the moral judgments of mankind, when we have committed ourselves to the unnatural doctrine that "free" "free" acts are moral.

If so very little can be said for indeterminism, why is it that so many good men defend it? The reason is not far to seek; they suppose that they are defending human freedom. Lucretius felt that nothing short of a causeless origination of motions could "break through the decrees of fate," and surely we must all admit that a man subject to the decrees of fate is not a free man. It does not lie with Edipus to decide whether he shall or shall not kill Laïus. The notion that a denial of "free-will" is a denial of human freedom and a surrender to fatalism is a widespread error, and is quite sufficient to account for the surprising things men have said on the subject of the will.

It is a thousand pities that the doctrine of indeterminism should have come to be called the doctrine of "free-will." We have all heard much of fate and free-will, and no man with the spirit of a man in him thinks, without inward revolt, of the possibility that his destiny is shaped for him by some irresistible external power in the face of which he is impotent. No normal man welcomes the thought that he is not free, and the denial of freewill can scarcely fail to meet with his reprobation. We recognize freedom as the dearest of our possessions, the guarantee, indeed, of all our possessions. The denial of freedom we associate with wrong and oppression, the scourge and the dungeon, the tyranny of brute force, the despair of the captive, the sodden degradation of the slave. Freedom is the open door to the thousand-fold activities which well up within us, and to which we give expression with joy.

But it should never be forgotten that freedom - the freedom for which men have died, and which poets have sung has no more to do with indeterminism, with "freedom," than has the Dog, a celestial constellation, with the terrestrial animal that barks. The antithesis of freedom is compulsion, that hateful thing that does violence to our nature and crushes with iron hand its activities. We say that a man is under compulsion, when the impulses of his own nature are overborne by some external power and are prevented from translating themselves into action. When I wish to raise my hand from the table, and find it held down by another, I am under compulsion. I am free when I can assert

myself; when I can do something; when the action in question can be referred to the idea in my mind.

Of course, in so far as actions which appear to be mine are fated, I am not free. Some external power is responsible for the actions in question. But it is equally clear that, in so far as any actions which appear to be mine are "free" actions, I am not free either. Such actions are not done by me, and cannot be prevented by me. They make their appearance independently; I am not consulted at all in the matter.

Thus we see that the fatalist and the "free-willist," cordially as they seem to detest each other, are really fighting for the same cause. The former is eager to maintain that actions of which I appear to be the author are done by some other power. The latter strenuously insists that actions of which I appear to be the author, are done by no power at all. Both agree in denying my causal efficiency; both reduce me to a passive spectator of what appear to be my acts.

It is clear that the "free-willist" has gone too far. He has set me free from another, and, not content with that, he has gone on to set me free from myself. He has refused to refer my behavior to another; now he refuses to refer my behavior to me. In other words, he has set me, not free, but "free." To withdraw me from society he has condemned me to a confinement so solitary that I am not even in the cell with myself.

This is not freedom. To be a free agent, man must at least be an agent. Of the three doctrines, fatalism, "free-will," and determinism, it is only the last that guarantees man's freedom. It holds that man is really an agent- that his acts may be attributed to him, that they have their roots in his character as well as in his environment.

Determinism is the doctrine that all the phenomena of nature are subject to law; it is a frank recognition of the order of causes as it seems to be revealed to us. The fall of a raindrop, the unfolding of a flower, the twitching of an eyelid, the penning of a sentence all these, the determinist maintains, have their adequate causes, though the causes of such occurrences lie, in great part, beyond the line which divides our knowledge from our ignorance. Determinism is, of course, a faith; for it is as yet impossible for science to demonstrate even that the fluttering of an aspen-leaf in the summer breeze is wholly subject to law; and

that every turn or twist upon its stem must be just what it is, and nothing else, in view of the whole system of forces in play at the moment. Much less is it possible to prove in detail that that complicated creature called a man, draws out his chair, sits down to dinner, gives his neighbor the best cut of the beef, discusses the political situation, and resists the attractions of the decanter before him, strictly in accordance with law. No man can prove that every motion of every muscle is the effect of antecedent causes which are incalculable only because of the limitations of our intelligence and our ignorance of existing facts. And yet the faith of science seems to those trained in the sciences a reasonable thing, for, as is pointed out, it is progressively justified by the gradual advance of human knowledge, and even in fields in which anything like exact knowledge is at present unattainable, the little we do know hints unmistakably at the reign of law.

