On one occasion, an aged scholar soliloquized as follows: “Homer was at the same time beggar and poet: his mouth more often filled with verses than with bread. Plautus turned a mill that he might live. Menander, Cratinus and Terrence were drowned; Empedocles lost in the crater of Mount Etna; Euripides and Heraclitus torn to pieces by dogs; Hesiod, Archilochus and Ibychus, murdered. Sappho threw herself from a precipice. Condemned by a tyrant, respectively, Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius Arbiter, cut their veins and bled to death. Poison terminated the lives of Socrates, Demosthenes and Lucretius. “In Plutarch, we read of ‘two eminent persons, whose names were Attis, the one a Syrian, the other of Arcadia, both were slain by a wild boar; of two, whose names were Acteon, one was torn to pieces by his dog, the other by assassins; of two famous Scipios, one overthrew the Carthagenians in war, the other totally destroyed them; four of the most warlike commanders of antiquity had but one eye—Philip, Antigonous, Hannibal and Sertorius.’

“Paul Borghese, a writer of rhythmic verse, died of starvation. Tasso, himself the most amiable of poets, lived like a pauper, and passed away in an asylum. Bentivoglio, a creator of classic comedies, in the misery of his old age, was refused admittance to an hospital he had founded. Cervantes died of hunger, and Camoens ended his days in an almshouse. The body of Vaugelas was disposed of to surgeons that his debts might be paid. Spencer was forsaken and neglected in his old age. Decker, Cotten, Savage and Lloyd breathed their last in jails.

“Might not these men have said, ‘Who can shut out fate?’ Were they the sport of circumstances, or could circumstances have been made their sport? Was each independent of fatality? Was he free from destiny; or, was he subject to an unalterable course—an invincible necessity?”

The query of this venerable sage has been that of civilized man in every age. Coming into the world with the dawn of philosophy, it will remain until the veil of Isis is uplifted. Profoundest wisdom has ever taught the subordination of man to a higher law, by which his career is largely determined from the beginning. Investigation will disclose that such, to-day, is the real opinion of a vast majority of mankind.

The thought was ascendant in the literature and religion of the ancient Greeks. Their Moira was a personification of law; the Goddess of Destiny, who assigned to everyone his fate, or “share.” At the birth of man she spun the thread of his future life, pursued his footsteps, and directed the consequences of his actions, according to the decrees of Zeus. By some she was conceived as a fatal divinity, who directed human affairs in such a manner as to restore the right proportions or equilibrium, wherever it had been disturbed; who measured out happiness and unhappiness, and allotted losses and sufferings to him who was blest with too frequent gifts of Fortune, to the end he might be humbled into acknowledging the existence of bounds beyond which human happiness cannot proceed with safety.

To Homer she was not an absolute sovereign of both heaven and earth, to whom even the gods must bow; but merely apportioned the fate of men, as counseled by Deity. In the theology of Hesiod there were three: Clotho, the spinning fate; Lachesis, who assigned to man his fate; and Atropo, who decreed a fate that could not be avoided. This conception answered to the Teutonic Norns, or Weird Sisters. What was to the earlier poets of Greece a person, Æschylus apprehended as a principle; a law for both gods and men; an over-ruling, ever-present, inevitable necessity, against which it is vain to contend, and from which it is hopeless to escape. “His characters are pre-determined parricides, murderers and adulterers.” For instance, the destiny of the pious Amphiaraus led him to that death his wisdom foresaw; fate impelled him to the society his judgment forbade. Good Eteocles, too, lies under the band of fate, but seeks not to avert the doom. “Stern, uncompromising, he will meet the man he must slay, by whom he must himself fall.” The inexorable destiny of Æschylus was to Sophocles and Plato an ordering of the divine will.

