stic fashion,
from the study of statistics and the laws of physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural influence. The
Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and then punishment, are
no longer 'viper-tressed goddesses with eyes and mouth aflame,' but those
evil thoughts which harbour within the impure soul. In this, as in all
other points, to arrive at Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of
scientific and modern thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as
essentially a reductio ad absurdum of life, he was fully conscious of the
fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond
which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but
a certain creative attitude of the mind which is, from the first,
continually influenced by habits, education and circumstance; so
absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the bad man alike
seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable to
sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.

And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the nature of
man (a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days when the 'race
theory' is supposed to be a sufficient explanation of the Hindoo, and the
latitude and longitude of a country the best guide to its morals {188})
Aristotle is completely unaware. I do not allude to such smaller points
as the oligarchical tendencies of a horse-breeding country and the
democratic influence of the proximity of the sea (important though they
are for the consideration of Greek history), but rather to those wider
views in the seventh book of his Politics, where he attributes the happy
union in the Greek character of intellectual attainments with the spirit
of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed, and points out how the
extreme cold of the north dulls the mental faculties of its inhabitants
and renders them incapable of social organisation or extended empire;
while to the enervating heat of eastern countries was due that want of
spirit and bravery which then, as now, was the characteristic of the
population in that quarter of the globe.

Thucydides has shown the causal connection between political revolutions
and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the
psychological influences on a people's character exercised by the various
extremes of climate--in both cases t