Critics of the scientific world view fling around the words ‘determinist’ and ‘materialist’. The words drip with negative connotations. For Victorians, the words connoted a damnable philosophy which it was hardly necessary to spell out: usage pointed the finger at people who would constrain and diminish humanity, if not God, by declaring limits to what the human spirit can hope for and what it can do. In sharp contrast, the nineteenth-century promoters of science pointed to the control, the human benefit, which knowledge of causes and effects brings: subjection to the natural order is the condition of possibility for human order. Victorian fears and hopes have re-appeared a century later as the neurosciences take their self-proclaimed march across the continent of human self-understanding.

Running through all this was, and is, the question of free will, which the Victorian psychologist Alexander Bain referred to as ‘the jungle of Free-will and Necessity’. The very notion of free will is problematic, and, I shall argue, it is necessary to understand the notion in context, intellectual and social, not to seek abstract definitions.