f pre-existing causes:

"Life is but a succession of phenomena.

"Therefore every life is necessarily determined by pre-existing
causes.

"I do not see how the conclusion can be escaped that from the time
we open our eyes upon the world and receive our first impressions,
we are thrust forward between insurmountable walls of fate that
leave no room for freedom. It is true that so far as external or
objective forces are concerned we may be, as a rule, under no
compulsion to follow one more than another; but _subjectively_ we
are in no sense free, because the peculiar way in which the _will_
will act under given conditions must depend upon the preponderating
_subjective_ force. To hold otherwise is to contend that a lesser
force can overcome a greater,--which is absurd."

Certainly the problem as to the degree to which environment determines
life is an interesting one, but may it not be reversed and stand as the
problem to what degree life controls and fashions the environment? Does
not the environment change with the life in a corresponding evolutionary
process? "Every spirit builds its house." Then, too, the thing we call
life is not composed exclusively of character and circumstances. There
enters into it a third element,--that of the unknown.

The environment of Tennyson, for instance, in his early youth, was that
of the limited, even though thoughtful and refined life of the son of a
country clergyman of modest means; as his powers expanded and developed
his environment kept pace with it in extension of breadth. Is it not,
then, true that a life really belongs to the environment it creates for
himself, rather than to that in which it is first nurtured? "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be" applies to the possibilities of life in the
present as well as in that future which lies beyond the change we call
death. The divine electric spark leaps through the atmosphere and
communicates its kindling power. The inner force of the spirit works
outward and begins to shape and fashion its own world. Environment is
simply another name for that series "of the more stately mansions" that
each one may build according to the power that worketh in him. A great
sorrow comes; or an overwhelming joy, on which one rises to heights of
ecstasy, to the very Mount of Transfiguration itself, and thus
transcends all former limits and creates his new environment, whose
wal