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If we cannot want what we want, if our wants are not self-determined, then in what sense is the view of the self as an uncaused originator of action that lies behind the Christian idea of the soul, the Kantian noumenal self and the Cartesian ego adequate?

The two seemingly contradictory statements are not really contradictory; they are made in different connections; the one in reference to phenomenal causation, the other to noumenal causation—to an underlying 'principle of activity.'

We formulate the laws of evolution in terms of antecedence and sequence; we also refer these laws to an underlying cause, the noumenal mode of action of which is inexplicable.

The probability is that he means that we cannot know the relative without admitting the existence of the absolute, and that we cannot know the phenomenal without taking the noumenal for granted.

Still, we can neither know the absolute nor the noumenal for the reason that our mind is limited to relations.