Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/787

 stones at strangers passing by; a dog barks at their heels; both are soundly whipped at each offense, and sooner or later both cease its repetition. In both instances punishment was given from the same standpoint; its action on child and dog was alike—equally effectual, and I see no reason for the interposition of moral responsibility in the one case, if denied in the other.

I do not believe that the doctrine of necessity, if generally held, would lessen in any way our abhorrence of evil, or our approval of the good. To assert, as Professor Bascom does in his recent work on "Ethics," as a proof of free-will, that the doctrine of necessity "does not merely strangle virtue—it leaves every thought and action as true and as just, one as another," and that "all our moral action loses its character without liberty," seems to me to make statements unsupported by any evidence whatever. Would Professor Bascom allow that Deity is free to become a fiend? And if not—if to be God he must of necessity be good—does he conceive that divine action "loses its character without liberty"? Or can he explain why conduct should be deprived of the distinctions of good and evil because conditioned, any more than physical qualities admitted to be determined independently of the individual's will? If beauty in the human form is better than ugliness, health than disease, symmetry than distortion, intelligence than idiocy, why should not modesty, humanity, justice, and truth, not only seem, but be better than profligacy, cruelty, iniquity, and falsehood? The fact is, goodness is essentially beautiful, and in the slow progress of mankind upward, from savagery to the ultimate civilization yet to be, can not fail to command admiration. Evil is hateful, independently of its relations to ethics, and its awful realm extends far beyond the area of human action. In the spider springing upon the entangled fly, the cat playing with its victim before tearing it to pieces, in the teeth of the shark, the fangs of the rattlesnake, the poisonous slaver of the rabid dog; in the deposition of tubercle, the slow growth of cancer, the ravages of syphilis upon innocent childhood, we get glimpses of the great mystery of Evil, separate from human will, where we pity but never condemn. And if, perchance, some day the world should learn to discriminate in the sphere of human action between the deed and doer; if, acknowledging necessity, it should come to have a larger and more comprehensive charity for all mankind, will it have strayed very far from the example and precepts of the world's great Teacher? Was there not one who, hating leprosy, loved the leper?—about whom Pharisees murmured because he sat at meat with sinners?—who condemned not her whom the law would have stoned?—who taught that "it must needs be that offenses come," and whose last prayer asked forgiveness for his enemies, "for they know not what they do"? I do not believe these dying words were without meaning; they were the expression of a scientific truth.

Nor, finally, will belief in the conformity of will to law hinder our