ON FREE-WILL, AND MAN'S AUTOMATISM. 147 



is this very rigidity of Nature's laws, joined to our 

 knowledge of the several laws themselves. We are free, 

 and knowledge is the true emancipator. To know the 

 physical law, and to make use of it, to know the physio- 

 logical, or mental, or economic law, and to take account 

 of it, is to make the law our servant and not our master. 



Nature is unchanging ; it is for us to know her, and 

 after knowing to obey her, in obeying to obtain the 

 dominion over her. But knowledge is the first condition 

 of empire. Knowledge which positive science as dis- 

 tinct from hypothesis provides is thus the true de- 

 liverer of man both from the tyranny and seeming 

 caprice of external natural forces, blind and powerful, 

 as well as from the maleficent forces, moral or organic, 

 resident within. Ever it is the truth which makes man 

 free, so far as freedom can be predicated of a being 

 subject to external and internal conditions, which can 

 be indefinitely modified and made to serve his most 

 intimate -desire and purpose, but which in themselves are 

 unalterable. 



We are free, in the sense explained ; but there is no 

 autonomous will. There is no absolute sovereignty of 

 the will, but only a constitutional rule subject to many 

 checks and conditions. The will is limited by laws and 

 conditions, physical, organic, mental, social, which must 

 be accepted in any case ; but which, if accepted and 

 made the best of, man can control his destiny in their 

 despite, and even by their means. We can thus act as 

 if we were free, in spite of the doctrine of speculative 

 necessity, as Butler argues ; we are free to pursue our 

 most desired ends the only freedom that any need care 

 to have ; and we shall obtain all the more of this kind of 

 freedom, the more all Nature passes under the yoke of 

 invariable and unchanging laws. 



