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Good mental states can be made to grow and bad mental states to decrease until the stage is reached when the saint knows that he is free. It may perhaps be thought that the early Buddhists did not realize the consequences of applying their doctrine of causation to psychology and hence never faced the possibility of determinism.
This is the theory of Determinism, and I will now explain it. If God is responsible for Man's existence, God is responsible for Man's acts. The Christian says God is our Maker. God made Man. Who is responsible for the quality or powers of a thing that is made? The thing that is made cannot be responsible, for it did not make itself. But the maker is responsible, for he made it.
Ah, when the superstitions of remote peoples, the fables and myths, were taken away; when the manufactured history and determinism of the Israelites from the fall of man to the coming of that Messiah, whom the Jews crucified because he failed to bring them their material Kingdom, were discredited; when the polemic and literal interpretations of evangelists had been rejected, and the pious frauds of tampering monks; when the ascetic Buddhism was removed; the cults and mysteries, the dogmas of an ancient naive philosophy discarded; the crude science of a Ptolemy who conceived the earth as a flat terrestrial expanse and hell as a smoking pit beneath proved false; the revelation of a Holy City of jasper and gold and crystal, the hierarchy with its divine franchise to save and rule and conquer, when all these and more were eliminated from Christianity, what was left?
The communists in Russia would not propagate their faith with such unflagging zeal if economic determinism were alone determining the opinion of the Russian people. The socialist theory of human nature is, like the hedonistic calculus, an example of false determinism. Both assume that the unlearned dispositions fatally but intelligently produce a certain type of behavior.
He brings together, without being eclectic, action and reflection, free will and determinism, motion and rest, intellect and intuition, subjectivity and externality, idealism and realism, in a most unconventional way. His whole philosophy is destructive of a large amount of the "vested interests" of philosophy. "We are watching the rise of a new agnosticism," remarked Dr. Bosanquet.
He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free; and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the events before it. No event that followed affected it, though the day after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August.
Those who adopt the Bolshevik standpoint must reckon with the embittered hostility of capitalist States; it is not worth while to adopt Bolshevik methods unless they can lead to good in spite of this hostility. To say that capitalists are wicked and we have no responsibility for their acts is unscientific; it is, in particular, contrary to the Marxian doctrine of economic determinism.
Concerning the kind of persons for whom he wrote his book, he says, I advise everyone who is perfectly innocent, who is not interested in philosophical and ethical questions like that of determinism and freedom on the ground that man cannot grasp them; and is entirely unconcerned about his ignorance I advise such a person to refrain from opening this book or any other of a similar nature.
And now I will try to show the difference between this Determinism, which some think must prove so maleficent, and the Christian doctrine of Free Will, which many consider so beneficent. Let us take a flagrant instance of wrong-doing.
"Some one she's met abroad?" "The wonderful part of the book," Mrs. Ballinger conceded, "is that it may be looked at from so many points of view. I hear that as a study of determinism Professor Lupton ranks it with 'The Data of Ethics." "I'm told that Osric Dane spent ten years in preparatory studies before beginning to write it," said Mrs. Plinth. "She looks up everything verifies everything.
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