A government compels its citizens to obey certain unpopular laws; the victorious army compels the enemy to surrender. The obedience of the citizens and the surrender of the enemy are acts done under compulsion; they are not acts of free will. But a man of a certain character wills, under given circumstances and in the absence of compulsion, _necessarily_ in the way in which he does. The determination of a free will is not a matter of chance but of necessity. Yet the determining factors are not outside but inside; they are not due to compulsion, not to the pressure of a foreign power, but to the nature of the willing being himself. This, then, is the definition of “free”: A being is free if it is unrestrained, so that it acts according to its own nature. As is its nature, so it wills; as it wills, so it acts. If we know the character of a man and the situation in which he is placed, we can predict his choice as the necessary result of his nature. His decision, although it is free and not under compulsion, is not an outcome of chance which might under the same conditions be different, but is the inevitable result of necessity. If by free will we had to understand that the decisions of the will are the result either of chance or of absolute chance, the foremost duty of the educator would be to make man unfree, to insert certain dominant ideas into his mind, destined to determine his will. The free man according to this definition of free will as being due to chance, would be a person whose actions are more whimsical than the fancies of lunatics. We reject this conception of the freedom of the will. In our opinion a will is free if it is unrestrained so that it can act according to its nature. Our conception of free will does not stand in contradiction to the doctrine of “determinism” as defined by the “Century Dictionary” in its second sense: “In general, the doctrine that whatever is or happens is entirely determined by antecedent causes.” THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY. We distinguish between (1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4) physiological, and (5) psychical events. A mechanical phenomenon is a change of place which does not involve a change of the constitution of the parts moved. E. g., a stone is pushed; its position is altered, but the stone remains the same. A physical phenomenon is an event in which the molecular state of the bodies in action is altered. Water heated becomes steam, frozen it becomes ice. The three states have different molecular configurations. Chemical phenomena are such in which the constitution of the atoms is altered. The characteristic qualities of hydrogen, for example, are different when combined with different elements or when isolated. Each combination is a peculiar substance with peculiar qualities and not a mixture or combination of the qualities of the isolated elements.