entiating itself. Only the surrounding
circumstances can have any effect in such a direction. [These two
sentences dogmatically deny the existence of the relatively independent
physiological cycle of causation.] To suppose otherwise is to suppose
that the mind of man is exempt from the universal law of causation.
There is no caprice, no spontaneous impulse, in human endeavors. Even
tastes and inclinations _must_ themselves be the result of surrounding
causes."[9]

{237}

Elsewhere Mr. Allen, writing of the Greek culture, says:--

"It was absolutely and unreservedly the product of the geographical
Hellas, acting upon the given factor of the undifferentiated Aryan
brain,... To me it seems a self-evident proposition that nothing
whatsoever can differentiate one body of men from another, except the
physical conditions in which they are set,--including, of course, under
the term _physical conditions_ the relations of place and time in which
they stand with regard to other bodies of men. To suppose otherwise is
to deny the primordial law of causation. To imagine that the mind can
differentiate itself is to imagine that it can be differentiated
without a cause."[10]

This outcry about the law of universal causation being undone, the
moment we refuse to invest in the kind of causation which is peddled
round by a particular school, makes one impatient. These writers have
no imagination of alternatives. With them there is no _tertium quid_
between outward environment and miracle. _Aut Caesar, aut nullus_!
_Aut_ Spencerism, _aut_ catechism!

If by 'physical conditions' Mr. Allen means what he does mean, the
outward cycle of visible nature and man, his assertion is simply
physiologically false. For a national mind differentiates 'itself'
whenever a genius is born in its midst by causes acting in the
invisible and molecular cycle. But if Mr. Allen means by 'physical
conditions' the whole of nature, his assertion, though true, forms but
the vague Asiatic {238} profession of belief in an all-enveloping fate,
which certainly need not plume itself on any specially advanced or
scientific character.

And how can a thinker so clever as Mr. Allen fail to have distinguished
in these matters between _necessary_ conditions and _sufficient_
conditions of a given result? The French say that to have an omelet we
must break our eggs; that is, the breaking of eggs is a necessary
condition of the omelet. But is it a suffi