Quote of the Day: Mark Twain, Determinist

"Your mind is merely a machine, nothing more. You have no command over it, it has no command over itself--it is worked solely from the outside. That is the law of its make; it is the law of all machines." - Mark Twain, What is Man?

On the whole, Twain’s interests reveal a predominantly materialistic conception of the universe. These interests and this conception, in conjunction with Twain’s devout sense of morality, may account for what is often perceived to be a cynical, deterministic, and solipsistic worldview, and for Twain’s tendency, in his later writing, to reduce immoral deeds and personal tragedies to explainable and unavoidable phenomena.-Mark Twain’s Writing During his Last Twenty Years: The Conflicts of a Moralist