of us, even though unfamiliar with the controversies that have raged for centuries on the question of free will, must have sometimes been compelled by the conditions of

med the belief in our freedom which for a moment had been shaken by doubt and perplexity;

to be so interrelated as to constitute a universal system in which no phenomenon can ever be considered as absolutely beginning, but can in each case be traced back to a preceding phenomenon as its cause, or at any rate as the condition of its intelligibi

sary effects of causes that have acted on his character or momentarily on his will, we cease to consider such acts as partaking of that moral value through which man's

ar constituents of human personality. They cannot be imparted to man from the outside. They are in him from the very start even if only as germs which he must himself cultivate, and which will, when developed, enable him to act consciously, that is, with full knowledge of his acts. This knowledge is twofold, for he knows what he is doing, and he knows also how his actions must be judged. And so all the causes that bear on him are practically of no weight in determining a course which he will take, if he is a man, only after the approval of his own judgment. What is more natural than to avenge an insult, and to harbour hatred against an enemy? And yet from the viewpoint of morals, man is worthy of this name only in so far as he is able to resist his overpowering passions and to release himself from that force which compels him to offset harm with more harm, and meet hatred with hatred. He must pardon; he must love the enemy who harms him. Only when a man is capable of understanding the b

y us in the future, do everything in his power to meet successfully the opposing forces of evil. We surely cannot abandon the unfortunate wretch who through moral impotence-whether it be the craven submissiveness of the coward, or the undaunted violence of the overbearing brute-commits an evil deed. We feel it 45 our

al and irremediable moral depravity; and that therefore persons tainted with it are fatally condemned never to heed sufficiently the voice of duty and ever to yield to their perv

Italian writers. Though their influence is now on the wane, their observations on the pathological nature of criminal acts

t on the crest of the wave which hurls it forward? Man, they say, is no different from this drop: from the time of his birth to the instant of his death, hemmed in by all the beings of nature, acted upon by innumerable concurrent causes, he is pushed and dragged at every moment by the irresistible current of all the forces of the entire mass of the universe. At times he may delude himself into believing that he has lifted his consciousness out of the huge flood, that it is within his power to resist, to

ounting for it, corresponds and answers to an invincible certitude in our soul, invincible because a postulate of our moral conscience. That is to say, that whatever our scientific theories and ideas, we have a conscience which imposes a law upon us,-a law which, though not promulgated and sustained by any external force, or rather because of it, compels us in a manner which is absolute. This law is the moral law. It requires no speculative demonstration. The scrutiny of philosophers might not be helpful to it. It rises spontaneo