132 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



which, in the case of man, assumes in common 

 parlance the predicate of " liberty." Its free dominion 

 and action become more and more deceptive as the 

 muscular system and the sense-organs develop with 

 a free and rapid locomotion, entailing a correlative 

 evolution of the brain and the organs of thought. 



The question of the liberty of the will is the one 

 which has more than any other cosmic problem 

 occupied the time of thoughtful humanity, the more 

 so that in this case the great philosophic interest 

 of the question was enhanced by the association of 

 most momentous consequences for practical philo- 

 sophy — for ethics, education, law, and so forth. Emil 

 du Bois-Keymond, who treats it as the seventh and last 

 of his " seven cosmic problems," rightly says of the 

 question : " Affecting everybody, apparently accessible 

 to everybody, intimately involved in the fundamental 

 conditions of human society, vitally connected with 

 religious belief, this question has been of immeasur- 

 able importance in the history of civilisation. There 

 is probably no other object of thought on which the 

 modern library contains so many dusty folios that 

 will never again be opened." The importance of 

 the question is also seen in the fact that Kant put 

 it in the same category with the questions of the 

 immortality of the soul and belief in God. He 

 called these three great questions the indispensable 

 " postulates of practical reason," though he had 

 already clearly shown them to have no reality what- 

 ever in the light of pwre reason. 



The most remarkable fact in connection with this 

 fierce and confused struggle over the freedom of the 

 will is, perhaps, that it has been theoretically rejected, 

 not only by the greatest critical philosophers, but 



