difficulty and the formation of a philosophy of history, the
conflict of free will with general laws appears first in Greek
thought in the usual theological form in which all great ideas seem
to be cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of OEdipus and Adrastus, exemplifying
the struggles of individual humanity against the overpowering force
of circumstances and necessity, which gave to the early Greeks
those same lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less
artistic fashion, from the study of statistics and the laws of
physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural
influence. The Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and
then punishment, are no longer 'viper-tressed goddesses with eyes
and mouth aflame,' but those evil thoughts which harbour within the
impure soul. In this, as in all other points, to arrive at
Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific and modern
thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as
essentially a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of life, he was fully conscious
of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of
force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is
inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which
is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and
circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good
and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the
one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated
for reformation.