SOCIOLOGY AND FREE-WILL 



Arab fatalists, among whom the saying is current 

 that " when Allah wills an event, he prepares 

 the causes beforehand," alike exemplify this. 

 Though both agree in repudiating causation, 

 both equally in their every-day maxims give 

 evidence of an unconscious belief in its exist- 

 ence. 



Having identified the causation theory with 

 fatalism, it becomes all the easier for its oppo- 

 nents to accuse it of denying moral responsibil- 

 ity. Accordingly, when Mr. Buckle, following 

 in the footsteps of Laplace, inferred from the 

 regularity of the statistics of crime and suicide, 

 marriages and dead-letters, that voluntary ac- 

 tions conform to law ; ^ it was proposed by one 

 of his reviewers that state governments should 

 at once suspend judicial operations, and having 

 ascertained from statistics the yearly number of 

 murders, should forthwith hang a correspond- 

 ing number of individuals, selected by lot from 

 the community. To which suggestion the nat- 

 ural reply would have been, that if govern- 

 ments ever do adopt this singular course of ad- 

 ministering justice, they will then be consistently 

 acting on the belief that motives do not stand 

 in a causal relation to volitions. If the volition 

 can follow the weaker motive, the feelings which 

 ordinarily deter from the commission of crime 



^ Buckle, Civilization in England, vol. i. pp. 20—30 ; 

 Laplace, Essai sur les ProbabiliteSy p. 76. 



VOL. Ill -^73 



