SCIENCE AND MAN. 615 
necessity certainly failed to frighten Bishop Butler. He 
thought it untrue even absurd but he did not fear its 
practical consequences. He showed, on the contrary, in 
the " Analogy," that as far as human conduct is concerned, 
the two theories of free-will and necessity would come to 
the same in the end. 
What is meant by free-will? Does it imply the power 
of producing events without antecedents of starting, as 
it were, upon a creative tour of occurrences without any 
impulse from within or from without? Let us consider 
the point. If there be absolutely or relatively no reason 
why a tree should fall, it will not fall; and if there be 
absolutely or relatively no reason why a man should act, he 
will not act. It is true that the united voice of this 
assembly could not persuade me that I have not, at this 
moment, the power to lift my arm if I wished to do so. 
Within this range the conscious freedom of my will cannot 
be questioned. But what about the origin of the " wish? " 
Are we, or are we not, complete masters of the circum- 
stances which create our wishes, motives and tendencies to 
action? Adequate reflection will, I think, prove that we 
are not. What, for example, have I had to do with the 
generation and development of that which some will con- 
sider my total being, and others a most potent factor of 
my total being the living, speaking organism which now 
addresses you? As stated at the beginning of this dis- 
course, my physical and intellectual textures were woven 
for me, not by me. Processes in the conduct or regulation 
of which I had no share have made me what I am. Here, 
surely, if anywhere, we are as clay in the hands of the 
potter. It is the greatest of delusions to suppose that we 
come into this world as sheets of white paper on which the 
age can write anything it likes, making us good or bad, 
noble or mean, as the age pleases. The age can stunt, 
promote, or pervert pre-existent capacities, but it cannot 
create them. The worthy Kobert Owen, who saw in 
external circumstances the great molders of human char- 
acter, was obliged to supplement his doctrine by making 
the man himself one of the circumstances. It is as fatal 
as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our 
taste. How many disorders, ghostly and bodily, are trans- 
mitted to us by inheritance? In our courts of law, when- 
ever it is a question whether a crime has been committed 
