First of all, let the determinist honestly envisage the implications of his philosophy. If every action is necessarily the result of pre-existing and ultimately physical conditions, we must conclude, first that determinism and mechanism are identical, and that Michelangelo's piety and Shakspere's passion, Socrates' nose and Cleopatra's smile were due to the mechanical and chemical structure of the primeval nebula. It is a large order; one wonders at the readiness with which professional skeptics like Renan and Anatole France swallowed this deterministic camel. But even doubters are believers; their proudly scientific rejection of one faith is soon followed by their blindly human acceptance of another.

It remains a marvel that this tremendous nebula never choked the gullet of credulity. What hypnotism was it that made us for a generation accept the transient categories of physics as the laws and symbols of our lives? Which of us really believed that he was a machine, and acted honestly on that humorous hypothesis? Or did we secretly know, beneath this Byronic pretense, that sense and mind are active as well as

passive things, and that we are in our little ways creative centers in the flux of force? How could we honestly conceive in terms of mechanism and determinism the vast variety and fertility of life, its endless experiments and forms, its inexhaustible ingenuity, its patient transformation of the world nearer to the heart's desire?

Our determinism came of Locke's conception of the mind as a clean slate on which sensations wrote, a passive wax, shaped and reshaped helplessly by external things. But we are being taught to-day a different psychology. At the bottom of our souls we find desire, desire which is "the very essence of man"; and we can trace in a thousand ways the selective and formative action of desire on our sensations, perceptions, memories and ideas. Life has divided its great hunger into specialized instincts and capacities; it is these that determine our actions, our attitudes, and the orientation of our senses; we are unconscious of innumerable stimuli that vainly try to send their messages to us; we ignore vast realms of sensible reality because we select through our purposes the sensations we need. We hear certain sounds that interest us, and are deaf to a thousand others; we look at some temporarily meaningless object and see straight through it to some goal that fills our minds and therefore guides our eyes. It is our purposes that interpret sensations into perceptions, unify perceptions into ideas, and co-ordinate ideas into thoughts. It is purpose, and not recency nor frequency nor vividness, that explains the association of ideas. You are told to add given pairs of numbers; soon

the "mental set" of addition "determines" without effort the association of stimulus and response; and hearing "7 and 7" you answer "14." But if you had been told to multiply, you would have reacted with "49" to that identical sensation. You are not, then, the helpless recipient and victim of whatever stimuli may chance to impinge upon your flesh. You are an agent of selection. Education is not, as Spencer led the world to believe, a scheme for adapting you completely to your environment; it is the far more subtle art of developing in you the powers through which you may adapt your environment to your own purposes, and the susceptibilities through which you may receive the meaning and beauty of the world.

In this process of active adaptation we perform mental prodigies which only a fanatic could conceive as mechanical: we analyze wholes into parts, and recombine parts into new wholes; we dissociate ideas in perception, and re-associate them in reasoning; we consider purposes, measure values, imagine results and invent ways and means for our innermost desire. We recall the issue of past responses, vision their like again in these surroundings and judge them in the light of our purposes. Knowledge is the memory of the results of various modes of action; the more our knowledge, the greater our foresight can be; the greater our foresight the wider our freedom. Consciousness is the rehearsal of imagined responses; through memory, imagination and reason we eliminate unwise reactions, and express with some success our final aim. Freedom, like reason, is delayed response leading to total response; our free

dom grows as by delay we permit a complex situation to arouse in us all relevant impulses, and as by imagination, we combine these partial impulses into a total reaction that expresses our complete and maturest self.

Mechanism is secondary; what we see as primary, fundamental, and immediate, what we take for granted in the actual and honest philosophy of our lives, is that every organism, in proportion to the flexibility of its structure, is a center of redirected force, and (in some measure) of spontaneous initiation. Life is creative, not because it makes new force from nothing, but because it adds its own remoulding force to the powers that enter from without. And will is free only in so far as the life of which it is the form, actively reshapes the world.

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Can this conception of freedom withstand the assaults of the determinist? minist? He will remind us that "will" is an abstract term (he will forget that "force" is not less so). To which we should reply that by will we mean no metaphysical entity, but the propulsive and expansive behavior of life itself. What life is, another page must try to tell; but let us not turn a fact into a mystery, or the determinist will recall the conservation of energy; the organism cannot emit more energy than it has received. Which is to forget that life itself is energy, visibly transforming the forces and materials brought to it into combinations that aim at the mastery of environment by thought, and occasionally succeed. What issues from action may be no more in quantity than what entered

in sensation; but how potently different in quality! This transforming power of life is the highest energy we know; it is known to us more directly and surely than any other energy in the world, and is synonymous with freedom.

