XVI 

 FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 1 



ARGUMENT 



I. Does Determinism blot out the criminal s responsibility for his crimes ? 



And would he fare better at the hands of Science, if he were 

 treated as irresponsible ? If he cannot help offending, can society help 

 punishing ? Belief in social reform presupposes an alternative and better 

 course of events. Is, then, a belief in Freedom irrational, and should 

 Determinism make no difference to practice ? 



II. The scientific value of Determinism as a methodological postulate. Law 



as the instrument of prediction. But this ignores novelty, and our 

 postulate s confirmation is only empirical. The value of Determinism 

 diminished by our ignorance, and largely sentimental. The caricaturing 

 of Libertarianism. Free choice not motiveless. Freedom demanded 

 and explained by the moral struggle, and so thinkable and possible. 

 The clash of rival postulates leaves us free to choose between them. 

 Does this prove Freedom ? 



IF the Social Revolution should ever pass from the 

 region of vague sentiment into that of crude and cruel 

 fact, there is at least one class of learned men whose 

 extinction may be prophesied with as great confidence as 

 that of priests and kings. When the amiable exhortation 

 of the French revolutionist has been acted on, and the 

 neck of the last king has been constricted with the 

 entrails of the last priest, the last millionaire will no 

 doubt have been smothered with the unsaleable remainders 

 of the last professor of philosophy. 



Such at any rate is the estimate of the value of 

 philosophy Mr. Robert Blatchford s pamphlet, Not Guilty, 

 A Defence of the Bottom Dog, very distinctly manages to 



1 This essay appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Review for November 1907. 



283 



