of internal and external circumstances, which play upon it, according to
the laws of cause and effect.

Take it that a man has insulted me. I leave the place in which I have
been insulted, and with me goes the suggestion of forgiveness or of
murder and vengeance. And then it is assumed that a man has his complete
free will, unless he is influenced by circumstances explicitly
enumerated by the law, such as minority, congenital deaf-muteness,
insanity, habitual drunkenness and, to a certain extent, violent
passion. If a man is not in a condition mentioned in this list, he is
considered in possession of his free will, and if he murders he is held
morally responsible and therefore punished.

This illusion of a free will has its source in our inner consciousness,
and is due solely to the ignorance in which we find ourselves concerning
the various motives and different external and internal conditions which
press upon our mind at the moment of decision.

If a man knows the principal causes which determine a certain
phenomenon, he says that this phenomenon is inevitable. If he does not
know them, he considers it as an accident, and this corresponds in the
physical field to the arbitrary phenomenon of the human will which does
not know whether it shall decide this way or that. For instance, some of
us were of the opinion, and many still are, that the coming and going of
meteorological phenomena was accidental and could not he foreseen. But
in the meantime, science has demonstrated that they are likewise subject
to the law of causality, because it discovered the causes which enable
us to foresee their course. Thus weather prognosis has made wonderful
progress by the help of a network of telegraphically connected
meteorological stations, which succeeded in demonstrating the connection