Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/503

Rh no more to be chosen by men or women, Savonarola reminds the fugitive Romola, than birthplace, or father, or mother could be chosen, though men might choose to forsake them. So long as a moral code exists, and is generally acknowledged and revered, the fact of individual deflections from it, whether they be more or less numerous, is of comparatively small importance. It is the invalidation of the moral code, the prevalence of ethical agnosticism, the skepticism as to all first principles, which I account so portentous a sign of our own times. It seems to me to be the token of a decadent and moribund civilization.

Let us look at the matter as practical men. Assuredly what we may expect from materialism is not construction but destruction in all the most important departments of human life. Consider only two. The bond of civil society is obedience to law, fenced round with penalties; but legislation rests upon the doctrine of human responsibility. "Will," Kant tells us, "is a kind of causality belonging to living beings in so far as they are rational; and freedom is such a property of causality as enables them to be efficient agents, independently of outside causes determining them; while, on the other hand, necessity is that property of all irrational beings, which consists in their being determined to activity by the influence of outside causes." This conception of human freedom underlies the notion of crime. Yes; the sense of crime is bound up with the belief in man's power of choice, and in his obligation to choose rightly. Where there is no faculty to judge of acts, as right or wrong, and to elect between them, as in a young child or a lunatic, there is no criminal responsibility, for there are no persons. Personality manifests itself under the condition of free-will, influenced but not coerced by motives, a will which has the power of choice between two alternative courses. Without that power assuredly there is no moral acountability. Ought is a meaningless word without Can. Now, every school and variety of materialism does, in effect, deny free-will, be the denial more or less direct, more or less veiled. Either we are presented with the a posteriori argument, so elaborately worked out by Buckle, which aims at establishing, by the aid of statistics, that what we call morality is subject to fixed laws, like the course of the stars or the return of the seasons; that what we call virtue and vice are the results of physical causes, as regular as those which rule the germination of plants or the procreation of animals. Or the a priori road is followed, and we are told that though we can determine our actions according to our wishes, we can not determine our wishes. The will—what we call will—is exhibited to us as always governed by the strongest motives, the force of which is not due to us, for we suffer them, we do