466 FREE WILL AND NECESSITY 



{aKoXaala) and thorough ignorance have lost sight of the 

 ideals of goodness and wisdom, and so are no longer 

 troubled by the attraction of what is unseen as well as 

 unattainable. There is therefore no consciousness of 

 necessity or freedom in the infra-vaoraX stage, in which it 

 is impossible to say either " I can," "I ought," or " I must." 

 The capacity to feel the last of these at all events does not 

 indeed seem to vanish wholly until we sink beneath the 

 threshold of conscious existence, but it is the normal con- 

 dition of inanimate nature. 



§ 9. For it is wholly erroneous to ascribe necessity to 

 the action of the inanimate in the sense in which we feel it. 

 It is erroneous not because of its anthropomorphism, for 

 all our explanations are anthropomorphic (ch. v. § 6), but 

 because of its bad anthropomorphism. The falling of a 

 stone over a precipice is not necessary, for we cannot, 

 without personifying it, attribute to it the feeling of " not 

 being able to help falling," which we should experience if 

 launched forth into the air. These feelings we know to 

 be false in the case of the stone : the stone simply falls, 

 and feels nothing. We might as truly (and as falsely) 

 represent what happens as the free expression of the 

 stone's inner nature as as a reluctant submission to the 

 external law of gravitation. It would be as correct to say 

 that the stone fell because it wanted to, as that it fell 

 because it had to. In each case we interpret the fact in 

 terms of our thought ; it makes no difference in principle 

 whether we regard the Becoming of unconscious nature as 

 analogous to human freedom or to human necessity. 



In inanimate nature events simply happen^ A is and then 

 B is ; but we, interpreting this anthropopathically, say A 

 is the cause of B. But herein lies a double error ; for 

 when we say, " When A is, B must necessarily follow," we 

 go beyond our evidence in several ways. For we not only 

 assume a connection where none need exist, except in our 

 fancy, but imply a feeling of compulsion which we cannot 

 seriously ascribe to B, And then it turns out that after 

 all our conception of causation cannot be applied to the 

 Becoming of nature in the way we insist on applying it, 

 that it leads either to an infinite regress of conditioned 

 causes (§ 4 and ch. iii. § 11), or to a first cause which is 



