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Updated: June 28, 2025
But the Determinist would not blame Sikes at all: he would blame his environment. Is not that a material difference? But follow it out to its logical results. The Christian, blaming only Bill Sikes, because he had a "free will," would punish Sikes, and perhaps try to convert Sikes; and there his effort would logically end.
If such a thought does not produce something like despair, it ought to do so; if it does not, then it represents not a conviction but a pose. As a matter of fact, the determinist creed, with all its professions of charitableness towards the transgressor, and while pretending to soothe us by absolving us from responsibility for wrong-doing, fatally paralyses our endeavours.
If for "self-culture" we substituted self-reliance, buoyancy, a sense of responsibility, we should scarcely go too far; for, indeed, it would be difficult to say from what sources the consistent determinist is to derive these qualities.
The determinist sponge passes over the whole moral vocabulary, not only over the inconvenient parts; it obliterates the terms self-indulgence, dishonesty, cowardice, but the same fate overtakes self-conquest, integrity, bravery. To vary the phrase slightly, we must not, on the determinist hypothesis, insult God by taking credit to ourselves for what He has done.
The throwing overboard of free will is commonly denounced on the ground that it subverts morality and makes of religion a mocking. Such pious objections, of course, are foreign to logic, but nevertheless it may be well to give a glance to this one. It is based upon the fallacious hypothesis that the determinist escapes, or hopes to escape, the consequences of his acts.
The ordinary person is to-day quite as strongly convinced of the rights of other men as he is of their duties; and thus the determinist is bound to confess that there is an ameliorating and humanising principle at work, if not in the world at large, at least in the Western races.
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.
I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people or get excited over them." "You're a quaint little determinist," laughed Anthony. "It's your world, isn't it?"
The answer is, Yes, perhaps, provided his moral instincts are sound; but the average mortal, when he has to choose between the hard duty and the easy indulgence, will be sorely tempted to find a reason for yielding in his determinist philosophy.
The important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to the Protestant cause. Protestantism apart, however, Froude's position as a clergyman had become intolerable.
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