Heaven forbid that I should once more wade in those swamps of logomachy
and tautology in which the old guard of the Determinists still seem to
be floundering. The question of Fate and Free Will can never attain to
a conclusion, though it may attain to a conviction. The shortest
philosophic summary is that both cause and choice are ultimate ideas
within us, and that if one man denies choice because it seems contrary
to cause, the other man has quite as much right to deny cause because
it seems contrary to choice. The shortest ethical summary is that
Determinism either affects conduct or it does not. If it does not, it is
morally not worth preaching; if it does, it must affect conduct in the
direction of impotence and submission. A writer in the “Clarion” says
that the reformer cannot help trying to reform, nor the Conservative
help his Conservatism. But suppose the reformer tries to reform the
Conservative and turn him into another reformer? Either he can, in which
case Determinism has made no difference at all, or he can’t, in which
case it can only have made reformers more hopeless and Conservatives
more obstinate. And the shortest practical and political summary is that
working men, most probably, will soon be much too busy using their Free
Will to stop to prove that they have got it. Nevertheless, I like to
watch the Determinist in the “Clarion” Cockpit every week, as busy as a
squirrel--in a cage. But being myself a squirrel (leaping lightly from
bough to bough) and preferring the form of activity which occasionally
ends in nuts, I should not intervene in the matter even indirectly,
except upon a practical point. And the point I have in mind is practical
to the extent of deadly peril. It is another of the numerous new ways in
which the restless rich, now walking the world with an awful insomnia,
may manage to catch us napping.