come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the
antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedents
and surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, and
yet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would have
altogether differed.

It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty.
Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and in
regard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchased
completeness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to be
accounted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spite
of all attempts to explain it away, the fact that we think ourselves
free and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains unaffected.

But let us examine how far the difference between the scientific view
and the religious view of human action extends.

Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of human
action, much even of that which appears at first sight to be more
especially independent of all law, is really as much regulated by laws
of nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed out
how often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the man
himself, and how often the will is certainly passive and consents
instead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to deny
that nature and not the will is producing the conduct. And not only so,
but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call
caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to
assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But
it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men
that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that
their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That
amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same
conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number
of suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds,
cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that
like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only
can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of
men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for
another, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter a
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