Determinism is, then, nothing less than a recognition of the order which reigns in the world. It differs from fatalism in that it refuses to ignore arbitrarily certain causal sequences to which experience appears to give unequivocal testimony. It regards as absurd the notion that an end can be determined independently of means — that the slaying of Laius has no necessary connection with the actions of Laïus and of Edipus. And it differs from indeterminism in holding that there is no action which may not theoretically be traced to its causes. In recognizing that ideas may stand to actions in the relation of plan to accomplishment, and that the ideas themselves are not inexplicable appearances, without relation to anything that has preceded them, it recognizes that man has a character and can act freely in harmony with his character. It views man as he is viewed by the judge, the philanthropist, the moralist, the pedagogue, and the plain man.

Men generally regard a man as free when he is in a position to be influenced by those considerations by which they think the normal man not under compulsion naturally is influenced. They do not think that he is robbed of his freedom in so far as he has a character, weighs motives, seeks information, is influenced by persuasion. What would become of our social system if men had no character, and were not affected by influences of this sort? The popular prejudice against determinism must be due to a misconception. It is due to the misconception that determinism and fatalism are the same thing; when, as a matter of fact, deter

minism is the only doctrine which effectually combats fatalism and rescues for us that freedom without which man would not be man.

A determinist cannot, then, be a fatalist. I have said some pages back that he may or may not be a parallelist. It ought to be evident that he may or may not be a materialist or an idealist, a monist or a dualist, a theist, an atheist, or an agnostic. From this sheaf of "isms" he must choose on other grounds than his determinism. As a determinist he must regard the world as an orderly world and recognize cause and effect wherever they seem to be revealed. But men may agree upon this point, and yet differ widely touching the ultimate nature of this orderly world. There is nothing to prevent the determinist from being a theologian, and upholding the doctrine of predestination. However, he must not be a fatalistic predestinarian; he must regard the Divine plan as embracing means as well as ends; he must make it all-inclusive. If he does this, he can say, with George Herbert:

While all things have their will, yet none but Thine."

CHAPTER XXXIV

OF GOD

I HAVE said in an earlier chapter1 that there is but one argument for the existence of minds, and I have insisted that the assumption that minds exist must not be made lightly and without good reason.

That men have made and do make a multitude of hasty inferences of the sort needs no proof. The bright cloud of the greater and lesser divinities with which the poetic imagination of the Greek peopled heaven and earth could not endure the beams of the rising sun, and it dissolved and disappeared. To primitive man all things are full of gods in a very literal sense, and when primitive man learns to reflect, these gods are banished to the realm of mere imaginings. So beautiful are the unreal creatures born of the uncritical thought of a gifted race, that one feels a pang as one sees them fade away. The sky, the earth, and the expanse of ocean seem robbed of the life with which they pulsated, and there are moments in which even the modern man is tempted to envy the pagan "suckled in a creed outworn."

Our world, the world which science and the development of reflective thought present to our gaze, is, it is true, a something much more august than the cosey little world in which the Greek found himself so much at home. Of its majesty the ancient thinkers had glimpses not vouchsafed to their unthinking fellows. But the long labor of the ages has brought us to a deeper realization of its greatness and to an abiding sense of the littleness of man. We are more conscious of our ignorance than were our predecessors, and the very growth of our knowledge has forced us to see how far we fall short of the ideal of knowledge which we have come to hold before ourselves and which we make efforts to attain. In this great world which we see dimly presented to us man seems to hold an insignificant place; it is, per1 Chapter XXVIII.