pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is
true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

XLI

FREE WILL

Free will, it appears, is still a Christian dogma. Without it the
cruelties of God would strain faith to the breaking-point. But outside
the fold it is gradually falling into decay. Such men of science as
George W. Crile and Jacques Loeb have dealt it staggering blows, and
among laymen of inquiring mind it seems to be giving way to an
apologetic sort of determinism--a determinism, one may say, tempered by
defective observation. The late Mark Twain, in his secret heart, was
such a determinist. In his "What Is Man?" you will find him at his
farewells to libertarianism. The vast majority of our acts, he argues,
are determined, but there remains a residuum of free choices. Here we
stand free of compulsion and face a pair or more of alternatives, and
are free to go this way or that.

A pillow for free will to fall upon--but one loaded with disconcerting
brickbats. Where the occupants of this last trench of libertarianism err
is in their assumption that the pulls of their antagonistic impulses are
exactly equal--that the individual is absolutely free to choose which
one he will yield to. Such freedom, in practise, is never encountered.
When an individual confronts alternatives, it is not alone his volition
that chooses between them, but also his environment, his inherited
prejudices, his race, his color, his condition of servitude. I may kiss
a girl or I may not kiss her, but surely it would be absurd to say that
I am, in any true sense, a free agent in the matter. The world has even
put my helplessness into a proverb. It says that my decision and act
depend upon the time, the place--and even to some extent, upon the girl.

Examples might be multiplied _ad infinitum_. I can scarcely remember
performing a wholly voluntary act. My whole life, as I look back upon
it, seems to be a long series of inexplicable accidents, not only quite
unavoidable, but even quite unintelligible. Its history is the history
of the reactions of my personality to my environment, of my behavior
before external stimuli. I have been no more responsible for that
personality than I have been for that environment. To say that I can
change the former by a voluntary effort is as ridiculous as to say that
I can modify the curvature of the lenses of my eyes. I know, because I
have often tried to change it, and always fail