lved in the strict logic of the case. Its
truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
question all hope of a coercive demonstration,--a demonstration which
I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.

With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not
without one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about to
urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
{147} for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I
cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our
doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed
from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great
extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much
farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of
finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain
formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality,
for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
kind of belonging of one thing with