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Then, Christianity accepts the doctrine of Free Will, with its consequent rewards and punishments; while Humanism embraces Determinist doctrines, with their consequent theories of brotherhood and prevention. And that is another radical difference. Because the Christian regards the hooligan, the thief, the wanton, and the drunkard as men and women who have done wrong.
But I am not arguing for free will at all. I am simply showing that by the very constitution of our minds we cannot avoid taking some measure of free will for granted. Even the determinist who scouts this view and calls it absurd is by his own action a convincing demonstration of its truth. +Only the Infinite has perfect freedom.+ But this contention is something more than mere logic chopping.
But education, which we speak of as a panacea for all ills, only deals with what it finds, and does not, as we ought to claim, rub down bad points and accentuate good, and it is this, that perhaps more than anything else has made me a Determinist, that the very capacity for change and improvement is so native to some characters, and so utterly lacking to others.
An important ethical problem which Judah Halevi discusses more thoroughly than any of his predecessors is that of free will, which he defends against fatalistic determinism, and endeavors to reconcile with divine causality and foreknowledge. And there is no doubt that fatalism is opposed to Judaism. A fatalistic determinist denies the category of the contingent or possible.
Now, I am an Agnostic, or Rationalist, and I am a Determinist, and I am a Socialist. But if I were asked to describe myself in a single word, I should call myself a Humanist. Socialism, Determinism, and Rationalism are factors in the sum; and the sum is Humanism. Briefly, my religion is to do the best I can for humanity.
But how the function of being an owner will figure, no economic determinist as such, can tell you. There is no fixed set of opinions on any question that go with being the owner of a factory, no views on labor, on property, on management, let alone views on less immediate matters.
The determinist, in the name of science, upholds diametrically opposite ideas, in the domain of psychology as well as in those of the economic or juridical sciences.
Nevertheless, I like to watch the Determinist in the "Clarion" Cockpit every week, as busy as a squirrel in a cage. 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. Must Be a Mystery
There would be no ignorance and no poverty left in the world. That is because the Determinist understands human nature, and the Christian does not. It is because the Determinist understands morality, and the Christian does not. For the Determinist looks for the cause of wrong-doing in the environment of the wrong-doer.
But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will.
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