574 PSYCHOLOGY. 



l>eliever in free-will can ever Jo will be to show that the 

 deteriniuistic arguments are not coercive. That they are 

 seductive, I am the last to deny ; nor do I deny that effort 

 may be needed to keep the faith in freedom, when they 

 press upon it, upright in the mind. 



There is Sb fatalistic argument for determinism, however, 

 which is radically vicious. When a man has let himself 

 go time after time, he easily becomes impressed with the 

 enormously preponderating influence of circumstances, 

 hereditary habits, and temporary bodily dispositions over 

 what might seem a spontaneity born for the occasion. 

 "All is fate," he then says ; "all is resultant of what pre- 

 exists. Even if the moment seems original, it is but the 

 instable molecules passively tumbling in their preappointed 

 way. It is hopeless to resist the drift, vain to look for any 

 new force coming in ; and less, perhaps, than anywhere else 

 under the sun is there anything really mine in the decisions 

 which I make." This is really no argument for simple 

 determinism. There runs throughout it the sense of a force 

 which might make things otherwise from one moment to 

 .another, if it were only strong enough to breast the tide. A 

 person who feels the impotence of free effort in this w^ay has 

 the acutest notion of what is meant by it, and of its possible 

 independent power. How else could he be so conscious of 

 its absence and of that of its effects ? But genuine deter- 

 minism occupies a totally different ground ; not the impo- 

 tence but the unthinkability of free-will is what it affirms. 

 It admits something phenomenal called free effort, which 

 seems to breast the tide, but it claims this as a portion of the 

 tide. The variations of the effort cannot be independent, it 

 says; they cannot originate ex nihilo, or come from a fourth 

 dimension ; they are mathematically fixed functions of the 

 ideas themselves, which are the tide. Fatalism, which 

 conceives of effort clearly enough as an independent varia- 

 ble that might come from a fourth dimension if it ivoidd 

 come, but that does not come, is a very dubious ally for 

 determinism. It strongly imagines that very possibility 

 which determinism denies. 



But what, quite as much as the inconceivability of 

 absolutely independent variables, persuades modern men 



