wishes to go "spook" hunting, I recommend such an "efficient cause" to her notice, if, after having been slain more than a century ago by David Hume, it still persists in haunting the minds of innocent and worthy persons.
Secondly, I do not hold that "a man's personality is formed for him and not by him." Such a mode of expression seems to me exceedingly misleading. A man's personality is himself,—the total result at any given time of his present and past acts, thoughts, feelings, etc. The individual's action is his own action; but that he acts, and how he acts, can only be explained by a reference to preceding conditions in the man himself and in his environment.
One word more. Miss Gulliver claims that the moral chaos to which she asserts determinism points "tells mightily against the truth of the hypothesis." Now it is just against the spirit of this criticism that my article is directed. The moment we allow a consideration of the ethical consequences of a belief to weigh in the scale against it, we are abandoning that mental attitude of strict impartiality in regard to truth which is really essential, not only to the scientist, but also to the ethical student. It is far better to conceive of the universe as a moral chaos, if such our reason shows it to be, than to have a moral chaos in our own minds; and such a chaos must result if we are led to subordinate the claims of rational thought to the supposed interests of ethical theory or theology.
