of the second class as worthy of the name at all. Certainly, as jurymen, they have little concern with them. It is only with those of the first class that the law has to do, except in cases in which the sanity of the accused is in question. But suppose one of the jurymen happens to be a philosopher, and is accustomed to reflect upon matters which most men are in the habit of passing by without much thought. He may say to himself: "As a juryman I cannot think of listening to the absurd excuse for homicide offered by this second fellow. If I did I should have to admit that no man is a moral agent and that no crime should be punished. The smuggler, the burglar, the murderer, may be assumed to be influenced by motives of some sort. There is no case in which something may not be pointed to as that which occasioned the deed. Human life must be protected; society must be preserved; evildoers must be punished. If some men find the attractions of crime irresistible, so much the worse for them. And yet, as a philosopher, I find that I must accept the fact that, in a certain sense of the words, the guilty man couldn't help doing what he did. He was what he was; the target was attractive; the result followed. He was free from external compulsion, but he was not and could not be free from himself and his own impulses."
The man who reasons thus is called a determinist. Whether our determinist is wise to express things exactly as he does will appear in what follows. But the thought which he is at least trying to express is sufficiently clear. A determinist is a man who accepts in its widest sense the assumption of science that all the phenomena of nature are subject to law, and that nothing can happen without some adequate cause why it should happen thus and not otherwise. The fall of a raindrop, the unfolding of a flower, the twitching of an eyelid, the penning of a sentence—all these, he maintains, have their adequate causes, though the causes of such occurrences lie, in great part, beyond the line which divides our knowledge from our ignorance. Determinism is, of course, a faith; for it is as yet wholly impossible for science to demonstrate even that the fluttering of an aspen leaf in the summer breeze is wholly subject to law; and that every turn or twist upon its stem must be just what it is, and nothing else, in view of the whole system of forces in play at the moment. Much less is it possible to prove in detail that that complicated creature called a man draws out his chair, sits down to dinner, gives his neighbor the best cut of the beef, discusses the political situation, and resists the attractions of the decanter before him, strictly in accordance with law—that every motion of every muscle is the effect of antecedent causes which are incalculable only because of the limitations of our intelligence and our ignorance of existing facts. And yet the faith of science seems to those trained in the sciences a reasonable thing, for, as is pointed out, it is progressively jus-
