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Updated: June 28, 2025
The most thoroughgoing determinist that ever lived forgets his determinism even while he argues about it. It must be amusing even to himself to see how he enjoys scoring off his opponent, thus taking for granted in the heat of controversy the very freedom he sets out to deny.
But when the would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is a singular compliment to the "Master Workman" he executes a volte-face and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one.
He knew that his power with Kitty came largely from a certain stoicism, a certain hardness, mingled, as he would prove to her, with a boundless devotion. Let him carry it through without fears and so enlarge her being and his own! And as to responsibilities beyond, as to their later lives let time take care of its own births. For the modern determinist of Cliffe's type there is no responsibility.
Hasdai Crescas frankly adopts the determinist position on the basis of God's knowledge, which cannot be denied, as well as of reason and experience, which recognizes the determining character of temperament and motive. But reward and punishment are natural and necessary consequences, and are no more unjust than is the burning of the finger when put into the fire.
The determinist makes the theory of causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "if you please" to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a sparkling and crystal clearness.
For it is in duration that we are free, not in spatialised time, as all determinist conceptions suppose in contradiction.
The Christian condemns the man who is a victim of evil social conditions. The Determinist condemns the evil conditions. It is the difference between the methods of sending individual sufferers from diphtheria to the hospital and the method of condemning the drains. But you may cynically remind me that nothing will come of the Determinists' protest against the evil social conditions. Perhaps not.
They have no necessary connection with parallelism. The interactionist, as well as the parallelist, may be a determinist, a believer in freedom, or he may be a "free-willist." He regards mental phenomena and physical phenomena as links in the one chain of causes and effects. Shall he hold that certain mental links are "free-will" links, that they are wholly unaccountable?
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.
Of a greater man than Cecil, John Knox, he was however almost an idolater. He considered that Knox surpassed in worldly wisdom even Maitland of Lethington, who was certainly not hampered by theological prejudice. With Puritanism itself he had much natural affinity, and as a determinist the philosophical side of Calvinism attracted him as strongly as it attracted Jonathan Edwards.
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