But let the professor once forget his theories, and be forced to buffet against his life's importunate and stern realities: let him quarrel with his housekeeper because she has mislaid his spectacles, or his night-cap, or, preoccupied with her bible, has not mixed his gruel properly; and his conception of free-will will revert in an instant to the universal type, and the good woman will discern only too plainly that her master's convictions as to it are precisely the same things as her own.
Everywhere, indeed, in all the life that surrounds us--in the social and moral judgments on which the fabric of society has reared itself, in the personal judgments on which so much depends in friendship and antipathies--everywhere, in conduct, in emotion, in art, in language, and in law, we see man's common belief in will written, broad, and plain, and clear.

There is, perhaps, no belief to which, for practical purposes, he attaches so important and so plain a meaning.
Such is free-will when looked at from a distance.

But let us look at it more closely, and see what happens then.

The result is strange.

Like a path seen at dusk across a moorland, plain and visible from a distance, but fading gradually from us the more near we draw to it, so does the belief in free-will fade before the near inspection of reason.