CLASSICAL NOTES. 25 



Again, M. Guyau observes that this spontaneity does not disturb 

 natural order, but works along the same lines. Mr. Masson (p. 224) 

 thinks this an arbitrary assumption ; luit does not the same ana'ogy 

 apply once more ? Free-will does not mean freedom to will arbitra- 

 rily, but freedom to act upon the highest law of our being ; and the 

 will is most free when most obedient to this law. In the same way 

 then, in proportion to the worth and development of anything, will 

 be its approximation to the highest law of its nature. The inner 

 desire, tlie true will, of each thing moves in this one direction : 

 l3t)u/.rj(Ttc, in Aristotelian phrase, is always tou ayadoo. 



In this sense spontaneity, human or not, may justly be said to 

 work along the lines of nature. It appears to iis — obscure though 

 the connection may look — that the acutest defender of miracles, 

 Canon Mozley, meant something of the same kind when he repre- 

 sented miracles as quickening merely, not, resisting, the processes of 

 nature. His theory seems to imply an elasticity in nature which 

 Lucretius describes as free-will. 



Mr. Masson shows, it is true, that the ascription of consciousness 

 to matter is against the express testimony of Lucretius (Lucr. II. 

 972) ; but his own quotation from Gassendi (p. 220) proves that M. 

 Guyau is not the only student of Epicureanism that has been more 

 logical than Epicurus and Lucretius. It is inevitable that here, as 

 in other speculations, there should be a "development" of doctrine. 

 The ascription to matter of will without consciousness is, as Mr. 

 Masson observes (p. 220), illogical. The spirit of the system in 

 spite of the letter seems to require this assumption : the defect here 

 is in Epicurus and Lucretius, not in the French critic. 



After all, the onus probandi lies with Mr. Masson. Lucretius 

 says that the atoms originally have free-will. He does not say that 

 this free-will ceases for that majority of them which meet to form 

 gross matter, and survives only in the minority which form the 

 human soul. 



The original free-will of nature is a necessary part of the Epicu- 

 rean system ; for without it the origin of the world is inexplicable. 

 The permanence of such free-will in nature, if in one sense unscien- 

 tific, in another i-ecommends itself to science; for it establishes the 

 "solidarity" of man and nature; and Epicurus, at any rate, believed 

 in human free-will. 



Finally, the visionariness and mysticism that undoubtedly attach 