Two great schools of philosophy divided the educated opinion of classic Greece and Rome. The tenets of both were fatalistic in tendency. What was to the Epicurean a “chance” appealed to the Stoic as “law.” Man, taught Epicurus, is a mere buffet of a blind fatality. The phenomenon of life, said Stoicism, is governed with iron sway by an imminent necessity of reason. “Man should be free from passion,” preached Zeno, “unmoved by joy or grief, and submit without complaint to the unavoidable power by which all things are governed.”

Buddhism is the doctrine taught by Gautama, the Hindoo sage, in the sixth century, B.C.; now the belief of a greater part of central and eastern Asia and the Indian Islands. In this creed, fatality is a cardinal principle. Sir Edwin Arnold has designated it “The Light of Asia.” The great religion of Brahma, also, teaches that everything is subject to a divinely appointed necessity. It boasts a philosophy that was the admiration of Bruno, Schelling, Hegel, and Draper. Manes declared that the moral universe was controlled by two supreme principles; one the author of all good, the other the author of all evil. The highest conception of Mohammed is an arbitrary and inexorable law. In the Koran we read: “No man can anticipate or postpone his end. Death will overtake us, even in lofty towers. From the beginning, God hath settled the place in which each man shall die.” The Persian poet sings: “The destinies ride their horses by night. No man can by flight escape his fate. Whether asleep in bed or in the storm of battle, the angel of death will find thee.” “I am convinced,” saith Ali, “that the affairs of men go by divine decree, and not by our administration.”

In the philosophy of Solomon, as recorded in Ecclesiastes, we read: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.... To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

With Christianity came the dogma of “predestination” and “election.” This was promulgated, on the very threshold, by Paul, a man of the sublimest genius; adorable, venerable and heroic. Thus he addressed the church at Rome: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God,—to them who are the called according to His purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be first born among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified. What shall we say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us?”

This idea is necessarily involved in the theology of St. Augustine, who maintained that “grace is effectual from its nature, absolutely and morally, not relatively and gradually.” It remained for John Calvin to erect the assertions of Paul into a cognate and masterly system. He insisted upon the purpose of God from eternity, respecting all events.

Briefly, of the religion of the world, to-day, ninety per cent are predestinarian in theory or practice, consciously or unconsciously. Of Christendom, those who agree with Arminius are in a small minority, relatively:—a minority whose creed involves not only the limitation of divine knowledge, but a paralysis of divine power and the moral chaos of a universe. That religion is necessarily puerile and unphilosophic which attempts to reconcile the omnipotence of God with the freedom of man. Either Nature is ordered for the best—so as to produce the highest good; or else, everything is purposeless and for the worst. In a word, either optimism or pessimism must wholly prevail: logically, a middle ground is impossible. We must choose between Leibnitz or Schopenhauer.

Literature and religion aside, the greatest intellects have promulgated a “philosophy of necessity.” Everything that exists, wrote Oersted in substance, depends upon the past, prepares the future, and is related to the whole. “Everything throughout creation is governed by law: but over most of the tracts that come within the active experience of mankind, the governing hand is so secret and remote, that until very large numerical masses are brought under the eye at once, the controlling power is not detected.” Jonathan Edwards said: “Nothing comes to pass without a cause. What is self-existent must be from eternity, and must be unchangeable; but as to all things that begin to be, they are not self-existent, and therefore must have some foundation for their existence without themselves.” Spinoza urged that “In no mind is there an absolute or free volition; but it is determined to choose this or that by a cause, which likewise has been fixed by another, and this again by a third, and so on forever.” Emanuel Kant contended that “every action or phenomenon, so far as it produces an event, is itself an event or occurrence, which pre-supposes another state wherein the cause is to be met with; and thus everything that happens is but a continuation of the series, and no beginning which occurs of itself is possible; consequently, all the actions of the natural causes, in the succession, are themselves again effects.” Our own Emerson asserted the omnipotence and omnipresence of law: “That the wilful and the fantastic, the low and the lofty, are encircled by a necessity.” Whatever limits us, we call fate. If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and dreadful shape. If we rise to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.... The limitations refine as the soul purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.

