It is well to bear these considerations in mind, even while admitting that a great deal of the dispute does turn upon the fitness of the language employed, and the accuracy with which it is used. And if intelligible definition may not, as Hume hoped, end the controversy, it will at least have the merit of making the issue plain. What is it that people have in their minds when they speak of the "Freedom of the Will"? Curiously enough, the advocates of "free-will" seldom condescend to favour us with anything so commonplace as a definition, or if they do it tells us little. We are consequently compelled to dig out the meanings of their cardinal terms from the arguments used. Now the whole of the argument for "free-will" makes the word "free" or "freedom" the equivalent to _an absence of determining conditions_; either this, or the case for "free-will" is surrendered. For if a man's decisions are in any way influenced--"influenced" is here only another word for "determined"--Determinism is admitted. I need not argue whether decisions are wholly or partly determined, the real and only question being whether they are determined at all. What is called by some a limited free-will is really only another name for unlimited nonsense. "Freedom," as used by the Volitionist, being an equivalent for "absence of determining conditions," let us ask next what this means. Here I am brought to a dead halt. I do not know what it means. I cannot even conceive it as meaning anything at all. At any rate, I am quite certain that it is outside the region of scientific thought and nomenclature. Scientifically, atoms of matter are not _free_ to move in any direction, the planets are not _free_ to move in any shaped orbit, the blood is not _free_ to circulate, the muscles are not _free_ to contract, the brain is not _free_ to function. In all these cases what takes place is the result of all converging circumstances and conditions. Given these and the result follows. Scientifically, the thing that occurs is the only thing possible. If the word "free" is used in science, it is as a figure of speech, as when one speaks of a free gas, or of the blood not being free to circulate owing to the existence of a constricted artery. But in either case all that is meant is that a change in the nature of the conditions gives rise to a corresponding change of result. The determination of the gas or the blood to behave in a definite way is as great in any case. From the point of view of science, then, to speak of an absence of determining conditions is the most complete nonsense. All science is a search for the conditions that determine phenomena. Save as a metaphor, "freedom" has no place whatever in positive science.