234 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



consciously in those who intend to conceive causes in 

 a more scientific manner. If a cause is analogous to a 

 volition, outside causes will be analogous to an alien will, 

 and acts predictable from outside causes will be subject 

 to compulsion. But this view of cause is one to which 

 science lends no countenance. Causes, we have seen, do 

 not compel their effects, any more than effects compel their 

 causes. There is a mutual relation, so that either can be 

 inferred from the other. When the geologist infers the 

 past state of the earth from its present state, we should 

 not say that the present state compels the past state to 

 have been what it was ; yet it renders it necessary as a 

 consequence of the data, in the only sense in which 

 effects are rendered necessary by their causes. The 

 difference which we feel, in this respect, between causes 

 and effects is a mere confusion due to the fact that we 

 remember past events but do not happen to have memory 

 of the future. 



The apparent indeterminateness of the future, upon 

 which some advocates of free will rely, is merely a result 

 of our ignorance. It is plain that no desirable kind of 

 free will can be dependent simply upon our ignorance ; 

 for if that were the case, animals would be more free 

 than men, and savages than civilised people. Free will 

 in any valuable sense must be compatible with the fullest 

 knowledge. Now, quite apart from any assumption as to 

 causality, it is obvious that complete knowledge would 

 embrace the future as well as the past. Our knowledge 

 of the past is not wholly based upon causal inferences, 

 but is partly derived from memory. It is a mere 

 accident that we have no memory of the future. We 

 might as in the pretended visions of seers see future 

 events immediately, in the way in which we see past 

 events. They certainly will be what they will be, and 



