266 LIFE: ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 



on a cloth untrue, with a twisted cue and elliptical billiard balls, 

 what becomes of free will? 



Freedom of ivill is mental, not physical. What we call freedom 

 of the will is essentially the self-imagined ability if a person to 

 select, at a certain time and under certain conditions, a certain 

 alternative of thousrht or action. The selection involves no infal- 

 lible assumption or guarantee as to what the immediate or remote 

 consequences will be in every case, and absolute uniformity of 

 results is seldom achieved or expected. The ethical and moral 

 criteria of the situation are met, and free will is exercised, when 

 a choice is made or, to throw a sop to the pure mechanists who 

 claim a material force majeure, when the chooser thinks he makes 

 a choice. Descartes' dictum, Cogito ergo sum, indicates how basic 

 are the unseen springs of our consciousness and reason, from 

 which emerge conscience and the power to make choices. 



The law has long recognized this situation. Criminal choice 

 or intent (moral turpitude) is generally alleged in felonies. A 

 common allegation in indictments is that the act was committed 

 "wilfully, wickedly and maliciously, with malice prepense and 

 aforethought." In some of the old English court records it was 

 applied even against animal offenders. In order to obviate the 

 difficulty of proving the putative state of mind of the law-breaker, 

 laws often rehearse or assume that certain acts are in themselves 

 presumptive evidence of criminal intent. It must be stressed, how- 

 ever, that the laws existing at any particular time represent merely 

 what is put into effect by the dominant powers of the state; that 

 these laws will differ widely from time to time and from place to 

 place; and that, owing to legal and legislative time-lag, they often 

 do not represent the current popular mores. 



Thousands of years of human experience have established cer- 

 tain actions and inhibitions as desirable in human society. Thus 

 the injunctions laid down in the Ten Commandments are gener- 

 ally accepted by civilized mankind. They seem, in part, to repre- 

 sent a condensation and extension of the forty-two items of the 

 chapter, in the Egyptian "Book of the Dead," known as "The 

 Negative Confession." Seven of these negative statements to the 

 underworld Judges (e.g., "I have not robbed with violence; I have 

 not made light the bushel") represent forms of stealing which are 

 condensed into the Eighth Commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." 

 The statement, "I have not defiled the wife of a man," corresponds 

 to the Seventh Commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adul- 



