ins
difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I
expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This
personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
work on others as it may.

Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is
enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
sense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world as
vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
remain forever inacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me
that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.

But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism
with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all,
perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism
with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion
as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I
deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
saying blankly that the murder,