SOMETHING NEW IN "FREEWILL" 347 



men to deny the existence of the external world. They have induced 

 some to maintain that every man has his own truth, which is true for 

 him; and others to advance the doctrine that no truth is attainable 

 by man. They have caused one philosopher to talk as though he had 

 created the world; and another to declare that there is no evidence of 

 the existence of minds in one's neighbors. Not the least remarkable 

 feat is the production of the persuasion — a persuasion very tenaciously 

 held to by some — that there is something cheering and even pious in 

 the doctrine that men's actions are, to some degree, at least, quite un- 

 accountable, and can not be expected to be congruous with the character 

 and environment of the person in connection with whom they myste- 

 riously make their inexplicable appearance. 



This does not at all mean that we are in a measure ignorant of 

 what individuals and classes of men will do under given circumstances. 

 No man denies such ignorance on our part, and all men strive to lessen 

 it. It means that no conceivable increase in our knowledge could be 

 expected to help us — that we are not concerned with the question of 

 knowledge or ignorance at all. It means that certain actions have 

 nothing to do with what has preceded them ; nothing with the character 

 of the supposed agent, but who is really not the agent; nothing with 

 his surroundings with the influences which have been brought to bear 

 upon him. Such actions just appear ; nobody causes them, nobody can 

 prevent them. There is no reason why they should happen in connec- 

 tion with one man rather than with another, or at one time rather than 

 at another. There is nothing in any one to call them into being or 

 to inhibit them. The baby, the grown man, the hardened criminal, 

 the philanthropist, the dullard, the man of genius, the devoted mother, 

 the cold-hearted coquette; — all these may suffer such actions, and there 

 is no more reason for expecting one of these to serve as the stage for 

 their appearance than there is for expecting another to serve as such. 

 The play has nothing to do with the stage ; it may break out anywhere ! 



temporal mores! are there those who harbor such thoughts 

 about their fellow-men? Indeed there are; this is the doctrine of the 

 " freewillist," stripped of its domino and set out without disguise. I 

 am convinced that it would not even get a hearing, were it not that 

 we often confuse it with the very different doctrine that men are under 

 certain circumstances free, and that we come to regard it as the opposite 

 of that very unscientific doctrine fatalism. 



Of freedom, " freedom," and fatalism I have already written at 

 some length in The Populae Science Monthly, 1 and I shall not treat 

 of them in detail here. But we have recently been offered some such 

 curious " freewill " reasonings by Professor James, in that much-dis- 

 cussed little work " Pragmatism," that I can not but think that a brief 



1 December, 1900, and October, 1901. 



