THE INWARD KIN6D0M

The kingdom of liberty, then, is first an inward kingdom, though Hke every other inward vital thing it tends to express itself in structure and organization. To be free is not to escape limitations, but rather to find oneself. Freedom is a spiritual, personal f act : it is the ascent of the deeper consciousness, the more inward Self, which, as it arises, announces itself as the higher necessity, whose " service is perfect freedom." It is the latent union of the One with the Many become conscious, active, dynamic.

It is interesting to observe — and will help us to give to Carpenter's mind its due rank — how similar this doctrine of freedom is to that propounded by Henri Bergson. The deeper we descend into the profundities of our personal being, the less are we able to express what we find there as a séquence -of separate and successive ideas, f eelings, efforts, and states of consciousness generally ; the more do we expérience the self- Ufe as one whole, indivisible thing like a flowing tide in which the successive waves run into each other and lose ail distinction in one interpenetrated whole. In its true nature, our self-reality (to quote a brilliant expositor of the " new philosophy," M. Edouard le Roy) appears as

an uninterrupted flow, an impalpable shiver of fluid cbanging tones, a perpétuai flux of waves which ebb and break and dissolve into one another without shock or jar.*

» Le Roy. A Nêw PhUoiophy, p. 77.