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Updated: May 4, 2025
I have known a case of an unfortunate child being beaten for not being able to tell the time after receiving an elaborate explanation of the figures on a clock dial, the fact being that she was short-sighted and could not see them. This is a typical illustration of the absurdities and cruelties into which we are led by the counter-stupidity to Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will.
His or her life would seem to him or her as real as ours are to us. The Matrix may be deterministic but this determinism is inaccessible to individual minds because of the complexity involved. When faced with a trillion deterministic paths, one would be justified to feel that he exercised free, unconstrained will in choosing one of them.
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.
Walking home together one day, these two fell to arguing the freedom of the will, and the nature of motives and desires, and what power one has over them; and so Thyrsis made the startling discovery that this young man, having accepted the doctrine of "determinism," had drawn therefrom the corollary that he had to do what he wanted to do, and so was powerless to resist his sex-impulses.
Such men of science as George W. Crile and Jacques Loeb have dealt it staggering blows, and among laymen of inquiring mind it seems to be giving way to an apologetic sort of determinism a determinism, one may say, tempered by defective observation. The late Mark Twain, in his secret heart, was such a determinist. In his "What Is Man?" you will find him at his farewells to libertarianism.
It holds up improvement as at least possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world. Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of PROMISE, just like the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design.
And if we compare Flaubert's indifference to his heroine's fate with the tenderness of Dumas fils, or of Daudet, or the English Reade and Dickens we shall realize that we have here a mixture of a personal and a coming general interpretation: Flaubert having by nature a kind of aloof determinism, yet feeling, like the first puffs of a cold chilling wind, the oncoming of an age of Doubt.
Thus at this point in fact we seem to be pressing upon the student of sociology the essential argument of geographical and evolutionary determinism, in fact inviting him to adopt a view, indeed to commit himself to a method, which may be not only foreign to his habits, but repugnant to his whole view of life and history.
His treatment of this question is parallel to that of William James in the first part of his Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard in 1898, when he called attention to "permissive" or "transmissive" function of the brain. Bergson's criticisms of Parallelism are very valuable. No less so are his refutations of both physical and psychological Determinism.
He may talk as if there were an iron determinism, but his practice is better than his preachment. Yet there are necessities in social life. To all the purposes of politics it is settled, for instance, that the trust will never be "unscrambled" into small competing businesses.
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