A breakable command and an unbreakable causal order
We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them.
The opening definition uses ‘law’ in the sense of a command that can be disobeyed. Earlier in this chapter, Cinderella's deadline supplies the model: a condition binds her conduct without making departure or disobedience physically impossible. Calling that a ‘real law’ deliberately privileges moral prescription over the descriptive ‘laws’ of science. It does not establish that these two uses of the word are interchangeable. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, IV.
A nineteenth-century determinist had already disputed the inference from causation to helplessness. In A System of Logic (first published 1843), Mill holds that motives and character determine conduct, yet that a person's wish to resist temptation or reform character can itself help cause a different action. The inspected seventh edition (1868), VI.ii, §§2–3, rejects a coercive bond between cause and effect and distinguishes self-formation from fatalistic resignation. Mill even concedes that necessitarians often feel the discouragement Chesterton describes. Mill, VI.ii, pp. 418–424.
The disagreement therefore concerns what freedom requires. Chesterton treats determination as excluding the freedom he values; Mill preserves deliberation and moral effort within a causal account. On Mill's terms, breaking a command need not break a natural law. His position challenges Chesterton's inference, without proving that Chesterton must accept this conception of freedom.
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