Now, whether or not nerve-cells have power to form new association fibres late in life, it is important to notice that the association fibres which exist at birth or form in childhood are the means by which one idea suggests another; and the means by which, as I said just now, upon the utterance of the word "wine" all we have remembered to have read or heard about wine is repeated by the memory "record."
And, just as a phonograph record can only repeat the song or speech that is printed upon it, so the memory can only repeat what it contains, and it contains nothing that has not been printed there through the medium of the senses.
That is why the word "marriage" carries with it no moral revulsion against polygamy in the mind of a Turk. The brain of a Turk has no "record" on its grey matter of any moral teaching against polygamy. And the "still small voice" does not make good the absence of the "record," and tell him that polygamy is wrong. This being so, what becomes of the theory that conscience is a mysterious agent of God implanted in the mind of man to guide him to do right and to shun wrong?
A cannibal chief was told by a missionary that it was wicked to have two wives. He went away and ate one wife. The missionary had printed on his brain "record" the lesson that to have two wives was wrong; but there was no "record" there to tell him he must not kill one wife and eat her.
Where was the "still small voice," the "divine guide to right conduct"?
CHAPTER TEN—FREE WILL
THE free will delusion has been a stumbling block in the way of human thought for thousands of years. Let us try whether common sense and common knowledge cannot remove it.
Free will is a subject of great importance to us in this case; and it is one we must come to with our eyes wide open and our wits wide awake; not because it is very difficult, but because it has been tied and twisted into a tangle of Gordian knots by twenty centuries full of wordy but unsuccessful philosophers, The free will party claim that man is responsible for his acts, because his will is free to choose between right and wrong.