SOCIOLOGY AND FREE-WILL 



and volitions among them, conform to law is 

 the indispensable axiom of every science or 

 philosophy which treats of the mind and its 

 products, whether individually or socially em- 

 bodied. He who asserts the contrary maintains 

 " a form of the Manichaean doctrine of two 

 principles ... in which one principle, that of 

 order, presides over the physical phenomena 

 of the universe, and the other, that of disorder, 

 over its moral phenomena." ^ As I have already 

 said, no middle ground can be talcen. The 

 denial of causation is the affirmation of chance, 

 and "between the theory of Chance and the 

 theory of Law, there can be no compromise, 

 no reciprocity, no borrowing and lending." To 

 write history on any method furnished by the 

 free-will doctrine would be utterly impossible. 

 Mr. Smith tells us that " finding at Rome a 

 law to encourage tyrannicide, we are certain 

 that there had been tyrants at Rome, though 

 there is nothing approaching to historical evi- 

 dence of the tyranny of Tarquin." By drawing 

 this inference he abandons his own principles, 

 according to which the law in question might 

 have originated without any cause except the 

 self-determining will of some Roman legislator. 

 And he is equally inconsistent in saying that 

 " a nation may have to go through one stage 

 of knowledge or civilization before it can reach 

 1 W. Adam, Theories of History , p. 65. 

 275 



