are not in this respect like other events,—that they are not the inevitable outcome of precedent conditions, but are, in some quite unique sense, 'free.' The purpose of this article is, however, not to fight over again the old battle of the freedom of the will, but to indicate some of the changes in our ethical notions which must result from the attempt to carry out to their logical conclusions the implications of the determinists' doctrine.
It may, nevertheless, be desirable for the sake of clearness to state this doctrine very briefly and in its simplest terms. A human character is the result of inheritance and of those external circumstances which in their totality, as they affect any man, we call his environment. Were there given, then, an absolutely complete knowledge of a man's character at some particular moment when he has to choose between two courses of action, with an equally full and accurate acquaintance with his circumstances, the course which he will adopt could be predicted with perfect certainty. This is equally true whether the choice be important or trivial, whether it involve moral issues or not; it is true when a man chooses his dinner at a restaurant, when he chooses his profession in life, when he chooses to be a martyr for conscience's sake, or to be a traitor to a sacred cause intrusted to his keeping. Always the result could be foretold, were the whole nature of the man, and the facts as present to his consciousness, precisely known. His actions must be thus and so, for just this man, at this time and under these conditions. It has been claimed that since there is no external force compelling the individual to a particular deed, the word 'must' is out of place in this connection, and on this account Mill and others have objected to the use of the words 'necessity' and 'necessitarian.' But the objection has really little weight; the determinist view is necessitarian, for the determination is equally a necessary one, whether it arises from the character of the individual—itself, of course, an effect of previous causes—or from the direct action of external forces. Thus we may as well face our problem squarely, and grant that the determinists' position is,
