348 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



examination of them will be found interesting. In any case it ought 

 to be useful to some; for when an author writes with passion and 

 vehemence there are those who are in danger of being swept away with 

 the tide of his eloquence, and of forgetting that they must not close their 

 eyes to the world of palpable and admitted fact that lies about them. 



Professor James makes lively objection to the emphasis which 

 some of us have laid upon the fact that there seems no sense in making 

 a man responsible for what he did not do and could not prevent; in 

 other words, in rewarding or in punishing him for " freewill " actions, 

 which, by hypothesis, do not spring from anything that is in him, but 

 just " happen " to the poor man. " Freewillists " have sometimes 

 maintained that only such actions can be regarded as creditable or the 

 reverse. It does not seem out of place for the man who sympathizes 

 with common sense and with science to point out that to reward a 

 man for what he did not do and can not do again, or to punish him for 

 what he did not do and can not be prevented from having happen to 

 him again, is highly absurd. 



This answer of common sense to the position taken by the " f ree- 

 willist," may, it is admitted, be good ad liominem, but it is declared 

 to be otherwise pitiful. Every man, woman and child, with a sense 

 for realities, ought, we are informed, to be ashamed to plead such 

 principles as either dignity or imputability. 



If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts we shall 

 punish him — anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether the acts 

 result from what was previously in him or are novelties in a strict sense. To 

 make our human ethics revolve about the question of " merit " is a piteous 

 unreality — God alone can know our merits, if we have any. a 



Now the common-sense determinist, that is, the man who believes in 

 human freedom in the ordinary signification of the word — who thinks 

 that the good man will freely choose the good, the bad man the evil, the 

 wise man the prudent course of action, the rash and imprudent the 

 gaming table — the common-sense determinist, I say, can have no 

 quarrel with the position, taken by Professor James, that utility must 

 be consulted in carrying on the social business of punishment and 

 praise. What more natural than that the man who believes human 

 actions to be explicable, even if not always explained, and who has 

 confidence in the efficacy of persuasion, reward and punishment, should 

 consult the principle of utility. He wishes to attain certain philan- 

 thropic ends; he believes that they can be attained by the employment 

 of the appropriate means ; and he turns to the means. 



But the common-sense determinist, like every one else who takes 

 an interest in ethics, must find rather paralyzing the idea that we 

 should eliminate from ethics the notion of "merit," and should praise 



2 " Pragmatism," p. 118. 



