he third class put compendiously
under water.

It is not, however, from the observation of individuals that the
argument against 'free-will,' as commonly understood, derives its
principal force. It is, as already hinted, indefinitely strengthened
when extended to the race. Most of you have been forced to listen to
the outcries and denunciations which rang discordant through the land
for some years after the publication of Mr. Darwin's 'Origin of
Species.' Well, the world--even the clerical world--for the most part
settled down in the belief that Mr. Darwin's book simply reflects the
truth of nature: that we who are now 'foremost in the files of time'
have come to the front through almost endless stages of promotion from
lower to higher forms of life.

If to any one of us were given the privilege of looking back through
the aeons across which life has crept towards its present outcome, his
vision, according to Darwin, would ultimately reach a point when the
progenitors of this assembly could not be called human. From that
humble society, through the interaction of its members and the storing
up of their best qualities, a better one emerged; from this again a
better still; until at length, by the integration of infinitesimals
through ages of amelioration, we came to be what we are to-day. We of
this generation had no conscious share in the production of this grand
and beneficent result. Any and every generation which preceded us had
just as little share. The favoured organisms whose garnered
excellence constitutes our present store owed their advantages, first,
to what we in our ignorance are obliged to call accidental variation;'
and, secondly, to a law of heredity in the passing of which our
suffrages were not collected. With characteristic felicity and
precision Mr. Matthew Arnold lifts this question into the free air of
poetry, but not out of the atmosphere of truth, when he ascribes the
process of amelioration to 'a power not ourselves which makes for
righteousness.' If, then, our organisms, with all their tendencies
and capacities, are given to us without our being consulted; and if,
while capable of acting within certain limits in accordance with our
wishes, we are not masters of the circumstances in which motives and
wishes originate; if, finally, our motives and wishes determine our
actions--in what sense can these actions be said to be the result of
free-will?

*****

Here, again, we are confronte