Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/504

484 not originate them. Do we reply: "True, indeed; but though we do not create motives we have in our own hands the culture of the will; we are the architects of our own characters, because character is formed by acts, is, in fact, a chain of acts, and it rests with us to forge the first link of that chain"? The rejoinder is: "You beg the question. That first act was determined by motives; it was produced by the influence of the strongest of the external causes. Your so-called free-will is an illusion; it is really the sum of the many influences, of various kinds, which have been brought to bear upon a man, not merely individually, but during the countless generations of his existence in his ancestors. These have given to his soul—what we poetically call soul—its characteristic ply. 'Such as we are made of such we be.' What we call virtue and vice are, in M.Taine's striking phrase, 'merely products, like sugar and vitriol.' They are mainly the outcome of heredity. Francis of Assisi was necessarily a saint. Eccelino was necessarily a monster. Alexander Borgia could not by any means have become a Savonarola, nor Savonarola an Alexander Borgia. 'A poor devil can't command courage any more than he can make himself six feet high,' says Colonel Newcome, in extenuation of the cowardice of his nephew Barnes. No; nor can he command purity, or veracity, or pitifulness. 'To doubt the necessary nature of an action when a motive is presented to a given character,' writes the German philosopher, 'is just as absurd as to doubt that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles.' "The conclusion to which materialism in all its schools is inevitably led, is that will is not what Kant has defined it, but only a word to hide our ignorance of causation, a modality of instinctive acts, accompanied by a certain degree of sensation. But with what is called metaphysical liberty, with freedom of volition, merit and demerit disappear too. Human causality, human spontaneity, human responsibility, all die before the "uncreating word" of materialism. Its doctrine of absolute irresponsibility makes an end of ethics; its criminal legislation can be nothing but leges sine moribus vanœ. For the sting of punishment is not the actual fact—"stone walls do not a prison make"—but the moral disapprobation of which the fact is evidence. But how visit with moral disapprobation those who were incapable of doing anything but what they did? Poor victims of temperament, of heredity, of environment, they are to be pitied, not blamed; while, indeed, we seclude them for the protection of our persons and pockets; for we are the numerical majority, we can appeal to the ultima ratio of force, if to nothing higher. It is no fancy picture which I am now drawing. Fifty years ago Balzac wrote: "Crime has been made poetical; tears are driveled over assassins." True as his words were then, they are even truer now. The idea of law as the embodied conscience of a nation of persons, the belief in justice, in the old sense, as something quite transcending mere expediency—fiat justitia pereat mundus—the conception of the civil