Body and will : being an essay concerning will in its metaphysical, physiological, and pathological aspects

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BODY AND WILL

BODY AND WILL

BBINO

AN ESSAY CONCERNING WILL

IN ITS

METAPHYSICAL, PHYSIOLOGICAL, AND PATHOLOGICAL

ASPECTS

BT

HENEY MAUDSLEY, M. D.

AUTHOB OP

" BODY AND MIMD," " PHYSIOLOGY OT THE MUTO," " PATHOLOQT OF THE MIND,"
" BESP0N8IBILITT DT MENTAL DISEASE "

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

1, 8, AND 5 BOND STEEET
1884

If9

A^ /oy'^Lf

v,

'^ORNELl^

UNiVE

n^i I Y;

^LJBR

PEEFACE.

This essay has had its beginnings ia lectures and addresses
which I have given on different occasions during the last
ten years ; the themes of which were Conscience and Organi-
sation, the Physical Basis of Will, Lessons of Materialism,
and the like. The design, entertained vaguely for some time,
of collecting them into a book was abandoned, because it was
evident that the treatment of the subject in that loose way
would not be sufiBciently concise and methodical, or indeed
adequate. Thereupon this essay on Will in its metaphysical,
physiological, and pathological relations was undertaken, in
order to have unity of subject and to treat it systematically
and with more pretence to completeness. The freedom of
a spiritual will being the stronghold of a metaphysical
psychology, there can be no accusation of evading difficul-
ties when that is selected as test-subject of the value of
the doctrines arrived at by the positive method of observation
and induction. If the method fails there, its fundamental
incompetence must be frankly admitted.

I am not ignorant that those who are adepts in the schools
of high mental philosophy may think the essay to be a weak
intrusion into their high domains ; for I must confess to being
unable to use their language with a satisfactory sense of
having clear and definite ideas beneath its terms, to having
no proper faith in their methods, and to having failed to
gather from their works fruits of any practical use. From

VI PEEFACE,

their standpoint they may be satisfied to dismiss it as of no
philosophical concern to them. Its justification from my
standpoint is, that I have been engaged all my life in dealing
with mind in its concrete human embodiments, and that in
order to find out why individuals feel, think, and do as they
do, how they may be actuated to feel, think, and do differently,
and in what way best to deal with them so as to do one's
duty to oneself and to them, I have had no choice but to
leave the barren heights of speculation for the plains on.
which men live and move and have their being. It is not
enough to think and talk about abstract minds and their
qualities when you have to do with concrete minds that
must be observed, studied, and managed.

The essay will not be in vain if it serve to bring home
to mental philosophers the necessity of taking serious account
of a class of facts and thoughts which, though they are not
philosophy, may claim not to be ignored by philosophy.
After all, it will not be labour lost, since they may well spare
a little time from their work of saying over and over again,
in different and not always clearer language, what was
said more than two thousand years ago, and of diligently
endeavouring to do now by the same method what men of
not less philosophical aptitudes and capacities failed to do
then.

CONTENTS.

PART I.
WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

SECTrOX PAGE

I. The Theoet of Fkeewill and its Difficulties . . ].

If. What CoNsciousNEas tellb us concbbnino Will . . 15

nr. CONCEENING THE AtJTHOEITT OF CONSCIOUSNESS . . . 3fi

IV. The Positive Assurance of Consciousness . . . 56

V. The Physical Basis of Conscious Identity .... 71

VI. Concluding Ebflbctions . . 87

PART 11.

WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL, SOCIAL. AND
EVOLUTIONAL RELATIONS.

I. Its Physiological Basis ... .... 99

ir. CONCEENING THE NOTION OP NECESSITY 123

III. Involution and Evolution ... . . 128

IV. Mental Evolution and the Social Medium . . . . 149
V. The Social Fusion of Egoisms 163

VI. The Cobecing Fobces of Social Union 175

VII. Ceetain Mental Peoducts of Evolution . . . .184

VUi CONTENTS.

PAET III.
WILL IN ITS PATHOLOGICAL RELATIONS.

SECTION PAQB

L Concerning Dbgbnebation 237

n. CONGBNITAI/ DBFICIBNCB OB ABSENCE OF MOEAL FeEI/ING

AND Will '. . 243

III. Degeneration of Moral Feeling and Will in Disease . 257

IV. The Moral Sense and Will in Criminals . . ■ . 276
V. Disorders of Will in Mental Derangement . . . 283

VI. The Disintegrations of the ' Ego ' 301

VII. What avill be the End thereof? 317

CONCEKNING WILL.

PAKT I.
WILL IF ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

SECTION I.

THE THEOET OP FEEEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES.

In certain rural districts it is the custom to speak of a child
that has been born out of wedlock as a ' chance- child,' and of
its mother as having had a ' misfortune ; ' not that any one
really believes the living event to have come by chance, in
violation of ordinary law, without conceivable cause, but it
is an indirect way of intimating that it ought not rightly to
have come, and that it is not certain who has been concerned
in the begetting of it. One may compare this way of speak-
ing of a natural event to that used by many of the advocates
of the freedom of the will, who are accustomed to speak of an
act of will as if it were a chance-event ; thereby meaning, or
persuading themselves they mean, not that some part of the
will, its inmost essence, is outside the reach of present ex-
planation, but that it is actually outside the order of natural
causation : that will is essentially a self-procreating, self-
sustaining spiritual entity, which owns no natural cause,
obeys not law, and has no sort of affinity with matter. An
immaterial entity in a material world, the events of which
it largely determines — such the signal and singular position
claimed for it.

