And not only so,
but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call
caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to
assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But
it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men
that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that
their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That
amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same
conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number
of suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds,
cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that
like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only
can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of
men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for
another, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter a
university, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) which
can be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable as far as
it goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for the
uniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all the
universality of that uniformity.
Pages:
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83