fession thinks it can see
and understand."

"That's very easy," the Doctor replied. "For instance: you don't
understand or don't allow for idiosyncrasies as we learn to. We know
that food and physic act differently with different people; but you
think the same kind of truth is going to suit, or ought to suit, all
minds. We don't fight with a patient because he can't take magnesia or
opium; but you are all the time quarrelling over your beliefs, as if
belief did not depend very much on race and constitution, to say nothing
of early training."

"Do you mean to say that every man is not absolutely free to choose his
beliefs?"

"The men you write about in your studies are, but not the men we see
in the real world. There is some apparently congenital defect in the
Indians, for instance, that keeps them from choosing civilization and
Christianity. So with the Gypsies, very likely. Everybody knows
that Catholicism or Protestantism is a good deal a matter of race.
Constitution has more to do with belief than people think for. I went to
a Universalist church, when I was in the city one day, to hear a famous
man whom all the world knows, and I never saw such pews-full of broad
shoulders and florid faces, and substantial, wholesome-looking persons,
male and female, in all my life. Why, it was astonishing. Either their
creed made them healthy, or they chose it because they were healthy.
Your folks have never got the hang of human nature."

"I am afraid this would be considered a degrading and dangerous view of
human beliefs and responsibility for them," the Reverend Doctor replied.
"Prove to a man that his will is governed by something outside of
himself, and you have lost all hold on his moral and religious nature.
There is nothing bad men want to believe so much as that they are
governed by necessity. Now that which is at once degrading and dangerous
cannot be true."

"No doubt," the Doctor replied, "all large views of mankind limit our
estimate of the absolute freedom of the will. But I don't think it
degrades or endangers us, for this reason, that, while it makes us
charitable to the rest of mankind, our own sense of freedom, whatever it
is, is never affected by argument. Conscience won't be reasoned with.
We feel that we can practically do this of that, and if we choose the
wrong, we know we are responsible; but observation teaches us that this
or that other race or individual has not the same practical freedom of
choic