calculability of the course of a process is incompatible with its purposive and intelligent character. An answer to this question is at once suggested by reflection upon our ordinary attitude towards such attempts to calculate the course of our own behaviour.[128] It is by no means every such calculation that we resent. So far from being affronted by the assumption that our conduct exhibits sufficient uniformity to admit of calculation, we expect our personal friends to have sufficient reliance on its uniformity to assume with confidence that we shall certainly do some things and refuse to do others, that we must have acted in certain ways and cannot have acted in others. “You ought to know me better than to suppose me capable of that” is between friends a tolerably keen expression of reproach, “I know I can count on you to do it,” a common expression of confidence. On the other hand, we should certainly resent the assumption on the part of a comparative stranger of such a knowledge of our character as would warrant confident calculation of our conduct, and if the calculation was avowedly drawn not from personal knowledge at all, but from general propositions of Psychology or Anthropology, we should pretty certainly feel that a more than accidental success threatened our moral individuality. Now, what is the explanation of this difference of feeling? Manifestly it must be sought in the great difference between the grounds on which the calculation is based in the two cases. In the first case we expected and welcomed the calculation, because we felt it to be founded upon our friend’s personal acquaintance with the guiding interests and purposes of our life; it was an inference based upon insight into our _individual_ character. In the other case we resented the success of the calculation, because we assumed it to be made in the absence of any such personal insight into our individual purposes and interests, on the basis of mere general propositions about human nature. We rightly feel that the regular success of calculation of this second sort is inconsistent with the ascription of any reality to our individual character. If all our actions can be calculated from general theorems in a science of human nature, without taking individual purpose into account, then the apparent efficacy of individual interests and purposes in determining the course of our history must be an empty illusion; we cannot be truly intelligent agents, seeing that we never really do anything at all.