“Our laws are the laws of God,” said the early scientist, quite rightly. And then, after he had abandoned that ancient idea, the “hypothesis of a God,” he continued to say it, not realizing how ridiculous and empty his notion of “law” had become. Eventually he did begin to see this, and was minded to drop force altogether. A law became merely the way things acted under given circumstances, and force merely a persistence in such action--in other words, the way in which other things would act which stood in the way. A given amount of some substance put into a scale pan will lift the same amount of the same substance to a level with it, and this behavior of the substance in the second pan is the measure of the “force” of gravity moving the substance in the first pan. As to the nature of force itself, the scientist came to say that it lay outside of his province--which was well and good. Pseudo-sciences went further, and said that there was no such thing as force--quite another pair of shoes. But long before this, which marks the end and not the beginning of the last scientific epoch, the Mechanist Hypothesis had been formulated in terms recognizing both force and matter, and brought to the attention of the average man through the writings of Newton. Sir Isaac Newton had one of the greatest minds granted to a human being since the Reformation; yet inadvertently he did his fellows about the most evil turn which modern history records. He robbed them of their belief in free will--or if not quite that, he at least induced them to abandon those fundamental propositions upon which alone the belief in free will can reasonably be based. Free will presupposes force--real force--at the disposition of the will. A will without force is a powerless will--no will at all. And a man without will is not a man; he is not even an animal. He is on a level with his own lawn-mower. Upon free will depends not only all religion, all ethics, all sense of human responsibility, but our physical and mental well-being, our happiness, our very self-respect. If we are but weathercocks, blown this way and that by every breeze, it is folly to talk of striving; of reasoning; of good or of evil; of loyalty or of treason; of anything which makes us act indeed like human beings. It is folly to speak even of consciousness. What good could it do us? We might as well surrender to Dr. Watson at once--and it is folly for him to write books to tell us so, though a folly which he cannot help. To rob man of his will would be to rob him of his life, and to rob him of his belief in the freedom of his will is to rob him of all faith in any means proposed to make life better. Yet our mechanists one and all pretend to be philanthropists, and nearly all are reformers. Every day of their lives is a self-contradiction.