‘If you believe in free-will and in atoms, you have two courses open to you. The first alternative may be put as follows: Something which is not atoms must be allowed an existence, and must be supposed capable of acting on the atoms. The atoms may, as Democritus believed, build up a huge mechanical structure, each wheel of which drives its neighbour in one long inevitable sequence of causation; but you may assume that beyond this ever-grinding wheelwork there exists a power not subject to but partly master of the machine; you may believe that man possesses such a power, and if so, no better conception of the manner of its action could be devised than the idea of its deflecting the atoms in their onward path to the right or left of that line in which they would naturally move. The will, if it so acted, would add nothing sensible to nor take anything sensible from the energy of the universe. The modern believer in free-will will probably adopt this view, which is certainly consistent with observation, although not proved by it. Such a power of moulding circumstances, of turning the torrent to the right, where it shall fertilise, or to the left, where it shall overwhelm, but in nowise of arresting the torrent, adding nothing to it, taking nothing from it,—such is precisely the apparent action of man’s will; and though we must allow that possibly the deflecting action does but result from some smaller subtler stream of circumstance, yet if we may trust to our direct perception of free-will, the above theory, involving a power in man beyond that of atoms, would probably be our choice.... ‘We cannot hope that natural science will ever lend the least assistance towards answering the Free-will and Necessity question. The doctrines of the indestructibility of matter and of the conservation of energy seem at first sight to help the Necessitarians, for they might argue that if free-will acts it must add something to or take something from the physical universe, and if experiment shows that nothing of the kind occurs, away goes free-will; but this argument is worthless, for if mind or will simply deflects matter as it moves, it may produce all the consequences claimed by the Wilful school, and yet it will neither add energy nor matter to the universe.’ 234. Now there appears to us to be a very serious objection to this mode of regarding the position of life, unless it be somewhat modified. Let us take one of the visible masses of this present universe, such as a planet. Suppose for a moment that instead of being attracted to a fixed and visible centre of force such as the sun, it is bound to an invisible and vagrant centre, the only condition imposed upon whose irregularities is that it shall always move in such a manner that there shall be neither creation nor destruction of energy.