theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	of its pretensions. I confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the pretensions of the gnostic faith. Not only do I utterly fail to understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being, with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all, must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation, and not be enveloped in its sphere.	null
book	Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its first dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find tha t the cognitive	null
book	faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental powers,—the powers of will. Such a thing as its emancipation and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color of plausibility from any fact we can discern. Arising as a part, in a mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must, wh atever its powers of growth may be (and I am far	null
book	from wishing to disparage them), remain a part to the end. This is the character of the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no reason to suppose that that character will ever change. On the contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. In every being that is real there is somethin g external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other. God’ s being is sacred from	null
book	ours. To co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking of him up, mus t lie the real meaning of our destiny.	null
book	This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when the soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe, is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theory about it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutest theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate education, are a sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they feed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain that a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should neve r pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of	null
book	human personality lay there.	null
book	I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope you will agree that I have	null
book	established my point, and that the physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Be tween agnosticism and	null
book	gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as to insist that we can know Being’ s character when made, and how it asks us	null
book	to behave.	null
book	63	null
book	If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim and end of every sound	null
book	philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this ascertainment of the character of Being lies an almost infinite speculative	null
book	task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan -psychic conclusions speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of	null
book	a Renouvier, reply whether wit hin the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the	null
book	speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do. But do it little or much, its place in a philosophy is always the same, and is set by the structural form of the mind.	null
book	Philosophies, whether expressed in sonnets or systems, all must wear this form. The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and communes with the eter nal essences. But whatever his achievements and discoveries be	null
book	while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the terra firma of concrete life again.	null
book	Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen how theism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native France to -day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to	null
book	be better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes our theoretic control , may suggest a most definite practical	null
book	conclusion,—this one, namely, that ‘ our wills are free. ’ I will say nothing of Renouvier’ s line	null
book	of reasoning; it is contained in many volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.	null
book	19 But to enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the	null
book	philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made, and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:—	null
book	“Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,	null
book	From that great deep before our world begins, Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,— Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, From that true world within the world we see,	null
book	Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,— Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep, With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy. For in the world which is not ours, they said, ‘Let us make man, ’ and that which should be man,	null
book	From that one light no man can look upon, Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign That thou art thou,—who wailest being born And banish ’d into mystery,...	null
book	...our mortal veil And shattered phantom of that Infinite One, Who made thee unconceivably thyself	null
book	19 Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols., 12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une	null
book	Classification Systématique des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.	null
book	64	null
book	Out of his whole world- self and all in all, —	null
book	Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape	null
book	And ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death to death through life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not matter, nor the finite -infini te,	null
book	But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world.”	null
book	65	null
book	The Dilemma Of Determinism	null
book		null
book	An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the Unitarian Review for	null
book	September, 1884.	null
book	A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free- will	null
book	controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which	null
book	every one has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,—not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free- will imply. At our very side almost,	null
book	in the past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,—we see in the writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf	null
book	20 how completely changed and	null
book	refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of the necessarily implied cor ollaries of determinism clearer to you than they have been	null
book	made before, I shall have made it possible for you to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free- will side of the	null
book	question all hope of a coercive demonstration,—a demonstration which I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.	null
book	With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not without one more point	null
book	understood as well. The arguments I am about to urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective satisfaction; and, second, if	null
book	there be two conceptions, and the one seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other,	null
book	we are entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two. I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me; for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not, they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science—our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest—proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our	null
book	minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral	null
book	20 And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,—see the Monist, for 1892 -93.	null
book	66	null
book	demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed	null
book	my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality, for example, —what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the	null
book	sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenome nally appears? It is as much	null
book	an altar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. Uniformity is as much so as is free- will. If this	null
book	be admitted, we can debate on even terms. But if any one pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all.	null
book	21	null
book	To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual arguments on the subject. I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can foretell one another ’s conduct, from the fixity of character, and all the rest. But	null
book	there are two words which usually encumber these classical arguments, and which we must immediately dispose of if we are to make any progress. One is the eulogistic word freedom ,	null
book	and the other is the opprobrious word chance . The word ‘ chance ’ I wish to keep, but I wish to	null
book	get rid of the word ‘ freedom. ’ Its eulogistic associations have so far overshadowed all the rest	null
book	of its meaning that both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to -day insist	null
book	that they alone are freedom ’s champions. Old- fashioned determinism was what we may	null
book	call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will,	null
book	necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words,	null
book	and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr. Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a ‘ free-will determinist. ’	null
book	Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presents simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by it, —whether he mean the acting without externa l constraint;	null
book	whether he mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law of the whole,—who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and sometimes we are not? But there is a problem, an issue of fact and not of words, an issue of the most momentous	null
book	21 "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the notion that the thought of a universal physical	null
book	order can possibly have arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular perceptions.	null
book	Indubitable as it is that men infer f rom known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if	null
book	restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other.	null
book	"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not discovered; till the order is looked for .	null
book	The first impulse to look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, or produce a result.	null
book	But the practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even	null
book	were there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and those in which it is linked to something else. The	null
book	former processes harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking: the latter do not. In the former, his concepts , general judgments , and inferences apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application. And	null
book	thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)	null
book	67	null
book	importance, which is often decided without discussion in one sentence,—nay, in one clause	null
book	of a sentence, —by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their efforts to	null
book	show what ‘ true’ freedom is; and that is the question of determinism, about which we are to	null
book	talk to -night.	null
book	Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite, indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now, evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for ourselves. What does determinism profess?	null
book	It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree	null
book	what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. An y other future complement	null
book	than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.	null
book	“With earth ’s first clay they did the last man knead,	null
book	And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.	null
book	And the first morning of creation wrote	null
book	What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”	null
book	Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on one	null
book	another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous. Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and, somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.	null
book	Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist nowhere , and that necessity on the one hand	null

