484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



not originate them. Do we reply : " True, indeed ; but though we do 

 not create motives we have in our own hands the culture of the will ; 

 we are the architects of our own characters, because character is formed 

 by acts, is, in fact, a chain of acts, and it rests with us to forge the 

 first link of that chain " ? The rejoinder is : " You beg the question. 

 That first act was determined by motives ; it was produced by the in- 

 fluence of the strongest of the external causes. Your so-called free- 

 will is an illusion ; it is really the sum of the many influences, of vari- 

 ous kinds, which have been brought to bear upon a man, not merely 

 individually, but during the countless generations of his existence in 

 his ancestors. These have given to his soul — what we poetically call 

 soul — its characteristic ply. ' Such as we are made of such we be.' 

 What we call virtue and vice are, in M. Taine's striking phrase, 

 'merely products, like sugar and vitriol.' They are mainly the out- 

 come of heredity. Francis of Assisi was necessarily a saint. Eccelino 

 was necessarily a monster. Alexander Borgia could not by any means 

 have become a Savonarola, nor Savonarola an Alexander Borgia. ' A 

 poor devil can't command courage any more than he can make himself 

 six feet high,' says Colonel Newcome, in extenuation of the cowardice 

 of his nephew Barnes. No ; nor can he command purity, or veracity, 

 or pitifulness. ' To doubt the necessary nature of an action when a 

 motive is presented to a given character,' writes the German philoso- 

 pher, ' is just as absurd as to doubt that the three angles of a triangle 

 are equal to two right angles.' " The conclusion to which materialism 

 in all its schools is inevitably led, is that will is not what Kant has de- 

 fined it, but only a word to hide our ignorance of causation, a modality 

 of instinctive acts, accompanied by a certain degree of sensation. But 

 with what is called metaphysical liberty, with freedom of volition, 

 merit and demerit disappear too. Human causality, human sponta- 

 neity, human responsibility, all die before the "uncreating word" of 

 materialism. Its doctrine of absolute irresponsibility makes an end of 

 ethics ; its criminal legislation can be nothing but leges sine moribus 

 vance. For the sting of punishment is not the actual fact — "stone 

 walls do not a prison make " — but the moral disapprobation of which 

 the fact is evidence. But how visit with moral disapprobation those 

 who were incapable of doing anything but what they did ? Poor vic- 

 tims of temperament, of heredity, of environment, they are to be 

 pitied, not blamed ; while, indeed, we seclude them for the protection 

 of our persons and pockets ; for we are the numerical majority, we 

 can appeal to the ultima ratio of force, if to nothing higher. It is no 

 fancy picture which I am now drawing. Fifty years ago Balzac 

 wrote : " Crime has been made poetical ; tears are driveled over assas- 

 sins." True as his words were then, they are even truer now. The 

 idea of law as the embodied conscience of a nation of persons, the be- 

 lief in justice, in the old sense, as something quite transcending mere 

 expediency— -fiat justitia pereat mundus — the conception of the civil 



