FREEWILL AND PREDESTINATION 7 



making discovery before an astonished world, and it will 

 probably go on being difficult just so long as trout are 

 trout. The trout, being a slow-witted person and so 

 fashioned by a merciful Providence, is apt to look twice 

 at a solitary specimen of any kind of insect before attacking 

 it. But, given a sufficient supply, he awakes in time to 

 the notion that there is game afoot, and it is probably 

 just the same if the artificial fly be tendered him again 

 and again without a mistake. He may begin to suspect 

 a hatch, and may irresistibly be led to respond to the 

 stimulus. Fortunately there are other stimuli to which 

 he responds with equal inevitability — funk, for instance. 

 So that the fearful may take heart of grace; and may even 

 suspect that, when the learned Professor had had his laugh 

 out at the readiness with which the anglers' reflexes 

 responded to his stimuli, and had settled whether there 

 were any or only rudimentary cortices to their brains, 

 things went on just as they were before, and that they will 

 so continue. 



It doesn't matter a bit in the world whether the trout 

 reasons that the artificial fly is unsatisfactory or whether 

 his sensations suggest to him that it is not a fly. In 

 either case the angler won't get him that chuck. It does 

 not matter whether his perceptions or his reason suggests 

 to him that that is a fly and good to eat. Perceptions 

 which lead to logical conclusions are as near a form of 

 reason as is good for the angler, even if the premisses or 

 one of them — the fly, to wit — be a wrong 'un. 



