FREE-WILL AND DETERMINISM RECONCILED

Whether man is governed by free will or determinism, is an ancient, long-troubling question, deemed to be circuitous and casuistic. Actually, it is not an "either-or" question. Mankind is both. I draw this inference from a study of music's affects of Congo Pygmies and Montreal musicians (below) which concluded: "People have been trying to figure out for quite a while whether the way that we react to music is based on the culture that we come from or on some universal features of the music itself," says Stephen McAdams, from McGill's Schulich School of Music. "Now we know that it is actually a bit of both." Thus, by analogy therefore, mankind is both free-will and determinism in one.