To this, however, the Moralist will object sadly, and the practical politician with scornful superiority, that the state has created institutions for suppressing the bandit, but that there are none such to control bandit states, and that self-defence alone, the only means of self-protection for man in Hobbes's primitive condition, can gain a footing between them. Clearly only the party attacked is in a state of self-defence, but the bandit who has a sufficient sense of humour to play the pettifogging lawyer can always maintain that attack is also self-defence, the preventive form of self-defence. The answer to this is: if society has managed to provide judges and police in order to secure peace, then mankind will for the same purpose learn how to provide courts of justice and a police force to deal with the bandits of practical politics who endanger peace among nations. But that is a practical question, not a theoretical one, not a principle of moral philosophy. The latter shows irrefutably that there is only one Morality, not a private one and a public one which is its negation, not one kind for the individual and another for politics, for the state. He who defends the thesis of a twofold Morality merely shows that he does not possess simple Morality. CHAPTER VI FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY Theological thought is faced with a problem in ethics which presents the greatest difficulties. It is the problem of Free Will. Is man who perceives, judges, has volition and acts, a free being inwardly? Can he, guided only by his own reasonable thoughts and conclusions, determined entirely by his own inner impulses and uninfluenced by outer circumstances, choose one or the other of two conflicting possibilities? When he has to make a decision, is he always like Hercules at the cross-roads who has to make up his mind alone as to which path he shall take, whether he is to follow quiet, modest virtue, or alluring, voluptuous vice? Does he do evil because he willed to do so and not otherwise, although it was in his power to avoid it? Does he decide for the good, because after due investigation and consideration he recognized it as preferable, though he might have rejected it? Or is man always subject to coercion from which at no time and no place he can escape? Are all his actions determined by the law of Nature which regulates every one of his movements just as mechanically as the course of the stars or the fall of a body to our earth when its support is removed? Is he an automaton, set going by cosmic forces, who possesses the doubtful privilege consciously to be able to follow the turning of his wheels, the action of his levers, rods and indicators and to listen to their humming and knocking without being allowed to interfere in their movements or to change the least thing in their functions or work? Is he fettered by the chain of causes which have existed eternally and continue to act immutably to all eternity?