n6 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



times an Atheist, sometimes a Positivist, and 

 sometimes, alas and alack, a cowardly or reaction- 

 ary Obscurantist. 



Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the free- 

 dom of the will. In the only sense in which the 

 word freedom is intelligible to me that is to say, 

 the absence of any restraint upon doing what one 

 likes within certain limits physical science certainly 

 gives no more ground for doubting it than the 

 common sense of mankind does. And if physical 

 science, in strengthening our belief in the universality 

 of causation and abolishing chance as an absurdity, 

 leads to the conclusion of determinism, it does no 

 more than follow the track of consistent and logical 

 thinkers in philosophy and in theology, before it 

 existed or was thought of. Whoever accepts the 

 universality of the law of causation as a dogma of 

 philosophy, denies the existence of uncaused pheno- 

 mena. And the essence of that which is improperly 

 called the freewill doctrine is that occasionally, at 

 any rate, human volition is self-caused, that is to say, 

 not caused at all ; for to cause oneself one must 

 have anteceded oneself which is, to say the least of 

 it, difficult to imagine. 



If the diseases of society consist in the weak- 

 ness of its faith in the existence of the God of the 

 theologians, in a future state, and in uncaused 

 volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is 

 to suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose 



