dramatic instinct was uncontrollable and had to be expressed. The
Archdeacon read the book, and was naturally furious. If he could
have been in any way convinced of his errors, which may be doubted,
to publish an account of them was not the best way to begin.
Reconciliation had been made impossible, and Anthony was left to his
own devices. His miscellaneous reading was not checked by an
ordination which imposed no duties. Goethe sent him to Spinoza, a
"God-intoxicated man," and a philosophical genius, but not a pillar
of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. Vestiges of Creation, which had
appeared in 1844, woke Oxford to the discovery that physical science
might have something to say about the origin, or at least the
growth, of the universe. The writer, Robert Chambers, whose name was
not then known, so far anticipated Darwin that he dispensed with the
necessity for a special creation of each plant and animal. He did
not, any more than Darwin, attack the Christian religion, and he did
not really go much farther than Lucretius. But he had more modern
lights, he understood science, and he wrote in a popular style. He
made a lively impression upon Froude, who learnt from him that
natural phenomena were due to natural causes, at the same time that
he acquired from Spinoza a disbelief in the freedom of the will.
When Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, we know that the will is free, and
there's an end on't," he did not understand the question. We all
know that the will is free to act. But is man free to will? If
everything about a man were within our cognisance, we could predict
his conduct in given circumstances as certainly as a chemist can
foretell the effect of mixing an acid with an alkali. I have no
intention of expressing any opinion of my own upon this subject. The
important thing is that Froude became in the philosophic sense a
Determinist, and his conviction that Calvin was in that respect the
best philosopher among theologians strengthened his attachment to