ou. XVII.] SOCIOLOGY AND FREE-WILL. 185 



fatalism ; a confusion of ideas like that under wliicli Mr. 

 Bounderby laboured, when unable to see the difference 

 between giving workmen their just dues, and feeding them 

 with turtle-soup out of a gold-lined spoon. To say that 

 actions dependent on volition will take place whenever the 

 essential conditions are present, and to say that they will take 

 place even if the conditions are absent, are by free-will 

 theorists held to be one and the same assertion ! ^ Fatalism 

 is, however, much more closely akin to their own doctrine. 

 Each ignores causation ; each is incompatible with personal 

 freedom; the only difference between them being that the 

 one sets up Chance, while the other sets up Destiny, as the 

 arbiter of human affairs. And while each doctrine is theo- 

 retically held by large bodies of men, each in practice is 

 habitually contradicted by its upholders. The defenders of 

 free-will, who in practice are obliged to admit a certain con- 

 nection between acts and motives, and the Arab fatalists, 

 among whom the saying is current that " when Allah wills 

 an event, be prepares tlie causes beforehand," alike ex- 

 emplify this. Though both agree in repudiating causation, 

 both equally in their every-day maxims give evidence of 

 an unconscious belief in its existence. 



Having identified the causation theory with fatalism, it 

 becomes all the easier for its opponents to accuse it of deny- 

 ing moral responsibility. Accordingly, when Mr. Buckle, 

 following in the footsteps of Laplace, inferred from the regu- 

 larity of the statistics of crime and suicide, marriages and 

 uead-letters, that voluntary actions conform to law ; ^ it was 



* " Tt is owing to the very general misconception of the nature of Law that 

 there arises the niisronception of Necessity ; the fact that events arrive irre- 

 sistibly whenever their conditions are present, is confounded with the concep- 

 tion that the events must arrive whether the conditions be present or not, 

 being fatally predetermined. Necessity simply says that whatever is is, and 

 will vary witli varying conditions Fatalism says that something inust be; 

 and this something cannot be modified by any modification of the conditions." 

 — Lewes, Prohlcms of Life and Miml, vol. i. p. 309. 



^ Buckle, Civiliz'iHon in England, vol. L pp. 20 — 30 ; Laplace, Essai mtt 

 lea FrobabilUis, p. 70. 