None greater than these may be found in the noble realm of speculative thought. They are unequalled by few, if any. The whole field of modern science, also, is in accord with their deductions: Teaching that nature is an inevitable sequence, and that all phenomena, material and mental, are linked together by an inevitable connection. In the words of Herbert Spencer: “Various classes of facts unite to prove that the law of metamorphosis which holds among the physical forces, holds equally between them and the mental forces. Those modes of the unknowable which we call motion, light, heat, chemical affinity, etc., are alike transferable into each other, and into those modes of the unknowable which we distinguish as sensation, emotion, and thought; these in their turns being directly or indirectly re-transferable into the original shapes.”

Would you dethrone man, I am asked? No; I surrender to the behests of philosophy as fortified by the deductions of science. Years ago it was argued by Comte that, in social order, the higher must subordinate itself to the lower. That the organic finds itself controlled and limited by the inorganic world, and man has to work out his destiny in submission to all the necessities, physical, chemical and vital, which are pre-supposed in his existence. “The higher,” he continued, “can overcome the lower only by obedience; if it is to conquer, it must at least ‘stoop to conquer.’” And as was once stated by Doctor Conolly, “All the superiority of man, all those faculties which elevate and dignify him, this reasoning power, this moral sense, these capacities of happiness, these high aspiring hopes, are felt and enjoyed and manifested by means of the nervous system. Its injury weakens, its imperfections limit, its destruction ends them.”

But, it may be asked, is not this a denial of “free-will?” Yes, as popularly understood. A “free-will,” in the metaphysical sense, is impossible. The conception is unknown to the best modern psychology. The abstract will, of certain metaphysicians, is a phantasm. Individual volitions, only, come within our actual experience. They have been generalized, by mental philosophers, into a self-existent, self-sustaining, and self-procreating entity. However, an abstraction is not an essence. Such men but tell us what a “free will” should be; that it exists has never been demonstrated. Again, the phenomenon “will” is now known to be transmitted from generation to generation. Heredity teaches that its energy and its weakness are connected with certain states of the organism. “We can no longer doubt the transmission takes place by means of the organs, and, in fact, that the ‘will’ is physiological.” Moreover, in a philosophical sense, the idea is “at war” with a uniform law of cause and effect. Chance events are inconceivable in a universe of causation. Freedom of the will, therefore, is a delusion. For ages men believed that the sun revolved around the earth, because it seemed to do so. A similar illusion is at the base of our ethical system, since we enjoy only the appearance of liberty. “Our apparent freedom consists in the absence of all physical restraints, and in our power to do as we please; but what we please to do depends upon our mental constitution and the circumstances in which we are placed.” The idea was beautifully expressed by Emerson in his poem “Fate.”

In human history, as in physical nature, therefore, every event is linked to its antecedent by an unavoidable connection, and such precedent is connected with an anterior effect; and thus the whole would form a necessary chain, in which, indeed, each man may play his part, but can by no means determine what the part shall be. The moral actions of men, said Buckle, are the product of their antecedents. In other words, when an action is performed, it is performed in consequence of certain motives; those motives are the results of some antecedents; “therefore, if we were acquainted with the whole of the antecedents and with all the laws of their movements we could with certainty foretell the whole of their immediate results. This great social law is liable to disturbances which trouble its operation, without affecting its truth.”

Ergo, given any set of circumstances, and nothing could have happened, save that which did happen; and under exactly the same conditions, the conduct of men must ever issue in the same results. The past should be dismissed without regrets. Our position, at any time, should be judged as it really is, and not for what we vainly suppose it might have been; “for nothing is more certain than that we could not have acted differently in any act of our lives, with the state of mind and circumstances then existing.”

Statistics, likewise, are daily making it evident that the same fixed calculable laws exist in the departments of life and mind as in physics. “In individual cases, or in a limited circle, apparent uncertainty may exist. Within a given number of cases, however, and a large field, invariable results may be looked for.”

