While destiny or fate in the sense of absolute external compulsion would certainly be destructive, not only of moral responsibility but of personality itself, yet religion or science without fate is radically unsound.”  Again he adds:  “We cannot separate perfection and fate.  Deity whose sway is not destiny is not venerable, nor even reliable.  It would be a purpose that did not round the universe, a love that could not preserve it.  Theism without fate is a kind of atheism, and a self-dominated atheism.  But holding justice to be the true necessity or fate, is properly theism, though it refuses the name."[201]

The reasoning here reminds one of the conclusions of a still more recent writer, who while condemning what he considers the fatalism of Calvinistic theology, still asserts that its logic leaves no alternative but the denial of a personal God.  And an early Buddhist philosopher has left a fragment which gives the very same reason for agnosticism.  Thus he says:  “If the world was made by God (Isvara) there should be no such thing as sorrow or calamity, nor doing wrong, nor doing right; for all, both pure and impure, deeds must come from Isvara....  If he makes without a purpose he is like a suckling child, or with a purpose, he is not complete.  Sorrow and joy spring up in all that lives; these, at least, are not alike the works of Isvara, for if he causes love and joy he must himself have love and hate.  But if he loves and hates, he is not rightly called self-existent.  ’Twere equal, then, the doing right or doing wrong.  There should be no reward of works; the works themselves being his, then all things are the same to him, the maker.”

This was a Buddhist’s answer to the Hindu pantheism, and there follows a reply also to the Oriental dualism which attempted to solve the difficulty by assigning two great first causes, one good and the other evil.  “Nay,” says this Buddhist philosopher, “if you say there is another cause beside this Isvara, then he is not the end or sum of all, and therefore all that lives may, after all, be uncreated, and so you see the thought of Isvara is overthrown."[202] Thus the same problems of existence have taxed human speculation in all lands and all ages.  The same perplexities have arisen, and the same cavils and complaints.

There is an important sense in which all forms of materialism are fatalistic in their relation to moral responsibility.  James Buechner assures us that “what is called man’s soul or mind is now almost universally conceded as equivalent to a function of the substance of the brain.”  Walter Bagehot, like Maudsley, suggests that the newly born child has his destiny inscribed on his nervous tissues.[203] Mr. Buckle assures us that certain underlying but indefinable laws of society, as indicated by statistics, control human action irrespective of choice or moral responsibility.  Even accidents, the averages of forgetfulness or neglect, are the subjects of computation.  To support his position he cites the averages of suicides, or the number of letters deposited yearly in a given post-office, the superscription of which has been forgotten.  Thus, underlying all human activity there is an unknown force, a vague something—­call it Deity, or call it Fate—­which controls human affairs irresistibly.