FREEDOM AND 'FREE-WILL. 3 185 



tified 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. There are few in- 

 telligent men who would care to maintain that the fall of a rain-drop or 

 the flutter of an aspen leaf could not be completely accounted for by 

 the enumeration of antecedent causes, were our knowledge sufficiently 

 increased; but there are a considerable number who take issue with the 

 determinist in his view of the subjection to law of all human actions. 

 They maintain that there is a necessarily incalculable element present 

 in such cases, and that all the antecedents taken together can only in 

 part account for the result. As opposed to determinism they hold to 

 the doctrine of indeterminism, or, as it has too often unhappily been 

 called, the doctrine of 'free-will.' 



I say as it has unhappily been called, because it is a thousand pities 

 that an interesting scientific question, and a most difficult one, should 

 be taken out of the clear atmosphere of passionless intellectual investi- 

 gation, and, through a mere confusion, brought down among the fogs of 

 popular passion and partisan strife. We have all heard much about 

 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 impo- 

 tent. No normal man welcomes the thought that he is not free, and 

 the denial of free-will 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. The very word freedom is enough to set us quivering with emo- 

 tion; it is the open door to the thousand-fold activities which well up 

 within us, and to which we give expression with joy. 



But it must not be forgotten that the antithesis of freedom is com- 

 pulsion, that hateful thing that does violence to our nature and crushes 

 with iron hand these same activities. The freedom which poets have 

 sung, and for which men have died, has no more to do with indeter- 

 minism than has the Dog, a celestial constellation, with the terrestrial 

 animal that barks. St. Thomas and Spinoza, who differ in many things, 

 have both pointed out that one must distinguish between the two 

 latter, and the distinction is not broader than that which exists between 

 the former. Determinism is not fatalism, and indeterminism is not the 

 affirmation of freedom in any proper sense of that word, the sense in 

 which men take it when it sets their pulses bounding and fills their 

 breasts with high resolve. We have seen that even a determinist can 

 distinguish between the two 'couldn't helps,' and recognize that they 

 must be differently treated. We may now go so far as to insist that, 



