THE SEVEN WORLD-PROBLEMS. 



44 1 



has seldom passed beyond the halls in which they were carried on. It 

 has been different with the question whether man is free in his acts, 

 or is driven by an unavoidable compulsion. This question touching 

 every one, apparently accessible to every one, intimately connected 

 with the fundamental conditions of society, reaching to the depth of 

 religious convictions has played a part of immeasurable importance 

 in the history of thought and civilization, and the stages of the devel- 

 opment of the human mind are plainly reflected in the discussion of it. 



Classical antiquity did not rack its brains very much over this 

 problem. Xeither the idea of an inviolably binding law of nature nor 

 that of an absolute control of the universe existing in the general 

 ancient view of the world, no ground was offered for a conflict be- 

 tween free-will and the governing principle of the world. The Stoics 

 believed in a fate, and therefore denied free-will. The Roman moral- 

 ists, from ethical considerations, set up the doctrine of freedom again 

 on a natural subjective basis. " Sent.it animus se moveri" Cicero re- 

 marks in the " Tusculans " ; " quod quum sentit, illud una sentit se 

 vi sua, non aliena moveri." 



It was Christian dogmatism that fell into the darkest self-dug pits 

 over this question. The hopeless, entangling controversy about free- 

 will and predestination has dragged along from the fathers of the 

 Church through all the schools of doctrine and thought to the Reform- 

 ers, and from them on. God is almighty and all-knowing ; nothing 

 comes to pass that he has not willed and foreseen from eternity. 

 Therefore, man is unfree ; for, if he had done otherwise than as God 

 had foreordained, then would not God have been almighty and all- 

 knowing. Thus it does not lie within man's will whether he do right 

 or sin. How, then, can he be responsible for his acts ? How can it 

 agree with God's justice and goodness that he punish or reward men 

 for acts which are fundamentally God's own acts ? Such is the form 

 in which the problem presented itself to those minds. The doctrine of 

 original sin, the questions of redemption through merit or through 

 the blood of the Saviour, by faith or by works, and of the different 

 kinds of grace, were complicated in a thousand ways with that dilem- 

 ma itself, already fruitful in subtilties, and the cloisters of Christendom 

 resounded from the fourth to the seventeenth century with disputa- 

 tions about determinism and indeterminism. Perhaps there is no 

 subject of human thought concerning which more has been written. 

 The contest was not always confined to books, but often culminated in 

 bitter accusations of heresy with all their horrors. 



How differently is the problem of free-will regarded in our time ! 

 The persistence of energy proves that force ever arises or is extin- 

 guished as little as matter. The condition of the whole world, even of 

 a human brain, at each instant, is the absolute mechanical result of the 

 condition in the previous instant and the absolute mechanical cause of 

 the condition in the following instant. That in a given instant one 



