demonstrate that the whole process takes place without the intervention of an immaterial entity to determine the character of the response. So long as this is the case it is presumptuous to ask that we discard the testimony of our consciousness in favour of a theory which has no apparent advantage as an explanation and no demonstrable basis in fact.
This leads me to ask, why be so jealous of any hypothesis that squints in the direction of independent psychical causation? The true answer to this goes to the heart of the strenuous objection now offered to the theory of freedom by a certain group of scientific men. Because, on the hypothesis of freedom, it is thought to be impossible to give a scientific explanation of human life. To say that the existence of real freedom renders a science of human nature impossible and to conclude, therefore, against the existence of freedom is manifestly to beg the whole question. In the first place, there can never be a science of human action based upon a pre-judgment of this fundamental question to begin with; for this is a renunciation of the scientific attitude at the start, and a science, in the true sense of the word, can never be built up by that method. In the second place, the fact of rational freedom, i.e., the existence of a real psychical cause which is not included in a chain of inevitable sequences, does not necessarily imply that its action will be capricious, inconsequential, incalculable. It is surely conceivable that the decisions of a rational mind, although uncaused by antecedent events, should nevertheless be orderly and regular, explicable and calculable, if all the conditions in view of which they were rendered were known. Is it absurd to suppose that the actions of a mind that was free and therefore rationally guided would be rationally explicable? May there not be order without necessity?
Indeed, it is fair to ask whether necessity is not an illusion, rather than freedom. May not the attribution of necessity to the sequences which we observe in the material
