In the last resort, therefore, Spencer fails to deduce philosophically not only the necessity of progress, but also its compatibility with the evolution-dissolution oscillation, and even the general possibility of conceiving the world as a process.
Ritschl 3 even speaks of the Reformed as teaching Kenosis in the modern sense; but it is to be feared they rather taught alternately the manhood and the Godhead than made a serious effort to show the compatibility of divine and human predicates in one person.
Moreover, the argument by means of which Chrysippus endeavoured to prove the compatibility of determinism with ethical responsibility is in some respects an anticipation of modern views.
Modern determinists differ from the earlier advocates of their theory in their endeavour to exhibit at least the compatibility of morality with the absence of freedom, if not the enhancement of moral values which, according to some of its advocates, follows upon the acceptance of the deterministic account of conduct.
For the very argument from the undeveloped possibilities of each man's character by which the determinist proves the compatibility of his theory with the phenomenon of sudden conversion and the like is sufficient also to prove that the state can never be sure that the punishments which it inflicts upon the individual will have the effect upon his character and conduct which it desires.
But what he emphasizes is on the one hand the close connexion between the conception of miracles and the belief in divine providence, and on the other the compatibility between miracles and the order of nature.
For further information concerning the compatibility and independence of a system of linear equations, see Gordon, Vorlesungen fiber Invariantentheorie, Bd.
The compatibility of Christian and later Neo-Platonic ideas is evidenced by the writings of Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais, and though Neo-Platonism eventually succumbed to Christianity, it had the effect, through the writings of Clement and Origen, of modifying the tyrannical fanaticism and ultradogmatism of the early Christian writers.
It might, however, be thought that whatever be the compatibility of theories of punishment or of the activity of the state as a moralizing agency with determinism, to reconcile the R denial of freedom with a belief in the reality of remorse or penitence will be plainly impossible.