In the 12th annual report of William Farr, Esq., to the Registrar General of England, we are told “it may be broadly stated that 27 in 1000 men of the population of the age of 20 and under 60, are suffering from one kind of disease or another; that several are of long duration, that others are recurrent, and that some are hereditary.” We are informed in a subsequent report of the Registrar himself, that it seems to be a “law” one person out of every 45, living at the commencement of any year, will die within that year. (The entire system of insurance—life, fire, and marine—is erected on the principle contended for in this chapter. Not only do a certain relative number of men die in each class annually, but the law extends to the number of policies lapsed each year. There seems also to be a periodicity in the number of fires and marine disasters.)

According to Porter and Buckle, even “marriage is not determined by the temper and wishes of the individual, but by large general facts over which individuals can exercise no authority. It is now known that marriages bear a fixed and definite relation to the price of corn.” A century’s experience in England demonstrates that marriages are regulated by the average earnings of the great mass of people. Cheapness of provision and not love regulates the number of nuptials. Combe affirms the same striking coincidence in the ratio of births in Great Britain. Another singular fact has been deduced from the official reports of England and France. “Even forgetfulness is under a constant law.” Buckle is an authority for the statement that “year after year, the same proportion of letter-writers forget to direct their letters, in some part; so that for each successive period we can actually foretell the number of persons whose memory will fail them in regard to this trifling occurrence.”

By the same witness we prove “the uniform reproduction of crime is more clearly marked, and more capable of being predicted than are the physical laws connected with the disease and destruction of our bodies.” Before this, Combe had observed a similar uniformity, under similar circumstances, of the recurrence of crimes. He perceived in human conduct the same striking indications of constancy in results, as in the prevalence of disease and the endurance of life. Combe said, in 1854, in writing by way of comment on a certain report to the House of Commons: “During the five years, ending with the last year of an execution, there were committed for the crimes enumerated, 7276 persons, of whom 196 were executed. During the five years immediately following the last execution, there were committed for the same offense 7120. Does not this show that these crimes arose from causes in themselves permanent, and which punishment does not remove?” Rawson also remarked that the greatest variation which had taken place during three years, in the proportion of any class of criminals, at the same period of life, had not exceeded a half per cent.

And Dr. Brown states (Vol. 8 of the Assurance Magazine), that “in twenty years, the number of persons accused of various crimes in France, and registered under their respective ages, scarcely varies at any age, from year to year, comparing the proportional per cent under each age with the totals.” M. Quatelet deduced from the statistical returns of government in the same country, that for 1826, 1827, 1828, 1829 and 1830, in each year, there was one person accused out of every 4463 inhabitants, and 61 condemned out of every 100 accused. “In everything which concerns crime,” observed this greatest of statisticians, “the same numbers re-occur with a constancy which cannot be mistaken, and that this is the case, even with those crimes which seem quite independent of human foresight, such, for instance, as murders, which are generally committed after quarrels arising from circumstances apparently casual. Nevertheless, we know from experience, that every year there not only take place the same number of murders, but even the instruments by which they are committed, are employed in the same proportion.” Murder, then, “occurs with as much regularity as the movements of the tides and the rotation of the seasons.” “Self-murder,” Buckle observes, “seems to be not only capricious and uncontrollable, but also very obscure in regard to proof.” Yet, in different countries, for which we have returns, we find, year by year, the same proportion of persons putting an end to their own existence. In London, for example, about 240 persons make away with themselves every year; the annual suicides oscillating, from the pressure of temporary causes, between 266, the highest, and 213, the lowest. In 1846, which was the great year of excitement—caused by the railroad panic—the suicides in London were 266; in 1847 began a slight improvement, and they fell to 256; in 1848 they were 247; in 1849 they were 213; in 1850 they were 229.

