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FREE WILL AND FATALISM. existence, but to a certain extent at least authors of our own characters? If you are already determined to take up a particular line of action by phenomenal antecedents, then, what sense is there in such sayings of Ethics or Gospels, of the Great as "Do this and that and do not do other." Ethics will lose its injunctive character and will be reduced to a mere science of health. In fact the experience of contrition which follows so often on one's doing something wrong, the language of praise and blame, we so often use when admiring the moral rectitude or the quality of the sentiment of justice, the inspiring instances of forgiveness, the constant reference to higher virtue, to the mode of plain living and high thinking and all of the like character we say, rest on this belief in the freedom of man. Take away the freedom of man, the wickedness of him comes out in all nakedness and horribleness in the same category as devastations of nature. If noble minds rose upon us as necessarily as lengthening summer days, we might indeed rejoice, but cannot be
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