xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 293 



a universe which fosters such illusions strike him as 

 particularly hopeful or rational ? 



If on the other hand he chooses to believe in Freedom 

 and prefers a world in which there can be real alternatives, 

 he will choose a world which can (perhaps) be altered 

 and improved. In such a world, of course, the desire 

 for reform can be rational, and the ordinary assumptions 

 of his words and thoughts and acts will not be stultified. 



But he will not, even so, escape from the charge of 

 irrationality. For the first move of the Determinist will 

 be to bring this indictment against the free universe. 

 Such a universe cannot, he contends, be fully determined ; 

 and if there is to be detected anywhere within it the 

 slightest trace of indetermination, its rationality is com 

 promised beyond redemption. If, he declares, there is 

 anything anywhere of which the behaviour is undeter 

 mined, to however small an extent, the rational order 

 of the world is irretrievably ruined. Everything must 

 be absolutely fixed ; or else everything must get so loose 

 as to dissolve itself in chaos. The menace is so terrible, 

 the danger is so imminent, that it would seem to need 

 the recklessness of a sceptic to reply that since the 

 irrationality of the universe was manifest in either case, 

 he at least considered himself free to choose whichever 

 form thereof best pleased him ; while it would require an 

 unusual amount of philosophic courage to resist intimida- 

 ation and to dare to question the conclusiveness of the 

 deterministic plea. 



Here then we come to the great antithesis of Freedom 

 and Determinism, which may well claim to be the blue- 

 ribbon problem of philosophy. Its claim to this proud 

 position rests in the first place on the fact that it is one 

 of the few philosophic problems which are capable of 

 interesting the ordinary man. Every one is capable of 

 feeling its central difficulty, the conflict and compulsion 

 of motives and the apparently free decision of the will. 

 Every one also can perplex himself with the apparently 

 unanswerable arguments for Determinism. And so, 

 secondly, the problem seems a typical example of the 



