xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 285 



of his maxim that much learning did not teach intelli 

 gence. And the philosopher- pedant has never been 

 denounced more brilliantly and incisively than by Plato. 



As for the use of Determinism as an excuse for the 

 bad man, it has been one of the earliest inferences to be 

 drawn from moral philosophy. No sooner had Socrates 

 put forward the suggestion that virtue was (a sort of) 

 knowledge, and thereby laid the foundation of a scientific 

 study of morals, than this dictum was improved into a 

 reductio ad absurdum of morality. It was at once pointed 

 out that if virtue was knowledge, then vice must be 

 ignorance, and that no one was vicious willingly, any 

 more than ignorant. Vice, therefore, was involuntary, 

 and no one should be blamed for being vicious. The 

 retort, fixed for us in the Ethics of Aristotle (iii. 5. 17), 

 that by the same reasoning virtue might be proved 

 involuntary, could not arrest the controversy : it had 

 merely to be accepted (as it promptly was by the Stoics) 

 to bring upon the scene full-blown Determinism, and to 

 inflict upon ethics a perennial problem which the majority 

 of philosophers at the present day probably regard as 

 insoluble, to wit that of reconciling the strict determination 

 of every event with the moral demand that it shall, 

 nevertheless, be possible to break the chain of circum 

 stance in order to choose the right. 



Clearly, therefore, Mr. Blatchford s contentions have 

 abundant plausibility as well as many precedents. There 

 is much excuse also for the lapses of his logic. The 

 spectacle of human folly, crime, and misery is so harrowing 

 that only the coolest intellects can bear coldly to criticize 

 and carefully to examine proposals that promise a whole 

 sale alleviation of the burden of man. And yet unless 

 Mr. Blatchford s clarion is merely to create confusion and 

 dissension in the ranks of the army with which man is 

 battling with his secular foes, these are just the points to 

 be scrutinized. The chief source of human suffering is 

 not social. It is not a consequence of man s imperfect 

 control of his own nature, nor of the imperfect develop 

 ment of his social sympathies and the resulting inhumanity 



