ni SCIENCE AND MORALS. 141 



casually associated for threescore years and ten 

 with the arrangement and movements of innu- 

 merable millions of successively different material 

 molecules, can be continued, in like association, 

 with some substance which has not the proper- 

 ties of matter and force?" As Kant said, on a 

 like occasion, if anybody can answer that ques- 

 tion, he is just the man I want to see. If he says 

 that consciousness cannot exist, except in relation 

 of cause and effect with certain organic molecules, 

 I must ask how he knows that; and if he says it 

 can, I must put the same question. And I am 

 afraid that, like jesting Pilate, I shall not think 

 it worth while (having but little time before me) 

 to wait for an answer. ^- 



Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the 

 freedom of the will. In the only sense in which 

 the word freedom is intelligible to me — that is to 

 say, the absence of any restraint upon doing what 

 one likes within certain limits — physical science 

 certainly gives no more ground for doubting it 

 than the common sense of mankind does. And if 

 physical science, in strengthening our belief in the 

 universality of causation and abolishing chance as 

 an absurdity, leads to the conclusions of deter- 

 minism, it does not more than follow the track of 

 consistent and logical thinkers in philosophy and 

 in theolog}^, before it existed or was thought of. 

 Whoever accepts the universality of the law of 

 causation as a dogma of philosophy, denies the 



