acts, because no one in the world, not even yourself, can possibly say what you will, or will not, do next. You are ‘accountable,’ in short, because you are a wholly ‘unaccountable’ creature.
We can not escape this conclusion. If we always can do anything, or nothing, under any circumstances, or merely if, of given alternatives, we can always choose either, then it is always possible that any act should come from any man. If there is no real, no rational connection between the character and the actions (as the upholder of ‘Freedom’ does not deny there is between the actions and the character), then, use any phrases we please, what it comes to is this, that volitions are contingent. In short, the irrational connection, which the Free-will doctrine fled from in the shape of external necessity, it has succeeded only in reasserting in the shape of chance.
The theory was to save responsibility. It saves it thus. A man is responsible, because there was no reason why he should have done one thing, rather than another thing. And that man, and only that man, is responsible, concerning whom it is impossible for any one, even himself, to know what in the world he will be doing next; possible only to know what his actions are, when once they are done, and to know that they might have been the diametrical opposite. So far is such an account from saving responsibility (as we commonly understand it), that it annihilates the very conditions of it. It is the description of a person, who is not responsible, who (if he is anything) is idiotic.
The doctrine of Indeterminism asserts that the actions are in no case the result of a given character, in a given position. The self, or the will, of Indeterminism is not the man, not the character at all, but the mere characterless abstraction, which is ‘free,’ because it is indifferent. It has been well called ‘a will which wills nothing.’ [1]
But here we have not to investigate the doctrine, but to bring it into contact with ordinary life. Let us suppose a man of good character, innocent of theoretical reflections. Our apostle of
