be answered, some caprice of the moment, some accidental impulse
or arbitrary freak of fancy. The late Professor James makes a valiant
attempt to solve the 'dilemma of determinism' by resorting to the idea of
'chance' which he defines as a 'purely relative term, giving us no
information about that which is predicated, except that it happens to be
disconnected with something else--not controlled, secured or {90}
necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence.'[7]
'On my way home,' he says, 'I can choose either of two ways'; and suppose
'the choice is made twice over and each time falls on a different
street.' 'Imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then am
set again at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was
made. Imagine then that, _everything else being the same_,[8] I now make
a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. Looking outwardly at
these universes of which my two acts are a part, can you say which is the
impossible and accidental one and which the rational and necessary one?'
Perhaps an outsider could not say, but Professor James, if he examined
his reasons, could say. He assumes that 'everything else is the same.'
But that is just what cannot be. A new factor has been introduced, it
may be a whim, a sudden impulse, perhaps even a desire to upset
calculation--a something in his character in virtue of which his second
choice is different from his first. It is an utter misnomer to call it
'chance.' Even though he had tossed a coin and acted on the throw, his
action would still be determined by the kind of man he was.

Let us not seek to defend freedom on inadequate grounds, or contend for a
spurious liberty. No view of the subject should indeed debar us from
acknowledging 'changes in heart and life,' but a misunderstanding of the
doctrine of freedom may tend to paralyse moral initiative. The attempt
to sunder the will and the understanding and discover the source of
freedom in the realm of the emotions, as the voluntarists seek to do,
cannot be regarded as satisfactory or sound philosophy. In separating
faith and knowledge the Ritschlian school tends to make subjective
feeling the measure of truth and life; while recent psychological
experiments in America with the phenomena of faith-healing, hypnotism and
suggestion, claim to have discovered hitherto unsuspected potencies of
the will. This line of thought has been welcomed by many as a relief