In the “Journey through India,” Heber mentions the vain attempt of the English government to check the frequent suicides by drowning, committed at Benares; and August Comte has exposed the folly of thinking that suicide can be diminished by the enactments of law-givers.

Of this field, Quatelet says, in conclusion: “The possibility of assigning, beforehand, the number of accused and condemned which should occur in a country, is calculated to lead to serious reflections, since it involves the fate of several thousands of human beings, who are impelled, as it were, by an irresistible necessity, to the bar of the tribunal, and towards the sentences of condemnation that there await them. These conclusions flow directly from the principle, already so often stated in this work, that effects are in proportion to their causes, and that the effects remain the same, if the causes which produced them do not vary.”

Another step is needed to complete our argument in this branch. Actions are the production of motives. Motives are the effects of determinate antecedents. Whence these antecedents? They are to be found in the “Law of Heredity.” Reproduction is governed by law, and “like begets like.” To quote from Voltaire: “The physical, which is ‘father of the moral,’ transmits the same character from father to son for ages. The Appii were ever proud and inflexible; the Catos always austere. The whole line of the Guises were bold, rash, factious, full of the most insolent pride and most winning politeness. From Francis de Guise down to that one who put himself at the head of the people of Naples, they were all in look, courage and character above ordinary men. I have seen full length portraits of Francis, of Balafre and his son: they were all six feet high, and they all possess the same features—the same audacity on the brow, in the eyes, and in the attitude.” M. Taine sees in Lord Byron a true descendant of the Berserkers. To Ribot, the French of the 19th century are the Gauls described by CÆsar and Strabo. Amphere writes of the character of the Greeks, that it has not changed; “he has now the same qualities, the same defects as of old.” The physiology and mentality of parents characterize their offspring. The human mind is not a blank at birth. Its capabilities and character are inherited. Every possibility of the soul is innate and constitutional from the moment of gestation. Such is the verdict of science substantiated by Ribot, Galton, and Fowler.

That the peculiar anatomy and physiognomy of races is persistent and hereditary, must be admitted. The truth is verified by every-day experience. We see it in the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, and Scandinavian. The intellectual characteristics of a people are likewise transmitted from generation to generation. The Indian, for example, is ever wild, free, cunning and revengeful. Negroes, on the other hand, are generally timid, garrulous, urbane and polite. The Hebrews, again, are noteworthy for intellectual calibre, the acquisitive faculty, and a clannish spirit.

In the family, likewise, likenesses and stature pass from generation to generation. So, also, of size. Fowler found this exemplified everywhere. Some of his illustrations were taken from the Websters, Franklins, and Folgers. Muscular strength is hereditary, as with the Douglas, Fessenden, and Garrish families. Physical deformities and excrescences obey this edict of nature; and it includes disease, insanity, gray hair, premature death, propensities, length of life and beauty. The truth is overwhelming that mental faculties and qualities descend from child to child. These sequences in mental phenomena operate through generations upon caution, self-esteem, firmness, pride, benevolence, and religious feeling. Talent and ability go by descent. Even genius, although akin to divine, is transmissible. “Each generation,” said Galton, “has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow.... The results of an examination into the kindred of about 400 illustrious men of all periods of history were such, in my own opinion, as completely to establish the theory that genius was hereditary.”

Now for my application. Gambling, in some form, is a propensity of the general mind: an inclination now hereditary in the race. That such must be the case is clear from Ribot, Maudsley and Da Gama Machado. “The dead rule over the living,” writes Spencer. “Past generations exercise power over present generations, by transmitting their nature, bodily and mental.”

