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"We must come to some decision." In the voting Lady Queenie, after hesitation, raised her hand with the disciplinarians. By one vote the libertarians were defeated, and the dalliance of the hospital staff in leisure hours received a severe check.
"I think we should remember," he said in his modest voice, "I think we should remember that we are dealing with adult men and women." The libertarians at once took him for their own. The disciplinarians gave him to understand with their eyes that it might have been better if he, as a new member attending his first meeting, had kept silence. The discussion was inflamed.
So long as men are content to be determinists in their studies and libertarians everywhere else, no particular mischief is likely to ensue; and it is matter of common experience, and for much congratulation, that our theoretical determinists should so far obey the instinct of moral self-preservation as to be for the most part practical libertarians, freely pronouncing praise and blame on human conduct, and feeling praise- and blameworthy themselves.
In it I propose to consider how our life goes forth in action; for in fact wherever self-consciousness appears, there is developed also a centre of activity, and an activity of an altogether peculiar kind. It is well known that in interpreting these facts of action the judgment of ethical writers is divided. Libertarians and determinists are here at issue.
Worse yet, they often measure differences in natural endowments arbitrarily, compensate for lack of acquired skills, and discriminate between types of endowments in accordance with cultural biases and fads. Libertarians limit themselves to ensuring a level playing field of just exchanges, where just actions always result in just outcomes.
As is well known, there are two opposing views upon this subject held by opposite schools the theory of Determinism, on the one hand, and of Free Will on the other. The Libertarians assert that our wills are free we having power of choice in all our actions. The Determinists, on the other hand, contend that our thoughts and actions are determined by definite, ascertainable causes.
On the material the human will is a slave; on the spiritual plane it is the sovereign. It may then be called the "awakened" will. It is my conviction that the eternal crossing of swords between the Determinists and the Libertarians can be set at rest only by a right understanding of the spiritual makeup of man, otherwise the arguments of both sets of thinkers are equally strong.
Outstanding philosophical and theological schools have been formed around the will, and both able and learned and earnest men have taken opposite sides on the subject of the will under the party names of Necessitarians and Libertarians.
It is surely a significant fact that, in the face of the late almost incredible proceedings under the so-called Espionage Act and other such laws, the only objections heard of came either from the persons directly affected nine-tenths of them Socialists, pacifists, or citizens accused of German sympathies, and hence without any rights whatever in American law and equity or from a small group of professional libertarians, chiefly naturalized aliens.
It is known that anarchists, individualists, "amorphists" and "libertarians" admit as a means of social transformation individual violence which extends from homicide to theft or estampage, even among "companions;" and this is then merely a political coloring given to criminal instincts which must not be confounded with political fanaticism, which is a very different phenomenon, common to the extreme and romantic parties of all times.
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