ed. Nevertheless, it has
changed. I am not the same man I was in the last century. But the
gratifying improvements so plainly visible are surely not to be credited
to me. All of them came from without--or from unplumbable and
uncontrollable depths within.

The more the matter is examined the more the residuum of free will
shrinks and shrinks, until in the end it is almost impossible to find
it. A great many men, of course, looking at themselves, see it as
something very large; they slap their chests and call themselves free
agents, and demand that God reward them for their virtue. But these
fellows are simply idiotic egoists, devoid of a critical sense. They
mistake the acts of God for their own acts. Of such sort are the
coxcombs who boast about wooing and winning their wives. They are
brothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run....

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. Nothing could be more untrue. Consequences
follow acts just as relentlessly if the latter be involuntary as if they
be voluntary. If I rob a bank of my free choice or in response to some
unfathomable inner necessity, it is all one; I will go to the same jail.
Conscripts in war are killed just as often as volunteers. Men who are
tracked down and shanghaied by their wives have just as hard a time of
it as men who walk fatuously into the trap by formally proposing.

Even on the ghostly side, determinism does not do much damage to
theology. It is no harder to believe that a man will be damned for his
involuntary acts than it is to believe that he will be damned for his
voluntary acts, for even the supposition that he is wholly free does not
dispose of the massive fact that God made him as he is, and that God
could have made him a saint if He had so desired. To deny this is to
flout omnipotence--a crime at which, as I have often said, I balk. But
here I begin to fear that I wade too far into the hot waters of the
sacred sciences, and that I had better retire before I lose my hide.
This prudent retirement is purely deterministic. I do not ascribe it to
my own sagacity; I ascribe it wholly to that singular kin