in detail is human and just, we have been contented to gather our speculative philosophy out of the broad and coarse generalisations of political necessity.  In the swift haste of social life we must indeed treat men as we find them.  We have no time to make allowances; and the graduation of punishment by the scale of guilt is a mere impossibility.  A thief is a thief in the law’s eye though he has been trained from his cradle in the kennels of St. Giles’s; and definite penalties must be attached to definite acts, the conditions of political life not admitting of any other method of dealing with them.  But it is absurd to argue from such rude necessity that each act therefore, by whomsoever committed, is of specific culpability.  The act is one thing, the moral guilt is another.  And there are many cases in which, as Butler again allows, if we trace a sinner’s history to the bottom, the guilt attributable to himself appears to vanish altogether.

This is all plain matter of fact, and as long as we continue to deny or ignore it, there will be found men (not bad men, but men who love the truth as much as ourselves), who will see only what we neglect, and will insist upon it, and build their system upon it.

And again, if less obvious, yet not less real, are those natural tendencies which each of us brings with him into the world,—­which we did not make, and yet which almost as much determine what we are to be, as the properties of the seed determine the tree which shall grow from it.  Men are self-willed, or violent, or obstinate, or weak, or generous, or affectionate; there is as large difference in their dispositions as in the features of their faces; and that by no original act of their own.  Duties which are easy to one, another finds difficult or impossible.  It is with morals as it is with art.  Two children are taught to draw; one learns with ease, the other hardly or never.  In vain the master will show him what to do.  It seems so easy:  it seems as if he had only to will and the thing would be done; but it is not so.  Between the desire and the execution lies the incapable organ which only wearily, and after long labour, imperfectly accomplishes what is required of it.  And the same, to a certain extent, unless we will deny the plainest facts of experience, holds true in moral actions.  No wonder, therefore, that evaded or thrust aside as these things are in the popular beliefs, as soon as they are recognized in their full reality they should be mistaken for the whole truth, and that the free-will theory be thrown aside as a chimera.

It may be said, and it often is said, that all such reasonings are merely sophistical—­that however we entangle ourselves in logic, we are conscious that we are free; we know—­we are as sure as we are of our existence that we have power to act this way or that way, exactly as we choose.  But this is less plain than it seems; and if we grant it, it proves less than it appears to prove.