AN ABUSE OF ABSTRACTION 487 



he, instead of having been decided at the foundation of the world, 

 were decided afresh at every passing moment in which fact seems 

 livingly to grow, and possibility to turn itself towards fact. 



He who takes things at their face-value here may indeed be de- 

 ceived. He may far too often mistake his private ignorance of what is 

 predetermined for a real indetermination of what is to be. Yet, 

 however imaginary it may be, his picture of the situation offers no 

 appearance of breach between the past and future. A train is the 

 same train, its passengers are the same passengers, its momentum is 

 the same momentum, no matter which way the switch which fixes its 

 direction is placed. For the indeterminist there is at all times enough 

 past for all the different futures in sight, and more besides, to find 

 their reasons in it, and whichever future comes will slide out of that 

 past as easily as the train slides by the switch. The world, in short, 

 is just as continuous with itself for the believers in free will as for the 

 rigorous determinists, only the latter are unable to believe in points of 

 bifurcation as spots of really indifferent equilibrium or as containing 

 shunts which there — and there only, not before — direct existing motions 

 without altering their amount. 



Were there such spots of indifference, the rigorous determinists 

 think, the future and the past would be separated absolutely, for, 

 abstractly taken, the word " indijferent " suggests disconnection solely. 

 Whatever is indifferent is in so far forth unrelated and detached. 

 Take the term thus strictly, and you see, they tell us, that if any 

 spot of indifference is found upon the broad highway between the 

 past and the future, then no connection of any sort whatever, no con- 

 tinuous momentum, no common aim or agent, can be found on both 

 sides of the gaping wound which it makes. 



Mr. Fullerton writes — the italics are mine — as follows : 



In so far as my action is free, what I have been, what I am, what I have 

 always done or striven to do, what I most earnestly wish or resolve to do 

 at the present moment — these things can have no more to do with its future 

 realization than if they had no existence. . . . The possibility is a hideous 

 one; and surely even the most ardent free-willist will, when he contemplates 

 it frankly, excuse me for hoping that if I am free I am at least not very free, 

 and that I may reasonably expect to find some degree of consistency in my life 

 and actions. . . . Suppose that I have given a dollar to a blind beggar. 

 Can I, if it is really an act of free will, be properly said to have given the 

 money? Was it given because I was a man of tender heart, etc., etc.? . . . 

 What has all this to do with acts of free-will? If they are free, they must 

 not be conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort, by the misery of 

 the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the passer-by. They must be causeless, 

 not determined. They must drop from a clear sl<y out of the void, for just 

 in 80 far as they can be accounted for, they are not free.* 



Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy 

 about the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I 



"Loc. cit., Vol. 58, pp. 189, 188. 



