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Updated: May 4, 2025
It follows from this that the soul, in its determinations and actions, is liberated from the laws and necessities of the corporeal nature; it is a free power, a power of indetermination, capable of choice, capable of introducing new, unforeseen, and unforeseeable actions, and on this point opposes itself to corporeal phenomena, which are all subject to a determinism so rigorous that any event could be foreseen if its antecedents were known.
Mechanism applied to the world gives materialism; applied to knowledge, sensationalism of a mathematical type; applied to the will, determinism; to morality and the state, ethical and political naturalism. Nevertheless, the empirical tendency of his nation has a certain power over him; he holds fast to the position that all ideas ultimately spring from experience.
On the contrary, it was a decided aggravation that there existed side by side with a perverse teleological determinism for the other world, an instrumental indeterminism for this world. For the latter served as effectively to put the means of man's life, as the former did to put his end, out of his present reach and control.
We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupassant's attitude towards our world in which, like the rest of us, he has that share which his senses are able to give him. But we need not quarrel with him violently. His determinism, barren of praise, blame and consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art.
The divorce movement in the United States affords no proof of the theory of economic determinism. For brief reading: WILLCOX, The Divorce Problem: A Study in Statistics. ADLER, Marriage and Divorce, Lecture II. Special Report on Marriage and Divorce, 1867-1906, Bureau of the Census. For more extended reading: HOWARD, History of Matrimonial Institutions.
As regards philosophy, it is necessary to remember the influence of Priestley and Belsham. These Unitarian leaders, following Hartley's psychology, stood for a determinism which was complete.
Determinism was accepted by both schools but with a difference. To the Stoic, fatum is a synonym of Providence whose popular name is Zeus. The Epicurean also accepts fatum as governing the universe, but it is not teleological, and Zeus is not identified with it but is, like man, subordinated to it. Again, the Stoic is consistently fatalistic.
Like Lessing and Goethe, they were also attracted to the pantheistic teaching of Spinoza, though rejecting its rigid determinism so far as it might affect the human will.
The reason assigned for cruelties and warfares upon heathen peoples was the abominations practiced by those peoples. Of course it is possible for a student obsessed with the modern doctrine of the economic determinism of history to say that we have in the story of the Hebrew development just the play of economic forces with moral aims assigned as their formal justification.
But, we repeat, this determinism has several possible forms one can reach the same goal through different means. Besides, these determining conditions are not lacking in any type of imagination; there is only a difference as between lesser and greater.
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