380 LESSONS FEOM NATURE. [CHAP. XIII. 



emphatically than before the marvellous and isolated character 

 of that power of choice which all unprejudiced men know 

 that they possess. When it comes to be fully appreciated, 

 amongst the many, how rigid law rules not only all living as 

 well as inanimate irrational creatures, but how even the 

 immense majority of our own actions are simply automatic, 

 the wonderful character of our power of (in certain cases) 

 voluntarily choosing the less attractive of two competing 

 objects will be less inadequately estimated. Moreover, the 

 recognition in our own being of this power, beyond anything 

 else in nature, renders supernatural action external to us not 

 only credible but to be anticipated a priori. Creative action 

 and absolute annihilation, miracle, response to prayer, and 

 the apportionment in another world of rewards and chastise 

 ments according to the exercise in this of meritorious voli 

 tions, or of the reverse, harmonise thoroughly with that 

 philosophy which asserts the freedom of the will. That they 

 do so harmonise, the very objections of our modern Deter- 

 minists serve to demonstrate ; and it is daily becoming more 

 apparent that to deny these is by implication to deny the 

 existence of virtue, to uproot every possible basis of morality, 

 and even, as we shall see, to eliminate from the social 

 organism those legal sanctions, and even those modes of 

 speech, the reasonableness of which depends upon the real 

 existence of &quot; rights &quot; and &quot; duties &quot; as ordinarily understood. 

 The bitter hostility which exists to the doctrine of man s free 

 will is not difficult to understand. It is impossible to assert 

 it without implicitly asserting religion ; and it is, in one aspect 

 at least, a trial to pride. It is indeed no small trial to the 

 pride of a highly-cultured man of powerful intellect to feel 

 that the poorest peasant is fully as capable as himself of 

 performing the highest actions those which are the special 

 prerogative of man namely, the exercise of rational meri 

 torious volition and choice. If there is such a thing as 

 morality, it is beyond comparison as to value with mere 

 intellectual culture or capacity, and it necessarily follows 

 that a poor paralysed old woman sitting in a chimney-corner 



