1 84 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the second class as worthy of the name at all. Certainly, as jurymen, 

 they have little concern with them. It is only with those of the first 

 class that the law has to do, except in cases in which the sanity of the 

 accused is in question. But suppose one of the jurymen happens to be 

 a philosopher, and is accustomed to reflect upon matters which most 

 men are in the habit of passing by without much thought. He may 

 say to himself: "As a juryman I cannot think of listening to the absurd 

 excuse for homicide offered by this second fellow. If I did I should 

 have to admit that no man is a moral agent and that no crime should 

 be punished. The smuggler, the burglar, the murderer, may be as- 

 sumed to be influenced by motives of some sort. There is no case in 

 which something may not be pointed to as that which occasioned the 

 deed. Human life must be protected; society must be preserved; evil- 

 doers must be punished. If some men find the attractions of crime 

 irresistible, so much the worse for them. And yet, as a philosopher, I 

 find that I must accept the fact that, in a certain sense of the words, 

 the guilty man couldn't help doing what he did. He was what he was; 

 the target was attractive; the result followed. He was free from ex- 

 ternal compulsion, but he was not and could not be free from himself 

 and his own impulses." 



The man who reasons thus is called a determinist. Whether our 

 determinist is wise to express things exactly as he does will appear in 

 what follows. But the thought which he is at least trying to express 

 is sufficiently clear. A determinist is a man who accepts in its widest 

 sense the assumption of science that all the phenomena of nature are 

 subject to law, and that nothing can happen without some adequate 

 cause why it should happen thus and not otherwise. The fall of a rain- 

 drop, the unfolding of a flower, the twitching of an eyelid, the penning 

 of a sentence — all these, he 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 wholly impossible for science to demon- 

 strate 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, dis- 

 cusses the political situation, and resists the attractions of the decanter 

 before him, strictly in accordance with law — that every motion of every 

 muscle is the effect of antecedent causes which are incalculable only be- 

 cause 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 jus- 



