UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 



The belief in free will is like the belief that the 

 earth is a plane instead of a sphere. For all practi- 

 cal purposes the earth is a plane — a plane which 

 has no boundaries; and for all practical purposes the 

 will is free. We feel at liberty to do what we like, 

 to go here or to stay there, to vote for this candidate 

 or to vote for that. We live our lives without any 

 sense of the sphericity of the globe, and without any 

 sense that our power of choice is not absolutely free. 



But it is as easy to prove that the will is not free 

 as to prove that the earth is round. In the realm of 

 material things fatalism abounds. Everything is held 

 in the iron law of cause and effect. Only life is spon- 

 taneous. We speak justly of the spontaneity of the 

 great poets, of the great orators, of our own best acts, 

 while yet we do not take into account the subtle and 

 hidden physical forces at work. The flower blooms 

 spontaneously, but not independently of the long 

 chain of forces at work there in the soil, in the air, 

 m the sun. Heroic deeds and poetic thoughts are 

 spontaneous in the same sense. Without thought 

 or calculation heroic deeds flash out in the lives of 

 men, noble thoughts are born in our minds and 

 hearts, as spontaneous as the rain or the dew, — 

 and no more so; which is to say that they are the 

 result of an intricate complex of causes at work in 

 unison with the creative force of Life. 



Something cannot come from nothing. Some 

 force in the man impelled him to the heroic act. All 



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