the figures on a clock dial, the
fact being that she was short-sighted and could not see them. This is a
typical illustration of the absurdities and cruelties into which we are
led by the counter-stupidity to Determinism: the doctrine of Free Will.
The notion that people can be good if they like, and that you should
give them a powerful additional motive for goodness by tormenting
them when they do evil, would soon reduce itself to absurdity if its
application were not kept within the limits which nature sets to the
self-control of most of us. Nobody supposes that a man with no ear for
music or no mathematical faculty could be compelled on pain of death,
however cruelly inflicted, to hum all the themes of Beethoven's
symphonies or to complete Newton's work on fluxions.

LIMITS TO FREE WILL.

Consequently such of our laws as are not merely the intimidations by
which tyrannies are maintained under pretext of law, can be obeyed
through the exercise of a quite common degree of reasoning power and
self-control. Most men and women can endure the ordinary annoyances
and disappointments of life without committing murderous assaults. They
conclude therefore that any person can refrain from such assaults if he
or she chooses to, and proceed to reinforce self-control by threats of
severe punishment. But in this they are mistaken. There are people, some
of them possessing considerable powers of mind and body, who can no more
restrain the fury into which a trifling mishap throws them than a dog
can restrain himself from snapping if he is suddenly and painfully
pinched. People fling knives and lighted paraffin lamps at one another
in a dispute over a dinner-table. Men who have suffered several long
sentences of penal servitude for murderous assaults will, the very day
after they are released, seize their wives and cast them under drays
at an irritating word. We have not only people who cannot resist an
opportunity of stealing for the sake of satisfying their wants, but even
people who have a specific mania for stealing, and do it when they are
in no need of the things they steal. Burglary fascinates some men as
sailoring fascinates some boys. Among respectable people how many are
there who can be restrained by the warnings of their doctors and the
lessons of experience from eating and drinking more than is good for
them? It is true that between self-controlled people and ungovernable
people there is a narrow margin of moral m