are formed by the opinions of others; but the way he looks at things, his attitude to life). It is influenced by whether he is poor or rich, by the job he has, whether he goes to church, whether he can relax in the pub. In short, his outlook on life is changing subtly the whole time from the day he is born to the day he dies; indeed, when one speaks in conversation of a person growing up, one means much more the extent to which his outlook has become mature, than whether his physical development is complete. Unfortunately, however, a man's consciousness can become corrupted; and indeed this is the fate that overwhelms most men before they die.
Before dealing with this even in outline, it is necessary to introduce the reader to an elderly but very respectable gentleman: Laplace's infinitely patient mathematician. Laplace imagined the mathematician sitting in the position of God, and able to look down on mortal man and see all the causes which had brought the man to where he was, and all the consequences which might flow from those causes. Laplace then postulated that the mathematician would be able to predict what the actual consequences for the man would be. Put more simply, and in analytical language, it amounts to this; if every event has a cause, then what a man does, however much he thinks that it is the voluntary decision of his free-will, is actually always caused by what has gone before. In a world in which science has shown (to most people's satisfaction) that “cause and effect” is the rule over most of creation, and in which the Church is fighting a pathetic rearguard action with medieval weapons against the bristling armaments of modern technology, there does not seem to be much place for free-will. Nor is it any good our saying, “We know we have free-will”; because many of the things we believe are in fact illusions. The monarchy may only be a fairy-tale, with which we are fed for its political convenience; and yet most of the thinking adult members of the population, if they were to meet the Queen, would behave…