book

of its pretensions. I confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the pretensions of the gnostic faith. Not only do I utterly fail to understand what a cognitive faculty erected into the absolute of being, with itself as its object, can mean; but even if we grant it a being other than itself for object, I cannot reason myself out of the belief that however familiar and at home we might become with the character of that being, the bare being of it, the fact that it is there at all, must always be something blankly given and presupposed in order that conception may begin its work; must in short lie beyond speculation, and not be enveloped in its sphere.

null

book

Accordingly, it is with no small pleasure that as a student of physiology and psychology I find the only lesson I can learn from these sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its first dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find tha t the cognitive

null

book

faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental powers,—the powers of will. Such a thing as its emancipation and absolution from these organic relations receives no faintest color of plausibility from any fact we can discern. Arising as a part, in a mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must, wh atever its powers of growth may be (and I am far

null

book

from wishing to disparage them), remain a part to the end. This is the character of the cognitive element in all the mental life we know, and we have no reason to suppose that that character will ever change. On the contrary, it is more than probable that to the end of time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. In every being that is real there is somethin g external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other. God’ s being is sacred from

null

book

ours. To co-operate with his creation by the best and rightest response seems all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretic drinking of him up, mus t lie the real meaning of our destiny.

null

book

This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when the soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and insisting about this formula or that. In the silence of our theories we then seem to listen, and to hear something like the pulse of Being beat; and it is borne in upon us that the mere turning of the character, the dumb willingness to suffer and to serve this universe, is more than all theories about it put together. The most any theory about it can do is to bring us to that. Certain it is that the acutest theories, the greatest intellectual power, the most elaborate education, are a sheer mockery when, as too often happens, they feed mean motives and a nerveless will. And it is equally certain that a resolute moral energy, no matter how inarticulate or unequipped with learning its owner may be, extorts from us a respect we should neve r pay were we not satisfied that the essential root of

null

book

human personality lay there.

null

book

I have sketched my subject in the briefest outlines; but still I hope you will agree that I have

null

book

established my point, and that the physiological view of mentality, so far from invalidating, can but give aid and comfort to the theistic attitude of mind. Be tween agnosticism and

null

book

gnosticism, theism stands midway, and holds to what is true in each. With agnosticism, it goes so far as to confess that we cannot know how Being made itself or us. With gnosticism, it goes so far as to insist that we can know Being’ s character when made, and how it asks us

null

book

to behave.

null

book

63

null

book

If any one fear that in insisting so strongly that behavior is the aim and end of every sound

null

book

philosophy I have curtailed the dignity and scope of the speculative function in us, I can only reply that in this ascertainment of the character of Being lies an almost infinite speculative

null

book

task. Let the voluminous considerations by which all modern thought converges toward idealistic or pan -psychic conclusions speak for me. Let the pages of a Hodgson, of a Lotze, of

null

book

a Renouvier, reply whether wit hin the limits drawn by purely empirical theism the

null

book

speculative faculty finds not, and shall not always find, enough to do. But do it little or much, its place in a philosophy is always the same, and is set by the structural form of the mind.

null

book

Philosophies, whether expressed in sonnets or systems, all must wear this form. The thinker starts from some experience of the practical world, and asks its meaning. He launches himself upon the speculative sea, and makes a voyage long or short. He ascends into the empyrean, and communes with the eter nal essences. But whatever his achievements and discoveries be

null

book

while gone, the utmost result they can issue in is some new practical maxim or resolve, or the denial of some old one, with which inevitably he is sooner or later washed ashore on the terra firma of concrete life again.

null

book

Whatever thought takes this voyage is a philosophy. We have seen how theism takes it. And in the philosophy of a thinker who, though long neglected, is doing much to renovate the spiritual life of his native France to -day (I mean Charles Renouvier, whose writings ought to

null

book

be better known among us than they are), we have an instructive example of the way in which this very empirical element in theism, its confession of an ultimate opacity in things, of a dimension of being which escapes our theoretic control , may suggest a most definite practical

null

book

conclusion,—this one, namely, that ‘ our wills are free. ’ I will say nothing of Renouvier’ s line

null

book

of reasoning; it is contained in many volumes which I earnestly recommend to your attention.

