But where would it be if we had free-will? rejoin the determinists.  If a ‘free’ act be a sheer novelty, that comes not from me, the previous me, but ex nihilo, and simply tacks itself on to me, how can I, the previous I, be responsible?  How can I have any permanent character that will stand still long enough for praise or blame to be awarded?  The chaplet of my days tumbles into a cast of disconnected beads as soon as the thread of inner necessity is drawn out by the preposterous indeterminist doctrine.  Messrs. Fullerton and McTaggart have recently laid about them doughtily with this argument.

It may be good ad hominem, but otherwise it is pitiful.  For I ask you, quite apart from other reasons, whether any man, woman or child, with a sense for realities, ought not to be ashamed to plead such principles as either dignity or imputability.  Instinct and utility between them can safely be trusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise.  If a man does good acts we shall praise him, if he does bad acts we shall punish him—­anyhow, and quite apart from theories as to whether the acts result from what was previous in him or are novelties in a strict sense.  To make our human ethics revolve about the question of ‘merit’ is a piteous unreality—­God alone can know our merits, if we have any.  The real ground for supposing free-will is indeed pragmatic, but it has nothing to do with this contemptible right to punish which had made such a noise in past discussions of the subject.

Free-will pragmatically means novelties in the world, the right to expect that in its deepest elements as well as in its surface phenomena, the future may not identically repeat and imitate the past.  That imitation en masse is there, who can deny?  The general ‘uniformity of nature’ is presupposed by every lesser law.  But nature may be only approximately uniform; and persons in whom knowledge of the world’s past has bred pessimism (or doubts as to the world’s good character, which become certainties if that character be supposed eternally fixed) may naturally welcome free-will as a melioristic doctrine.  It holds up improvement as at least possible; whereas determinism assures us that our whole notion of possibility is born of human ignorance, and that necessity and impossibility between them rule the destinies of the world.

Free-will is thus a general cosmological theory of promise, just like the Absolute, God, Spirit or Design.  Taken abstractly, no one of these terms has any inner content, none of them gives us any picture, and no one of them would retain the least pragmatic value in a world whose character was obviously perfect from the start.  Elation at mere existence, pure cosmic emotion and delight, would, it seems to me, quench all interest in those speculations, if the world were nothing but a lubberland of happiness already.  Our interest in religious metaphysics arises in the