stored-up impressions are more or less awakened under stimulation.
As life goes on, these stored impressions act as inhibitions or
stimulations to action, as the case may be. These form the material for
comparisons and judgments as to conduct. Not only are the impressions
imperfect and the record imperfect, but their value and effect depend on
the brain which compares and considers the impressions. From all this
mechanism, action is born.

That man is the product of heredity and environment and that he acts as
his machine responds to outside stimuli and nothing else, seem amply
proven by the evolution and history of man. But, quite aside from this,
logic and philosophy must lead to the same conclusions. This is not a
universe where acts result from chance. Law is everywhere supreme. Every
process of nature and life is a continuous sequence of cause and effect.
No intelligent person would ever think of an effect in the physical
world which did not follow a cause or causes. It has taken man a long
time to find this out. The recurrence of the seasons, the seed-time and
harvest, the common phenomena of Nature, were once supposed to be
outside the realm of cause and effect and due to the whim of some
powerful being. But the laws of matter are now coming to be understood.
Chance, accident and whim have been banished from the physical world.
The acts of men alone are supposed to be outside the realm of law. There
is a cause for the eternal revolution of the earth around the sun, for
the succession of seed-time and harvest, for growth and decay; but not
for the thoughts and actions of man.

All the teaching of the world is based on the theory that there is no
free will. Why else should children be trained with so much care? Why
should they be taught what is right and what is wrong? Why should so
much pains be taken in forming habits? To what effect is the storing of
knowledge in the brain of the child, except that it may be taught to
avoid the wrong and to do the right? Man's every action is caused by
motive. Whether his action is wise or unwise, the motive was at least
strong enough to move him. If two or more motives pulled in opposite
directions, he could not have acted from the weakest but must have
obeyed the strongest. The same motives applied to some other machine
might have produced an opposite result, but to his particular structure
it was all-controlling. How any special motive will affect any special
machine must d