130 THE CREED OF SCIENCE, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL. 



and to shape our future character. Later still, we became 

 units in the social body, for which our education was 

 in great part a training, and our society with all but 

 omnipotent strength has compelled us to accept and act 

 upon its most accredited principles of action under 

 penalty of its displeasure a most formidable sanction. 

 Besides compelling us to obey its laws, it forces upon us 

 a conformity with its beliefs, sentiments, opinions, so far 

 as these are necessary for the preservation of its own 

 existence ; while the subordinate sections of society with 

 which we may be connected in different relations, in like 

 manner have compelled us to a conformity with their 

 laws and usages and principles. And concurrently with 

 education and the pressure of society, there has been all 

 the time the never-ceasing, ever-changing pressure of 

 circumstances co-operating in the evolution and fixing 

 of our moral character ; and so great has been the total 

 influence of these various forces, heredity, education, the 

 social imperative, and the constant pressure of circum- 

 stance, that an extremely narrow margin indeed is left 

 at any time for the operation of the free autonomous will 

 of Kant and the transcendental metaphysicians. These 

 various factors amongst them make up so much of the 

 moral man that they almost justify the aphorism (quoted 

 by Professor Huxley J that " our moral character is woven 

 for us, not by us." 



At all events, they show that our wills are not free. 

 Our volitions, our actions, are determined by motives, as 

 Mill and Bain contend ; and the motives owe their 

 strength to our character thus shaped under the forces 

 above described. It is true that men imagine they are free 

 to act or not to act, to decide one way or the other, in a 

 given case, because, as Spinoza has said, we know our 

 actions, but not always the motives from which they 



