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 " Antilogy," 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 

 corne 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 Robert 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 



