it 



FATED TO BE FREE" 



that had gone to the making of his character up to 

 that hour impelled him to it. Something in the poet 

 bloomed or flashed out in his lyrical burst, but per- 

 haps if he had had a headache, or had just lost a 

 friend, the lyric would not have come. 



In terms of science every effect has its cause, and 

 there is no life except from antecedent life. Wlien 

 we fix our attention upon matter, and the laws of 

 matter, the belief in free will is impossible. We are 

 in the land of fatalism. We are not here by our own 

 will. We are not of this type or family or race by 

 oiu- own will. We are hardly more of this or that 

 political or religious creed by our own will. We did 

 not choose to have red hair or black hair, blue eyes 

 or gray eyes. We have no power of choice in the 

 main things of our lives and fortunes. And yet to us 

 it seems that our wills are free. When we appeal to 

 the natural scientific order, we are held in the iron 

 bonds of necessity or determinism. The natural 

 order is inviolable. The river is free to flow where 

 gravity directs or pulls it, or rather, where its in- 

 herent mobility allows it to flow. Each thing is free 

 to obey the laws of its o\\ti nature, which means it is 

 not really free at all. "Free as the air" we say, but 

 the air always behaves the same under the same 

 conditions; it is controlled by its own laws. The 

 wind does not blow where it listeth, but where its 

 laws decree that it shall blow. Human nature is 

 free in the same way — a vastly more complex 



151 



