It is an error to imagine that the doctrine of individual responsibility is always the expedient and edifying one in matters of conduct. There is a sort of people who grow indignant whenever general causes are insisted upon, apparently convinced that whether these are real or not it is immoral to believe in them. But it is not invariably a good thing to urge the will, since this, if over-stimulated, becomes fagged, stale, and discouraged. Often it is better that one should let himself go, and trust himself to the involuntary forces, to the nature of things, to God. The nervous or strained person only harasses and weakens his will by fixing attention upon it: it will work on more effectually if he looks away from it, calming himself by a view of the larger whole; and not without reason Spinoza counts among the advantages of determinism “the attainment of happiness by man through realizing his intimate union with the whole nature of things; the distinction between things in our power and things not in our power; the avoidance of all disturbing passions, and the performance of social duties from rational desire for the common good.”[4] An obvious moral defect of the unbalanced doctrine of responsibility is that it permits the successful to despise the unfortunate, in the belief that the latter “have only themselves to blame,” a belief not countenanced by the larger view of fact. We may pardon this doctrine when it makes one too hard on himself or on successful wrong-doers, but as a rod with which to beat those already down it is despicable. The annals of religion show that the moral life has always these two aspects, the particular and the general, as in the doctrines of freedom and predestination, or in the wrestlings with sin followed by self-abandonment that we find in the literature of conversion.[5] Perhaps we may say that the deterministic attitude is morally good in at least two classes of cases: First, for nervous, conscientious individuals, like Spinoza, whose wills need rather calming than stimulating, also for any one who may be even temporarily in a state of mental strain; second, in dealing on a large scale with social or moral questions whose causes must be treated dispassionately and in a mass.