CHAPTER III.

DETERMINISM.

If

IF one thing differentiates man from beast more than another it is his conscious faculty to help on the forces within him that tend towards good, or to defeat those forces by yielding to the baser inclination. Physiologically man differs most from animals in the dimensions, the convolutions, and the efficiency of his brain; but this is merely a difference of degree-a question of more or of less. we compare the lowest type of man with the highest type of beast, the difference becomes practically reduced to a faculty for speech and the use of tools; and these may result as much from the shape of the cavity of the mouth and from the digitation of the forepaws as from any great increase in the capacity of the brain. The essential difference between man and beast seems to consist in a faculty possessed by men to abstain from a present pleasure in order to escape a future pain. It is true that animals can be taught by man to do this very thing; but it is done by animals only through the education and under the eye of a human master; it is not believed ever to have been found in a state of nature outside of man.

Now this faculty of abstaining from a present pleasure to avoid a future pain, or of suffering a present pain in order to enjoy a future pleasure, is in one sense a direct development of the intellectual faculty, for when (as Huxley puts it) we learn the rules of the game, we find that physical well-being depends largely upon an exercise of this faculty; later we learn that moral well-being is no less the result of intelligent self-control; and so the determinists claim that the exercise of this faculty is only a form of enlightened selfishness, our own well-being constituting the end in view. And they are doubtless so far right. But there are two considerations which, as man develops, tend to complicate this reasoning, and these may be roughly named love and duty. For we have already seen that love tends to reach away from self-from the domestic relations, which are only a reflected form of self, to the tribe, the nation, and at last the race, self progressively becoming less and less until it reaches a vanishing point. And there grows up in the heart of man a new motive, called duty, which replaces selfishness by substituting therefor an abstract notion of right, to which we cling, and by which we conduct our lives irrespective of self, even in its remotest form. The determinists answer that this so-called love and duty are no other than pleasure in another form; that he who suffers pain out of love for his race (as Christ is believed to have done) or out of a sense of duty (as Socrates) is merely obeying the greater impulse, which is none the less a greater impulse because

it seems to be an unselfish one.

The maniac who

destroys himself or the dervish who tears his flesh is the slave of an idea; in his case the idea is a false one. In the cases of Christ and Socrates the idea was not a false one, but it was equally an imperative one; it dominated its victims no less imperiously. In this sense neither Christ nor Socrates was free to do otherwise. The nobility or unselfishness of the dominant idea does not make it any the less the determining idea. Determinism is therefore as true of the patriot and martyr as of the criminal or debauchee.

Men who have grasped this argument tend to fall in love with their own perspicuity, and to regard with a feeling akin to contempt all those who cling to the unphilosophical convictions of consciousness to the contrary. To look upon the best. part of humanity in its efforts to improve itself by defeating inclination and selfishness in compliance with the abstract rules of love and duty; to look upon this heroic effort as a part of the human comedy, a mere substitution of one idea for another; to regard its victims as "fools of Nature" pluming themselves as heroes in a paradise of their own imagining, while they are to the superior eye of the philosopher mere manikins with strings pulled by the greater inclination-this, to some persons, lifts them to the plane of the select and superior few, and seems to gratify, although it ought to humiliate, their self-esteem.

Against this tendency we must guard ourselves.

Reason may err as well as religion; dogmatism may be a vice of one as well as of the other; and reason alone may be as unfit to decide some of our problems as sentiment. For the question before us now is one of mixed fact and judgment. We have not facts enough to proceed to demonstration; we must take the facts we have and reach our conclusions from these facts as best we may, with the least inconsistency and the least assumption. Unfortunately, one of the facts with which we have to deal is a fact of consciousness, and for that reason the most difficult of all facts to handle. For a fact of consciousness is one upon which different individuals do not agree. To many the idea of a man being free to do one thing rather than another seems absurd; nothing in their experience justifies it. On the contrary, a review of their own actions in the past convinces them that, though they may at certain times seem to have chosen to do one thing rather than another, they are convinced by the light of philosophy that as a matter of fact they have never done anything save what the greater inclination dictated. Others are equally persuaded that their decisions are voluntary and free; that there are presented to them two courses, between which they choose with deliberation and freedom, sometimes pursuing the course most in accordance with their natural inclinations because they believe it to be the proper course, sometimes denying themselves the luxury of yielding to their inclinations because they believe their inclinations to be contrary to their

highest duty. The determinists say this so-called freedom of choice is an illusion. The non-determinists retort that men born blind cannot discuss colour; that the absence of this faculty of choice in some does not justify these last in denying it to those for whom its existence is as certain as that of the world in which we live. And so the battle ineffectually rages, no convincing argument being possible between combatants one set of whom deny the very existence of the thing concerning which they are fighting, and the others of whom are bound to admit that the thing in question may exist only in themselves and not in those who deny it.

But need the battle continue to ineffectually rage? If each side ceases for a moment to strike at the other's demands and pauses to consider its own, will it not appear that both are right up to a certain point, and both wrong beyond that point? Do they not both claim too much? Can they not both abate their demands and come to a conclusion founded on common sense and truth?

In one sense, and perhaps it may be added, in a purely verbal sense, the determinists are incontrovertibly right every man who adopts one course rather than another is following his greater inclination; if it were not so he would not have adopted it. This is so obvious that to contest it is vain. Let us take a concrete case: A man has to choose between jumping into an angry sea to save the life of an enemy at imminent risk to his own and seeing that