Page:Will to Believe and Other Essays (1897).djvu/259

237 Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says: "It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan brain.… To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the physical conditions in which they are set,—including, of course, under the term physical conditions the relations of place and time in which they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated without a cause."

This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no tertium quid between outward environment and miracle. ''Aut Cæsar, aut nullus! Aut'' Spencerism, aut catechism !

If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself' whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by ’physical conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but the vague Asiatic