The Totality of a Man's Experience Makes Him Who He Is

 The will is first and original; knowledge is merely added to it as an instrument belonging to the phenomenon of the will. Therefore every man is what he is through his will, and his character is original, for willing is the basis of his inner being. Through the knowledge added to it, he gets to know in the course of experience what he is; in other words, he becomes acquainted with his character. Therefore he knows himself in consequence of, and in accordance with, the nature of his will, instead of willing in consequence of, and according to, his knowing, as in the old view." - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Page 292 and 293

One of the problems with some of the rationalist philosophers is that they often become combatibilist.

Arthur here is teaching that our being is the will. We are who we are in eternity past. When we enter this life which is time and space, we go through life in successions. Thus as we learn more and more we get to know ourselves. Thus who we are and what we chose in eternity past becomes clear to us as time goes on.

It is similar to Leibniz thoughts.

G.W. Leibniz says, "Since this is so, we can say that the nature of an individual substance or of a complete being is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to contain and to allow us to deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed. An accident, on th other hand, is a being whose notion does not include everything that can be attributed to the subject to which the notion is attributed. Thus, taken in abstraction from the subject, the quality of being a king which belongs to Alexander the Great is not determinate enough to constitute an individual and does not include the other qualities of the same subject, not does it include everything that the notion of this prince includes. On the other hand, God, seeing Alexander's individual notion or haecceity, sees in it at the same time the basis and reason for all the predicates which can be said truly of him, for example, that he vanquished Darius and Porus; he even knows a priori (and not by experience) whether he died a natural death or whether he was poisoned, something we can know only through history. Thus when we consider carefully the connection of things, we can say that from all time in Alexander's soul there are vestiges of everything that has happened to him and marks of everything that will happen to him and even traces of everything that happens in the universe, even though God alone could recognize them all." - Discourse on Metaphysics, Page 8

In other words some qualifiers can be given to several different people. Such as King can be given to Alexander and David. However, what makes up Alexander is the sum total of his parts.

Aristotle and Happiness

Aristotle is wrong about happiness. I don't care that he is a prominent philosopher. Aristotle teaches in "The Nicomachean Ethics" that happiness is the virtuous activity of the soul and therefore the happy man is one who continues in life until death in this activity. The Bible alone, however, is God's word and it says that "Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works," - Romans 4. The Christian is made happy by knowing and accepting the gospel as the only means of righteousness before God. As the Westminster Catechism says that the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. We do so by knowing and believing the truth. Proverbs says, 13Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. James teaches us that the wisdom of the Christian is from above. And Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says, that God in His wisdom made the world and everything in it. And by God's wisdom the world did not know God. But rather the cross is the wisdom of God.

Which came first Original Guilt or Original Sin?

The federal headship of Adam may not seem germane to a descriptive psychology of human nature. As an office or function it does not even describe Adam's nature. But without it there is no understanding of the later generations - Cain, Lamech, Paul, and Alexander the coppersmith. Much of this material has already been touched upon, so that a reminder, some implications, and a small addition will be sufficient here. The small addition will be a defense of the consistency of immediate imputation with the philosophy of Realism, a consistency which Hodge denies.
In the discussion on traducianism it was necessary to anticipate the doctrine of immediate imputation. The essential point was there made clear: Depravity is a part of the penalty for sin, therefore the guilt logically precedes. The question is, on what ground does God hold us, Adam's posterity, guilty? The Biblical doctrine is that God imputes Adam's guilt to us immediately; that is, without an intermediary step. The word immediately here does not refer to time. One might say that God imputed Adam's guilt to us the very moment that Adam sinned. This could well be true, though it is more accurate to say that God imputed this guilt from all eternity. Clearly the doctrine of immediate imputation does not focus on time, as the contemporary usage of the word might suggest: The question is as stated above: Does God impute guilt because of our inherited depravity, or does he impute it without this as a means? The Biblical reason for the doctrine of immediate imputation is that depravity is a part of the penalty the guilt entails. We are not guilty because we are depraved; we are depraved because we are guilty.
Of course we are also guilty of our own voluntary transgressions here and now. This, however, is irrelevant to the present matter. The present matter is our relation to Adam's first sin.
The Westminster Confession uses a very carefully phrased paragraph to distinguish between inherited depravity and imputed guilt. It is so carefully yet so naturally worded that most readers probably fail to see the implications. The confessional statement is: 'They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to al their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation' (VI, 3). Note: the guilt was imputed; the corruption was conveyed. - Gordon H. Clark, The Biblical Doctrine of Man