not only cannot help being what you
are, but in your wretchedness and degradation you are what you could not
help being--this was your pre-ordained destiny from the beginning of
time. We are not angry with you, any more than we are angry with tigers
for being fierce, or with thorns for not bearing grapes; only, being what
you are, you never _could_ have borne, and never will bear, grapes."
Truly a "great and glorious thought"! Determinism makes of the whole
world of erring men a hospital, and pronounces {147} every patient an
incurable--it is ready to grant kindly, considerate treatment to each,
but holds out hopes of recovery to none. Who would not rather submit to
a sterner physician, whose ministrations promised to medicine him back to
health again! A consistent Determinism, prepared to look stedfastly at
things as they are, can, we repeat, lead nowhere but to despair; a
conclusion from which determinists, fortunately for themselves, escape by
means of the most patent inconsistency.

But we turn to the further contention which we already mentioned in
passing, _viz._, that the acceptance of Determinism would by no means
change our admiration of what was fine in human thought and action--just
as we did not admire a rose the less because it could not help being
fragrant and beautiful. Here we have a very palpable, but all the more
significant confusion between things totally different--aesthetics and
ethics. Our admiration for a rose is aesthetic; our admiration for
goodness is ethical, and we give it with the implicit understanding that
the quality we admire is the result of voluntary acts and decisions. All
moral judgments imply this; and in practice we know that the experience
of moral struggle and moral conquest is intensely real, not to be argued
away any more than we can be argued out of any other primary fact of
consciousness, which is its own sufficient evidence. Let anyone ask
himself quite {148} candidly whether the feeling called forth by some
rare work of art resembles remotely the emotion with which he reads of
some deed of humble heroism or self-sacrifice; the psychology which
discerns here no difference is singularly shallow.

But when the would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity
of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is--a singular
compliment to the "Master Workman"--he executes a _volte-face_ and falls
back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pr