null

book

19 But to enforce my doctrine that the number of volumes is not what makes the

null

book

philosophy, let me conclude by recalling to you the little poem of Tennyson, published last year, in which the speculative voyage is made, and the same conclusion reached in a few lines:—

null

book

“Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,

null

book

From that great deep before our world begins, Whereon the Spirit of God moves as he will,— Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, From that true world within the world we see,

null

book

Whereof our world is but the bounding shore,— Out of the deep, Spirit, out of the deep, With this ninth moon that sends the hidden sun Down yon dark sea, thou comest, darling boy. For in the world which is not ours, they said, ‘Let us make man, ’ and that which should be man,

null

book

From that one light no man can look upon, Drew to this shore lit by the suns and moons And all the shadows. O dear Spirit, half-lost In thine own shadow and this fleshly sign That thou art thou,—who wailest being born And banish ’d into mystery,...

null

book

...our mortal veil And shattered phantom of that Infinite One, Who made thee unconceivably thyself

null

book

19 Especially the Essais de Critique Générale, 2me Edition, 6 vols., 12mo, Paris, 1875; and the Esquisse d'une

null

book

Classification Systématique des Doctrines Philosophiques, 2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1885.

null

book

64

null

book

Out of his whole world- self and all in all, —

null

book

Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape

null

book

And ivyberry, choose; and still depart From death to death through life and life, and find Nearer and ever nearer Him who wrought Not matter, nor the finite -infini te,

null

book

But this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act and on the world.”

null

book

65

null

book

The Dilemma Of Determinism

null

book

null

book

An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the Unitarian Review for

null

book

September, 1884.

null

book

A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out of the free- will

null

book

controversy, and that no new champion can do more than warm up stale arguments which

null

book

every one has heard. This is a radical mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,—not, perhaps, of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the ideas of fate and of free- will imply. At our very side almost,

null

book

in the past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,—we see in the writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf

null

book

20 how completely changed and

null

book

refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of the necessarily implied cor ollaries of determinism clearer to you than they have been

null

book

made before, I shall have made it possible for you to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free- will side of the

null

book

question all hope of a coercive demonstration,—a demonstration which I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.

null

book

With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not without one more point

null

book

understood as well. The arguments I am about to urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective satisfaction; and, second, if

null

book

there be two conceptions, and the one seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other,

null

book

we are entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two. I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me; for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not, they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science—our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest—proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our

null

book

minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral

null

book

20 And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,—see the Monist, for 1892 -93.

null

book

66

null

book

demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to doubt it, as if it disappointed

null

book

my demand for uniformity of sequence, for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality, for example, —what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply a demand that the

null

book

sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary juxtaposition which now phenome nally appears? It is as much

null

book

an altar to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods. Uniformity is as much so as is free- will. If this

null

book

be admitted, we can debate on even terms. But if any one pretends that while freedom and variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and uniformity are something altogether different, I do not see how we can debate at all.

null

book

21

null

book

To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual arguments on the subject. I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can foretell one another ’s conduct, from the fixity of character, and all the rest. But

null

book

there are two words which usually encumber these classical arguments, and which we must immediately dispose of if we are to make any progress. One is the eulogistic word freedom ,

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and the other is the opprobrious word chance . The word ‘ chance ’ I wish to keep, but I wish to

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get rid of the word ‘ freedom. ’ Its eulogistic associations have so far overshadowed all the rest

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of its meaning that both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to -day insist

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that they alone are freedom ’s champions. Old- fashioned determinism was what we may

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call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will,

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necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words,

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and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr. Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a ‘ free-will determinist. ’

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Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of fact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presents simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by it, —whether he mean the acting without externa l constraint;

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whether he mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law of the whole,—who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and sometimes we are not? But there is a problem, an issue of fact and not of words, an issue of the most momentous

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21 "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the notion that the thought of a universal physical

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order can possibly have arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular perceptions.

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Indubitable as it is that men infer f rom known cases to unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if

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restricted to the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation. From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand, their contradictions on the other.

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"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not discovered; till the order is looked for .

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The first impulse to look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained, or produce a result.

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But the practical need is only the first occasion for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even

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were there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest, or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and those in which it is linked to something else. The

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former processes harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking: the latter do not. In the former, his concepts , general judgments , and inferences apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application. And

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thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of his own thought." (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)

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67

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importance, which is often decided without discussion in one sentence,—nay, in one clause

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of a sentence, —by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their efforts to

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show what ‘ true’ freedom is; and that is the question of determinism, about which we are to

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talk to -night.

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Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite, indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now, evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for ourselves. What does determinism profess?

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It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree

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what the other parts shall be. The future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. An y other future complement

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than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.

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“With earth ’s first clay they did the last man knead,

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And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.

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And the first morning of creation wrote

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What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”

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Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain amount of loose play on one

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another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous. Of two alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and, somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.

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Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist nowhere , and that necessity on the one hand

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