‘figment;’ and that his moral world is, in everything but names and phrases, not the moral world of the vulgar? If, to repeat, on the theory of Necessity I am not punishable in the ordinary sense, then (for we saw that the two went together) I am not responsible either.
Our result so far then is this: we have seen what punishment for the vulgar and for the Determinist respectively are; and to see that is to see that they are altogether incompatible; and so in like manner the responsibilities, which correspond to them, are not the same. And our conclusion must be, that neither the one nor the other of our ‘two great philosophical modes of thought,’ however excellent they may (or may not) be as philosophies, each by itself and the one against the other, does in any way theoretically express the moral notions of the vulgar mind, or fail in some points to contradict them utterly.
But to perceive the fact is not enough for us. It has not been a discovery, but has been admitted and professed by teachers of Determinism. Our interest is mainly to see wherein it is that Necessitarianism fails to interpret the popular belief. It fails in this, that it altogether ignores the rational self in the form of will; it ignores it in the act of volition, and it ignores it in the abiding personality, which is the same throughout all its acts, and by which alone imputation gets a meaning.
A man, to express what the people believe, is only responsible for what (mediately or immediately) issues from the act of volition;
