s of good and evil being formerly very different from what
they are at present. The functions of advocates or executors of the
divine will were always, however, reserved for privileged men, who
gave judgment in His name, either as priests, kings, or later on as
judges. We may also note by the way that judgment can be given without
belief in free arbitration, as is shown by the Mahometan fatalists and
the judgments of Haroun-al-Raschid, for example. In fact, fatalism
logically excludes the idea of free-will, for if everything is
absolutely predetermined, the thoughts, resolutions and acts of man
are also predetermined, which excludes all liberty.

=Responsibility.=--I have attempted to show in another work[9] that a
rational penal law should in no way concern itself with the question
of free arbitration. The fact that we feel free and responsible is not
at all sufficient to justify the doctrine of Kant.

The question of knowing whether an absolute predestination (fatalism,
regulating the universe in advance in all its details) exists or not,
is a question of pure metaphysics, the solution of which is quite
beyond human comprehension, and need not occupy us here. We must
simply depend on the scientific postulate of determinism, _i.e._, on
the law of causality applied to the motives of our actions, a law
which is very much like that of the conservation of energy, and which
admits of divers possibilities for the future, for it does not assume
a knowledge of the first cause of the universe nor the will of a
divinity.

We shall then understand that the complication of our cerebral
activities, mnemic and actual, combined with the fact that a great
part of them (and consequently of the motives for our actions) remain
subconscious, must produce in us the illusion of free-will.

On the other hand, we shall find the measure of what we are to
understand by relative liberty, in the plastic faculties of the
activity of the human brain, which allow it to adapt itself as
adequately as possible to the numerous and diverse complications of
existence, and especially to social relations between mankind.

The most adaptable man is the most free, especially in the sense of
active and conscious adaptation. There are also men who adapt
themselves passively and are easily molded. This passive plasticity at
any rate renders them capable of submitting to everything and only
provoking conflict as a last resource. These individuals are no doub