The determinist supposes that freedom is illusory because the "stronger" motive always wins. Of course this is a vain tautology: the motive that is strong enough to win is stronger than the one that fails. But what made it stronger if not its harmony with the will, with the desire and essence of the soul? "But there cannot be any uncaused actions." Verily; but the will is part of the cause; the circumstances of an action must include the forward urgency of life. Each "state" of mind follows naturally from the total preceding state of all reality; but that state and this include the transforming energy of life and will. "The same effect always follows the same cause." But the cause is never the same, for the self involved is always in flux, and circumstances are forever changing. "But if I knew all your past and present I could infallibly predict your response." You could if you knew also the nature and power of the life-force within me; you could, perhaps, if you abandoned mechanistic principles and asked yourself, for your guidance, what you -that is, life-would do in this complex of circumstance. Probably you could not predict successfully even then; probably there is in life an element of incalculability and spontaneity which does not accord with our categories and our "laws," and which gives peculiar zest and character to organic evolution and human

affairs. Let us pray that we shall never have to live in a totally predictable world. Does not the picture of such a world seem ridiculously incongruous with life?

"But all action is the result of heredity and environment." Not quite; the determinist modestly fails to take account of himself. He supposes once more that life is the passive product of external forces; he neglects (if we may use a pleonasm) the very vitality and liveliness of life. We are not merely our ancestors and our circumstances; we are also a well of transforming energy; we are part of that stream of creative force, of capacity for adaptive choice and thought, in which our forefathers also moved and had their being. These ancestors are in truth living and acting within us; but the will and the life that were once in them is in each of us now, creating the "spontaneous me." Freedom is narrower and wider than as conceived of old; it is subject, no doubt, to ancestral and environing limitations of a thousand kinds; nevertheless it is as deep as life, and as broad as consciousness; it grows in scope and power with the variety of experience and the clarity of thought. Will is free in so far as life is creative, in so far as it enters, with its fluent energy, as one of the determining conditions of choice and action. There is no violation of "natural law" in such a freedom, because life itself is a natural factor and process, not a force outside the varied realm of Nature. Nature itself, as its fine name implies, is that living power through which all things are begotten; perhaps throughout the world this spontaneity and urgency, which we have claimed for life, lurk.

To say that our character determines our actions is true. But we are our character; it is we then that choose. To say with Huxley that we may be free to act out our desire, but are never free to choose what our desire shall be, is also true, and also tautological; for we are our desires; desire is life itself, and in realizing our desires we realize ourselves. It is not enough to say that external and hereditary forces compel and conquer us; the other half of the truth is that life itself is a force of its own, with its own direction and power, cruelly limited and constrained, but effecting its will in an amazing degree, rising from the lowliest organisms to the lonely heights of genius, and covering the world with its forms and its

victories.

This realization of our fundamental freedom restores to us our responsibility and our personality, and challenges us to create. There was something cowardly in determinism, with its shifting of guilt to heredity and society, those poor abstract scapegoats of our vice and our sloth. It reflected not only the domination of the individual by the vast industrial machinery of our times, but also the overshadowing of personality by the ever-growing city and the rapacious democratic state; in a mob it is difficult to retain initiative and individuality. Determinism was a result of the intoxication of physics with its own external glory, so that it thought to include the universe of mind, art and love in its partial and precarious formulæ. But slowly we are passing out of the age of physics into the age of biology. We shall learn to see, behind the superficial

mechanisms of the world, the pulsing life beneath. We shall understand that in our modest measure we participate in the "procreant urge" of the world, and that if we wish, we may write some lines of the rôle we play in the drama of Creation.

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Let us note before we end, how the mechanical approach is breaking down in biology, in psychology, in physiology and even in physics itself. "To-day," says Lucien Poincaré, "the idea that all phenomena are capable of mechanical explanations, is generally abandoned." "In modern physics," says Cassirer, "the mechanical view of the world has been more and more superseded and replaced by the electro-dynamic view." "In spite of the efforts of thousands of workers," says Le Bon, "physiology has been able to tell us nothing of the nature of these forces that produce the phenomena of life. They have no analogy with those that are studied in physics." As chemistry needs the concept of quality in addition to that concept of quantity with which physics tries to be content, so physiology needs, in addition to quantity and quality, the concept of organism. Physics and chemistry are the study of parts which determine the behavior of their wholes; biology is the study of wholes which determine the behavior of their parts.

Among the biologists themselves the rejection of mechanism has become a common thing: Driesch and Pavlow and Haldane are names that might make any mechanist take thought. And it is significant that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, with all their hostility to tradi