In this respect the contrast between laws of purpose with the situation of the things to which they apply, and the laws of mechanics with the predicament of the things they govern, is complete. For example, the most inveterate statistician will hardly venture beyond the point of asserting that the man of alcoholic heredity will for the most part be unable to resist the attraction of drink. Yet sometimes he will be able to, for sometimes he _does_ resist. Can one conceive of the student of mechanics contenting himself with the result that bodies _generally_ fall to earth with an acceleration of thirty-two feet per second? During all the while Mercury’s unorthodox behavior baffled Newtonian physics, could any astronomer be found suggesting that perhaps this was a case of exceptional gravitation? As with heredity, so with all the other so-called forces our author brings to bear upon the conduct of his hero, giving in the end the illusion of mechanically determined action. Heredity, environment, education, serve their purpose well enough as terms that point out an analogy between the ends that attract beings of like history, but they yield only an _expectation_ of the normal, not an _assurance_ of the inevitable. Nor could any increase of statistical data of this kind do more than give us the materials for a closer calculus of probabilities. It is for the reason that all the laws which apply to human conduct are of this statistical nature, that, being permanently unable to predict it, we must regard it as free. And to be free to attain or not to attain a given end, is to be responsible, is to possess the first condition of a moral nature. Nor, in attaining to this insight have we sacrificed aught of our mechanical ideal. Only, who cares that atoms may neither be saved nor damned, if the beings they so fleetingly compose may be both? One might almost say that moral beings pass over the surface of mechanism as waves upon the face of the waters. But they constitute its beauty and its terror. May we not then sum up our conclusions in some such form as this?--Mechanical laws _do_ completely determine the conduct of everything to which they may be applied, but they cannot be applied to an animate being, since no mechanical definition of such a being is possible. Laws of purpose _can_ be applied to such a being, but they do not completely determine his conduct. It is because the only law which can thus apply to a human being does not necessitate his behavior, that we are obliged to regard that behavior as free and the being himself as responsible. The most that we can do in terms of such laws is to calculate the _chances_ for or against the individual’s success, for or against his ultimate worth. * * * * *