118 WALTER AUBREY KIDK, M.D.^ M.R.C.S., F.Z.S.^ ON 



It has been seen that a growing knowledge of living nature 

 has served to enlarge enormously the sphere of purpose. The 

 old controversy on the subject of free will or determinism can 

 never again engage the minds of men with the fervour and 

 passion seen in the past. No longer now need this controversy 

 divide even religious men into hostile camps. It has no loms 

 standi in a practical age like that which is upon us. No civilised 

 community would venture to act for 24 hours as if determinism 

 were true in ethics even though the prevailing fashion among 

 ethical teachers still seems to be to deny that man is free. If 

 governments could be induced to govern their people on the 

 theoretical lines of the non-religious experts on ethics, a very 

 little time would have passed before the survivors in the progres- 

 sive nations of the world would be longing for that "friendly 

 comet," referred to once by Huxley, which should resolve them 

 and their earthly abode into their original elements. But the 

 degrees of purpose which have been reviewed, as passing through 

 the whole scale of living beings, and the irresistible evidence 

 which is forthcoming, that man at least is free to make himself 

 bad or to make himself good, raise a very important point to 

 which, in his Gifford Lectures, Professor Campbell Fraser 

 frequently refers. 



Men are Persons not Things. 



He shows that the only intelligible conception of the world in 

 which we live requires us to look upon men as persons and not 

 things. All scientific progress, all secular business, all moral 

 progress requires that this view of men as moral beings be 

 acknowledged. It appears to lie at the root of all human life, 

 and to be frankly admitted by all except by the learned and 

 comparatively small coterie of scientific experts on ethics who 

 have captured the minds of their fellow scientists. If this be 

 formally granted, the whole of terrestrial existence gains enor- 

 mously in interest and importance, and the dark mystery of 

 evil becomes less and less oppressive to the human philosopher. 

 It is appalling to contemplate in thought what the condition of 

 mankind and his subject creatures would be if it were not 

 almost universally acknowledged in civilised countries. History, 

 fortunately, gives us one object-lesson of the results which would 

 follow if mankind were to hold the view that men are things 

 and not persons, and therefore irresponsible agents. The lesson 

 is writ large in the page of modern history. One of the greatest 

 c'-eniuses ever seen was that man who has been called " the 

 Scavenger of God," of whom it was said that " notliing where 



