f a dice box as double sixes are. If free-will is spoken of, that
must mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisoners
to-day as a Maori chief was a hundred years ago. It is as likely--I am
using Mr. McTaggart's examples--that a majority of Londoners will
burn themselves alive to-morrow as that they will partake of food, as
likely that I shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committing
a murder,[12] and so forth, through various suppositions that no
indeterminist ever sees real reason to make.

This habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me
of what Mr. Wells says of the current objections to socialism, in his
wonderful little book, 'New worlds for old.' The commonest vice of the
human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no, as black
or white, its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades.
So the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of
socialism, and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits
from a hat. Socialism abolishes property, abolishes the family, and
the rest. The method, Mr. Wells continues, is always the same: It
is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is
wanted without limit of qualification,--for socialist read pluralist
and the parallel holds good,--it is to imagine that whatever proposal
is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs, and
so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to
the simple-minded person in doubt--'This is socialism'--or pluralism,
as the case may be. 'Surely!--SURELY! you don't want _this!_'

How often have I been replied to, when expressing doubts of the
logical necessity of the absolute, of flying to the opposite extreme:
'But surely, SURELY there must be _some_ connexion among things!' As
if I must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying
any connexion whatever. The whole question revolves in very truth
about the word 'some.' Radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for
the legitimacy of the notion of _some_: each part of the world is in
some ways connected, in some other ways not connected with its other
parts, and the ways can be discriminated, for many of them are
obvious, and their differences are obvious to view. Absolutism, on its
side, seems to hold that 'some' is a category ruinously infected
with self-contradictoriness, and that the only categories inwardly
consistent and therefore pertin