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Does Jones's opinion, Jones being a weaver in a textile mill, come from the attitude of his boss, the competition of new immigrants, his wife's grocery bills, or the ever present contract with the firm which is selling him a Ford car and a house and lot on the instalment plan? Without special inquiry you cannot tell. The economic determinist cannot tell.
The Determinist says that the real question is not whether a man can do what he desires, but whether he can do what he does not desire; whether the will can act without a motive; whether that motive can in the last analysis be other than the strongest pleasure. The illusion of free will, he maintains, is only due to the conflict of our motives.
If he had first felt himself to be a Positivist with Morin, an Evolutionist and Determinist with Guillaume, he had afterwards been touched by the fraternal dream of a new golden age which he had found in Bache's humanitarian Communism. And indeed even Janzen had momentarily shaken him by his fierce confidence in the theory of liberative Individualism.
Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it.
Every definition, in the strict sense of the term, will imply the determinist thesis in advance, since, under pain of going round in a circle, it will be bound to express liberty as a function of what it is not. Either psychological liberty is an illusive appearance, or, if it is real, we can only grasp it by intuition, not by analysis, in the light of an immediate feeling.
Picton, speaking with authority, tells us that "to the true pantheist" man is "but a finite mode of infinite Being"; that human personality is only "seeming" and that, from the pantheistic standpoint, the self must be "content to be nothing." That is to say that the consistent pantheist must be a consistent determinist.
Nobody should have seen this more clearly than Mill as a good 'determinist. Conduct and character are related as the convex and concave of the curve; conduct is simply the manifestation of character, and to separate them is absurd. Why did he not see this? For reasons, I think, which illustrate his whole method.
If performance is always more or less straining after the ideal, the determinist is justified in expecting a higher standard of performance, and his fatalism may take the direction of removing the obstacles to further improvement.
The determinist can predict that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the owner will resist attempts to deprive him of ownership, or that he will favor legislation which he thinks will increase his profits.
When I was engaged in a controversy with the CLARION on the matter of free will, that able writer Mr. R.B.Suthers said that free will was lunacy, because it meant causeless actions, and the actions of a lunatic would be causeless. I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for.
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