mes Hinton, pp. 172, 173. See also the excellent chapter
on Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton.
Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classical
utterance on this subject.

[4] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will. It
all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate universe.
If _M_ + _x_ is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to _x_ and the
desire which prompts the belief are also fixed. But fixed or not,
these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
preceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
_M_ + _x_ which we seek. If, however, free acts be possible, a faith
in their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.

[5] In either case, as a later essay explains (see p. 193), the
_should_ which the moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted
in the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to
whose demands he individually bows.

{111}

REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[1]

MEMBERS OF THE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE:

Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
to-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
challenge,--not because they wish to fight, but because they are
ashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
teacher can be exposed,--the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,--

"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
Sicher ist 's in allen Faellen,"--

for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
quickest when one hits the mark.

Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
officiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I must
suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
desired. Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
assimilate results of science, and to