The origin and development of gambling were obvious to the eminent astronomer, Richard A. Proctor. “Beyond doubt,” he said, “the element of chance which enters into all lives, has had a most potent influence in moulding the characters of men. If we consider the multitudinous fancies and superstitions of men like sailors, farmers, and hunters, whose lives depend more on chance than those of men in some other employments, and recognize this as the natural effect of the influence which chance has on their fortunes, we need not consider it strange if the influence of chance, in moulding the minds and characters of our ancestors during countless generations, should have produced a very marked effect on human nature. An immense number of those from whom I inherit descent must, in the old savage days, have depended almost wholly upon chance for the very means of subsistence. When, wild in wood, the savage ran, he ran on speculation. He might, or he might not, be lucky enough to earn his living on any day, by a successful chase, or by finding such fruits of the earth as would supply him with a satisfactory amount of food. He might have much depending on chances which he could not avoid risking, as the gambler of to-day has when he ‘sees red’ and stakes his whole fortune on a throw of the dice or a turn of the cards. We cannot be doubtful about the effects of such chance influences even on the individual character. Repeated, generation after generation, they must have tended to fill men with a gambling spirit, only to be corrected by innumerable generations of steady labor; and, unfortunately, even in the steadiest work, the element of chance enters largely enough to render the corrective influence of such work on the character of the race much slower than it might otherwise be. Every man who has to work for his living at all, every man who has to depend in any way, on business for wealth, has to trust to chance, in many respects. So that all men, in some degree, more or less, have their characters modified by this peculiarity of their environment. The inherited tendency of each one of us towards gambling, in some one or other of its multitudinous forms, is undoubtedly strengthened in this way.” First, we see, it cannot be said that gambling is immoral, sinful, or irreligious. Second, it is clear the propensity to gamble is as natural as the temperament or complexion. The law can no more destroy the natural inclination of the mind, than it can make “one hair white or black.” If an evil (which in the absolute sense I deny), it is not to be prevented by legislation. It is no more possible, by direct effort, to change the gaming proclivity in man than to stem the torrent, or check the eternal progress of the glacier. The growth of centuries, down it moves through the years in an irresistible march. Absurd seem all our demonstrations; how idle, the beating of the air. When one form passes away another immediately takes its place. Disappearing here, it appears there. Apparently suppressed in one place it breaks out with more vigor in another. Continue it will, and continue it must, whether practiced openly or in secret. If it is not the faro-bank or lottery it is something worse. If not the gambling-rooms of a Morrissey, a Daly, a Pendleton or a Hankins, it will be the mammoth palaces (boards of trade and chambers of commerce, so-called), which now are a feature of every city in Christendom, and wherein millions upon millions are wagered annually upon the very bread and meat wherewith our life is sustained; wherein billions are lost and won, sometimes to the injury of every department of actual production. There are the open boards of trade, too, wherein the petty transactions aggregate many millions. I am told by those who have made it a study for years, that more than 80 per cent of the transactions on the exchange are fictitious: mere betting on the rise and fall of commodities in price. All authority in this matter is practically powerless. Inclinations will be satisfied, and until inclinations change, the demand will be supplied; this, moreover, in the face of laws however stringent, or police supervision however effective. Such methods are not only ineffective, but absolutely injurious to society. No nation or government has succeeded in restricting, limiting, or curing the gambling spirit and practice. That this is true, I call upon every candid and fair-minded man of experience to bear witness. I appeal to lawyers, judges, statesmen, scientists, philosophers, and the police and municipal authorities throughout the United States and Europe to corroborate my statement. The sooner this is generally realized, the better for humanity. What I have to suggest, instead of the present policy, is reserved for consideration in another place. I may say here, however, that for the law to punish what it cannot thereby cure is absurd—absurd as is every attempt to accomplish the impossible. Systematic education is the only hope; incessant training the only remedy for appetites and propensities; either for their correction, restraint, or subversion. If it had been revealed to man that gambling is a sin, even that would not vitiate our reasoning in this chapter. God, or absolute wisdom, should be able to reconcile the existence of an evil with His own Sovereignty. However, this chapter is not concerned with the realities of religion, or the true principles of philosophy. As human conceptions, they have been noted as in accord with the teachings of science; to show that the human intellect responds intuitively to what are subsequently known as the laws of nature.