LIFE; BODY AND MIND 215 



non, but I shall be surprised if any other can 

 be presented which will do less violence to our 

 established ways of thought. 



Now finally it may seem absurd for me to 

 venture, in my remaining page or two, even to 

 touch upon the great problem of mind that has 

 vexed so many generations of men — the classi- 

 cal problem of determinism or free will ; but the 

 solution that I have to offer I have already sug- 

 gested in a previous chapter, and now need only 

 restate it. The problem is not whether the mind 

 is powerful — ^we have already discussed that — 

 but is the mind free.^^ 



If we claim that the problem of freedom may 

 be solved by the same methods whereby other 

 paradoxes of science have been resolved, it is 

 from no feeling of arrogance. The scientific 

 puzzles of antiquity, the antinomies of later 

 philosophers, have one by one been swept away 

 before the advance of science. Why should this 

 one problem be an exception.? 



Some of my colleagues have doubted whether 

 this can be regarded as a scientific question, but 

 it seems to me that nothing could be more so. 

 No one science alone, but several sciences, phys- 

 ics, chemistry, geology and astronomy, assume 

 as their very first postulate that the future of 



