caused suffering, and our sin necessarily carries the suffering, if not the sin, of others with it. 2. _The Ideal World Requires, thus, the Facts of the Social Consciousness._--All this could be changed in any vital way only by shutting up every soul absolutely to itself, and with that result life has simply ceased.