rational determinist, whose position really assumed it, though
possibly individual determinists may have obscured the truth by their
phraseology. As of old, anti-rationalists persist in assuming that the
determinist view of things, mostly accepted by the rationalist, impairs
character by reducing will to a 'mechanism.' But that is a calculated
obscuration of the doctrine. It is a bad sophism to assert that 'the
rejection of mechanism by non-libertarians is a mere phrase. Sooner or
later they have to affirm that man is mechanically determined.'[15] It
is not so. 'Going Universe' negates Machine. _That_ concept adheres to
the schema of those who affirm the universe to be _made_: Naturalism
excludes it. Theistic determinism _does_ make man a mere vessel, a tool:
for Naturalism he is an individuation of the Living All. The
intelligent determinist never was and never will be put out by his
conceptual recognition of himself as part of an infinite sequence; and
he has no need of M. Bergson's (untenable) restatement of the problem of
free-will and determinism to the effect that the will is sometimes free
and sometimes not. That is indeed a hopeless fallacy--an illicit
inference from the unduly stressed re-discovery that new truth is
reached by a leap and not by a sequence. To say that we are 'free' when
we have an original idea or guess is to miss the logical truth set forth
by so unsophisticated a philosopher as Locke--that the concept of
'freedom' is irrelevant to every process of thought. M. Bergson insists
on the irrelevance of spatial terms to psychic processes, but overlooks
the equal irrelevance of terms of preventable personal action.

Precisely because he is, so to say, the latest outcome of the universe,
the rational determinist will insist upon 'pulling his weight' and
having things go, as far as may be, in the way he prefers. No one's
right is better! And he can confidently claim that here, where he is
philosophically at one with the thorough-going theist, he has all the
possible moral gain from his determinism without an iota of the theist's
perplexity. That gain consists in the lead to mercy in human affairs.
The theist-determinist is certainly not, as some Christian rhetoricians
(ignorant of Christian history) affirm all determinists must be, either
a coward or a licentious knave, in the ordinary sense. Augustine and
Luther and Calvin and Knox were neither, though all four were sadly
sinful men. But the theistic d