“FATED TO BE FREE” 
that had gone to the making of his character up to 
that hour impelled him to it. Something in the poet 
bloomed or flashed out in his lyrical burst, but per- 
haps if he had had a headache, or had just lost a 
friend, the lyric would not have come. 
In terms of science every effect has its cause, and 
there is no life except from antecedent life. When 
we fix our attention upon matter, and the laws of 
matter, the belief in free will is impossible. We are 
in the land of fatalism. We are not here by our own 
will. We are not of this type or family or race by 
our own will. We are hardly more of this or that 
political or religious creed by our own will. We did 
not choose to have red hair or black hair, blue eyes 
or gray eyes. We have no power of choice in the 
main things of our lives and fortunes. And yet to us 
it seems that our wills are free. When we appeal to 
the natural scientific order, we are held in the iron 
bonds of necessity or determinism. The natural 
order is inviolable. The river is free to flow where 
gravity directs or pulls it, or rather, where its in- 
herent mobility allows it to flow. Each thing is free 
to obey the laws of its own nature, which means it is 
not really free at all. “Free as the air” we say, but 
the air always behaves the same under the same 
conditions; it is controlled by its own laws. The 
wind does not blow where it listeth, but where its 
laws decree that it shall blow. Human nature is 
free in the same way —a vastly more complex 
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