n which our
volitions and acts can make any difference. Even in social life we seem
in the grip and grasp of forces which carry us towards evil or good
whether we will or no. _Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt._ The
whole known universe outside and around us presents to us the spectacle
of what has been called a _de facto_ teleology, and just because it is
so, and so widely and deeply so, it leaves little or no room for us to
set up our ideals within it and to work for their realization. The fact
that the laws which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no
difference; they modify themselves, and in their different forms still
constrain us. And no matter how increasingly beneficent they may in
their action appear, they are still despotic and we unfree. The rule of
laws which Science discovers encroaches upon our liberties and
privacies. What we had hitherto thought our very own, the movement of
our impulses and desires and imaginations, are reported by science to be
subject to 'laws of association', and we are borne onwards even if also
at times upwards on an irresistible flood. We remain bound by the iron
necessity of a fate that invades our inmost being--which will not let us
anywhere securely alone. I repeat that it matters not how certainly the
trend of the tide, which sets everywhere around and outside us, is
towards what is good or best for us, it still is the case that it
presents itself as neither asking for from us nor permitting to us the
formation of any ideals of ours nor any prospect of securing them by our
efforts. Were the fact of Progress established and conclusively shown to
be all-pervasive and eternal, it still would bear to us the aspect of a
paternal government which did good to and for us, but all the more left
less and less to ourselves.

This will doubtless be pronounced an exaggeration, and we may weakly
refuse to face the impression naturally consequent upon the progress we
have made in the ascertainment of the facts concerning the world in
which we live. But does not the impression exist? The hateful and
desolating impression made on us earlier by the thought of a 'block'
universe, once for all and rigidly fixed in unalterable and uniform
subjection to eternal and omnipresent law, has dissolved like the
baseless fabric of a vision. And why? Just because being found
intolerable it was faced and put to the question. Now that there has
been substituted for it the spectacle of a univ