Thus the missionary societies sometimes adopt Chinese infants and have them educated in European institutions at great expense: they go back to their own country with the resolve to propagate the Christian religion, but scarcely have they disembarked when the spirit of their race seizes upon them, they forget their promises, and lose all their Christian beliefs. It might be supposed that they had never left China. 1

To sum up, the consequences of heredity have been found to be twofold. Now it builds for the future, making possible, by the accumulation of simple sentiments, the production of sentiments more complex. Again it goes back towards the past, setting up again forms of sensitive activity once natural, now in disaccord with their environment. For there exist in the bottom of the soul, buried in the depths of our being, savage instincts, nomadic tastes, unconquered and sanguinary appetites which slumber but die not. They resemble those rudimentary organs which have outlived their functions, but which still remain as witnesses to the slow, progressive evolution of the forms of life. And these savage instincts, developed in man during the past, whilst he lived free amid the forests and streams, are from time to time recalled by heredity, by some trick which we do not understand, as though to let us measure with the eye the length of road over which we have travelled.

CHAPTER III.

MORAL CONSEQUENCES OF HEREDITY.

I.

Ar the first step in every study of morals we meet the inextricable problem of free-will. We are the less able to avoid it here, since it touches our subject at more than one point. We have already often directed attention to the fatalistic character of hereditary transmission, and the reader must see that what we give to heredity we take from free-will, and that heredity offers an abundant

1 A. Réville, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1er Septbre, 1869.

source, though hitherto but little explored, of arguments in favour of fatalism. This much is certain, that heredity and free-will are two opposite and irreconcilable terms. The one creates in us the personality, the character; it is the peculiar mark which distinguishes us from what is not ourselves; it is that in us which is most essential, most intimate. The other tends to substitute the species for the person, to blot out what is individual, and to subject all to the impersonal fatalism of its laws, so that we are necessarily destined to feel, think, and act as our fathers, whose thoughts, apparently extinct, re-live in us. In a word, by freewill we are ourselves, by heredity we are others.

We have, therefore, to consider the question of free-will. This we will endeavour to do very briefly, dismissing all solutions that have been disproved, and simply exhibiting the question as it stands in the present state of science.

The partisans and the opponents of free-will may contend for ever without agreeing, provided each side stands on its own ground and will not quit it. Those who hold the affirmative proceed subjectively, saying: I have an inner sense of my freedom of will, therefore I am free. Those who hold those negative proceed objectively, saying: All things are regulated according to laws; moral as well as physical science proves this, therefore free-will is an illusion. Each occupies a point of view totally different from that of the other.

The argument of the former seems at first view decisive, but on reflection it is found less conclusive. If, with the greater part of the philosophers in the last two centuries, we consider psychological life as limited to the domain of consciousness, and if we identify the soul with the ego, then we may hold that the various motives of which we are conscious are counsel, advice, reasons, subjects of deliberation, but they are not that which deliberates, compares, selects; and that, consequently, a voluntary act supposes, besides motives, something more. But if we may hold, as we may with truth, that besides the conscious life there is also an unconscious life whose influence is very great on our sentiments, our passions, our ideas, our activity in general, who can tell what part this unconscious agent may play in our determinations? Hence the assertion, I have a consciousness that I am free, therefore I am free,

loses much of its value, because consciousness supplies only a portion of the elements of the problem, and by no means supplies them all. Furthermore, this unconscious agency, which is overlooked, may be, as we shall see, the very groundwork, the essence, and, as it were, the root of the will.

As for those who, regarding the testimony of consciousness as secondary, adopt an objective method, they derive their arguments chiefly from two sources, physical and physiological phenomena, and historical and social facts.

The physical world, say they, is subject to the laws of a determinism which allows no exception. Experience proves, and science demands this. Science is explanation; to explain is to determine, and to determine a phenomenon is to refer it to its immediate conditions, or to its laws. We have no intelligible idea of a phenomenon that is produced spontaneously, with nothing to determine it to be, or to be in one way rather than in another. That would be a creation ex nihilo, a miracle. Leibnitz, and after him Laplace, have very forcibly expressed this truth. Physics and chemistry having demonstrated that nothing comes into being and that nothing perishes-neither matter nor force-that there occur only transformations, which themselves are determinable, the idea of universal determinism has become a scientific commonplace. The principle of the correlation or equivalence of forces is the highest expression of this belief in determinism. Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer, taking his stand on this principle of equivalence, reduces all phenomena, without exception, to transformations of motion; according to him, social facts arise out of certain psychological states, and these out of certain physiological conditions, life itself resulting from the play of physical forces: And if it be asked, whence these physical forces which through the intermedium of the vital forces produce the social forces? we reply, as we have all along, from solar radiation.'

