Let us now introduce into such an external and intelligible universe, governed as we have seen by a law of necessary causation, human beings endowed with a freedom of initiative. Such beings, so far as they possess a material constitution, will be subject, of course, to the necessary laws of matter. They are, how- ever, capable, under our hypothesis, of themselves setting in motion chains of causes and effects which have no antecedent cause other than the volition of the beings themselves. This is the meaning of freedom. These volitions, however, considered alone, have no explanation, so far as we have yet supposed. They are mere whims, of which nothing more is to be known than is to be known of the unconscious and unregulated motions of infancy. Indeed, that is all they are. If, however, we further predicate intelligence of such beings, a new but real element of intelligibility is added, to wit, the thought or intention manifested in their volitions.
The mere supposition of intelligent and freely volitional human beings, however, bears no very important consequences. Such beings would be wholly unrelated, except in three particulars. They are of course under the relations of space, time, and the other purely formal relations; they are subject to the law of causality; and they may voluntarily relate themselves to each other by joining in common purposes; but with that their relatedness ends. Two of them, for example, of opposite sex, might voluntarily co- habit and beget children. The children would be the effect of their parents' cohabitation, and the parents would be the cause of the children; but any further relation would depend solely upon the volition, not of the parents only, but of the children as well. To suppose anything more is to violate our hypothesis. Under such conditions, there could be no family in any legitimate sense of the word. So, too, society would not exist otherwise than as a mere social compact, dependent upon the actual will of each in- dividual- member, and since the possibility of a will to unite necessarily implies the possibility of a will to disunite, it would have no elements of continuity superior to the changing desires of its members. The form of such a society would be at any given moment but the form of the conjoint wills of its members. Those wills, however, would change with no more reason than the shifting desires of those at the time composing the social body, which therefore would lack every element of stability and of permanence. It would be particularly true that there would be no continuity of
