Chapter XIV 



CAUSATION 



In the old conflict between freewill and predestination 

 it has seemed hitherto that physics comes down heavily 

 on the side of predestination. Without making ex- 

 travagant claims for the scope of natural law, its moral 

 sympathy has been with the view that whatever the 

 future may bring forth is already foretold in the con- 

 figurations of the past — 



Yea, the first Morning of Creation wrote 



What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read. 



I am not so rash as to invade Scotland with a solution 

 of a problem which has rent her from the synod to the 

 cottage. Like most other people, I suppose, I think it 

 incredible that the wider scheme of Nature which 

 includes life and consciousness can be completely 

 predetermined; yet I have not been able to form a 

 satisfactory conception of any kind of law or causal 

 sequence which shall be other than deterministic. It 

 seems contrary to our feeling of the dignity of the mind 

 to suppose that it merely registers a dictated sequence 

 of thoughts and emotions; but it seems equally con- 

 trary to its dignity to put it at the mercy of impulses 

 with no causal antecedents. I shall not deal with this 

 dilemma. Here I have to set forth the position of 

 physical science on this matter so far as it comes into 

 her territory. It does come into her territory, because 

 that which we call human will cannot be entirely 

 dissociated from the consequent motions of the muscles 

 and disturbance of the material world. On the scientific 



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