In a world where all things are so firmly linked together, what place is there for free-will? What right have you, say the determinists, to break up the series of effects and causes, for the purpose of bringing in an unintelligible spontaneity? You say, when I wish to move my arm I move it; but this movement is not, as you suppose, a creation-it must have already existed in your organism

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under a different form; and the very act whereby you form your resolution is conditioned, is subject to determinism. There is ground for believing that every mental state is determined by organic conditions, and that consequently it comes indirectly under the laws of universal determinism. Even though you dispute this, you are in no better case, for at least you must concede that this mental state depends on those which precede it, and that it is subject to the laws of association, called into existence by association; but these laws of association are only one form of determinism.

It has been thought that this difficulty may be obviated by taking the ground that, supposing the voluntary act to be an effect, it is not therefore a necessary effect, and that causality does not always imply constraint, nor, consequently, necessity. To us this explanation seems not to go to the root of the question. The problem is not whether motives have or have not the character of coercion, but whether there is, besides motives and determining causes, a spontaneity which belongs to the individual himself. We might, indeed, regard our ideas, sentiments, and passions as forming a system of forces, each of which tends to pass over into action. There would occur between them action and reaction, attractions and repulsions, some of them combining to act in unison, others warring with one another, while others again are mutually neutralized wholly or in part. On this hypothesis the voluntary act -the final result of a conflict of forces-would not appear to be a constrained effect, and yet it would not have even the shadow of free-will. It would be so far from being free that, given the elementary forces, we might calculate the act as a problem in mechanics. If free-will exists, it can only consist in that property of the subject whereby it reacts against the determining causes, and in consequence of this reaction determines certain acts.

Before we examine more closely this obscure question, which will bring us unexpectedly back again to heredity, let us briefly consider the difficulties raised against freedom of will by the moral sciences.

Considerations drawn from the general course of history and from the sequence of historical facts are always somewhat vague. The study of social phenomena, classified and computed in statistics, gives a firmer ground for objections. As Quetelet, Buckle, Wundt,

and Littré,1 have observed, all acts commonly regarded as resulting from free-will-such as murders, thefts, crimes and offences of all kinds, marriages, divorces, suicides-reach about the same figure year after year in a given country. Thus, in Belgium, in the five years 1841-5 the average number of marriages in cities was 2,642 per annum, the utmost deviations being + 46 and −136. In France, during the long period between 1826 and 1844, the number of criminals per annum varied from 8,237 to 6,299, and

so on.

It is certain that we cannot glance at the statistics of the various human acts without being struck with the regularity of their occurrence. This proves that man's causality is governed by laws which admit very little variation, but it in no wise proves that such causality does not exist. We entirely believe in the existence of social and historical laws, but statistics cannot teach us whether these laws stand alone, or whether there is not besides an indeterminate number of causes. As Wundt very well remarks, when we extend our observations from one man over a whole population, we eliminate all those causes which appertain only to the individual, or to a small portion of the population. We adopt the same procedure as the physicist, who, in order to eliminate all accidental influences, always brings together a great number of observations and thence deduces a law. But when the statistician, having thus put aside the individual influences, concludes that they have no existence, it is as though the physicist were to conclude that the accidental influences he eliminated in the general did not exist in the individual. The physicist may disregard these, since for him they have no significance; but as for the psychologist-who raises the question whether besides the social influences there exist causes of volition of an individual nature-he, of course, may not overlook those deviations proper to each particular case, for they indicate the existence of individual causes.2

From what has been said we get little more than negative notions about free-will, and, indeed, it is perhaps impossible to go

1 The reader will find some curious statistics in the Révue de Philosophie Positive, for Sept. 1868.

? Wundt, vol. ii. ch. 56.