Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/193

Rh by the gradual advance of human knowledge, and even in fields in which anything like exact knowledge is at present unattainable the little we do know hints unmistakably at the reign of law. There are few intelligent men who would care to maintain that the fall of a rain-drop or the flutter of an aspen leaf could not be completely accounted for by the enumeration of antecedent causes, were our knowledge sufficiently increased; but there are a considerable number who take issue with the determinist in his view of the subjection to law of all human actions. They maintain that there is a necessarily incalculable element present in such cases, and that all the antecedents taken together can only in part account for the result. As opposed to determinism they hold to the doctrine of indeterminism, or, as it has too often unhappily been called, the doctrine of 'free-will.'

I say as it has unhappily been called, because it is a thousand pities that an interesting scientific question, and a most difficult one, should be taken out of the clear atmosphere of passionless intellectual investigation, and, through a mere confusion, brought down among the fogs of popular passion and partisan strife. We have all heard much about fate and free-will, and no man with the spirit of a man in him thinks, without inward revolt, of the possibility that his destiny is shaped for him by some irresistible external power in the face of which he is impotent. No normal man welcomes the thought that he is not free, and the denial of free-will can scarcely fail to meet with his reprobation. We recognize freedom as the dearest of our possessions, the guarantee, indeed, of all our possessions. The denial of freedom we associate with wrong and oppression, the scourge and the dungeon, the tyranny of brute force, the despair of the captive, the sodden degradation of the slave. The very word freedom is enough to set us quivering with emotion; it is the open door to the thousand-fold activities which well up within us, and to which we give expression with joy.

But it must not be forgotten that the antithesis of freedom is compulsion, that hateful thing that does violence to our nature and crushes with iron hand these same activities. The freedom which poets have sung, and for which men have died, has no more to do with indeterminism than has the Dog, a celestial constellation, with the terrestrial animal that barks. St. Thomas and Spinoza, who differ in many things, have both pointed out that one must distinguish between the two latter, and the distinction is not broader than that which exists between the former. Determinism is not fatalism, and indeterminism is not the affirmation of freedom in any proper sense of that word, the sense in which men take it when it sets their pulses bounding and fills their breasts with high resolve. We have seen that even a determinist can distinguish between the two 'couldn't helps,' and recognize that they must be differently treated. We may now go so far as to insist that,