2 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

I'or the most part those who uphold a power of this kind,
self-determined and self -determining, free not merely to act
but to he, do not go so far as to say that motives are not at
work continually in the mind, or that the will takes no
account of them ; what they do earnestly protest is, that in
the motivation of will there is not the uniform, inseparable
connection between motive and wiU which there is between
cause and effect in physical nature. In the internal world
of mind there is the self-consciousness of a freedom that
is not perceivable nor conceivable in the external world of
matter : the particular wiU is not the unconditionally
necessary consequent of antecedent motives. It, or some
allied entity in the individual, which, having abstracted it
virtually from the concrete self, they call his non-bodily self,
has a spontaneous, independent, arbitrary power to make
this or that motive preponderate as it pleases, to choose this
or that one among motives and to make it the motive ; in
doing which the self-determining principle is held by some
to act without motive, of its own internal motion, without
other cause or reason than pure self-evolution ; by others,
however, who think it not self-sufBcing enough to dispense
entirely with motives, to take remote account only of motives
of so high and superlatively refined a nature that they do
not weigh at all upon its freedom, insinuating themselves
into its essence without actuating it, permeating and inspir-
ing it without in the least constraining it.

It would seem a small matter whether such exceedingly
subtile and highly sublimed motives are admitted or not ;
since, so far as there is the assumption of a kind of power,
little or much, fine or coarse, which is above the reach of
actuating motives and able nevertheless to work as it likes
upon motives, absolutely free and independent in that func-
tion, we are no whit better off than if we assumed off-hand
an arbitrary, self-determining power which could do entirely

without motives. The initial difficulty is the capital one

namely, the conception, in any degree, of a power in nature
so extraordinary, coming from an unknown without, having
no genesis but an auto-genesis, deriving its subsequent
energy from nothing but itself, subject to no laws of growth,

THE THEOEY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 3

though manifestly growing in the individual with his mental
growth ; a power which, notwithstanding that it works as a
part of nature, is not of the same kind nor has anything in
common with anything else there — is without sympathy,
affinity, or relationship with the things which it works in
and upon. It is not entirely right to describe it as super-
natural since it thus works naturally and constantly in the
events of the world : supernatural it is in tlie primal source
and perpetual renewal of its energy, inscrutably unnatural
in the mode of its union with the natural.

If there be a power of this kind in the universe, the
obvious and instant reflection is that causation is not uni-
versal, as all the world is in the habit of thinking and say-
ing ; that there is a large region of human events which lies
outside the otherwise uniform law of cause and effect. It is
a conclusion which cannot be evaded ; for to say that events
depend upon the will, and in their capacity of events are
natural, and not to ask at all upon what their cause depends
when it is will, may be lawful and right in pui-e metaphysics,
but would be disastrous foUy in physics. Were the conclu-
sion rigorously admitted it would be necessary to repudiate
all attempts to foresee, formulate, or reckon upon human
events in so far as they are effects of will ; for how reduce
to laws phenomena which are the workings of a power that
is itself above the reach of natural law ? Unawares we find
ourselves drifted by the theory into the startling necessity
of supposing that the sum of energy in the universe is not a
constant quantity ; that the law of conservation of energy,
though a most useful work-a-day theory, is at bottom an
illusive hypothesis even within the limits of human experi-
ence ; that there are now, and have been since creation's dawn,
countless myriads of sources of self-creating energy which
have poured their multitudinous streams into it continually.
Creation of energy without end, infinite effect without cause !
The great natural argument for the existence of God has
always been that everything within human cognisance must
have a cause, such being the necessity of human thought, \
and that for final cause of all things, except itself, there
must be a cause of causes, a great First Cause. What then

4 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT,

of the will ? We are brought at the outset to a perplexing
dilemma — to the obligation of confessing either that the
vdll, like every other mode of natural energy, must have a
cause, or that a great First Cause is not a necessity of human
thought.

In truth, we are tacitly to understand that it has a cause
— namely, the will of God, inciting or restraining. Although
not governed by motives and without any touch of earthly
affinity, the upholders of a free will acknowledge willingly
that it is wrought upon continually and effectively by that
supernatural energy. A Divine grace is always at hand to
give it help in time of need, inspiring and strengthening it
to do well, dissuading or withholding it from doing ill. It is
God's good purpose, says that learned divine, Dr. Isaac
Barrow, ' to master our will, and to make us surrender and
resign it to His just, wise, and gracious will ; ' and to make
good His right ' God bendeth all His forces and applieth all
His means, both of sweetness and severity, persuading us by
arguments, soliciting us by entreaties, alluring us by fair
promises, scaring us by fierce menaces, indulging ample
benefits to us, working in and upon us by secret influences
of grace, by visible dispensations of providence.' A stu-
pendous array of motives, which it is a standing wonder
any one ever withstands, seeing that they are wielded by the
power of Omnipotence and guided by the insight of Omnisci-
ence. The odd and perplexing thing is that we are required
to believe that the operation of these mighty agencies is
nowise incompatible with the perfect freedom of the will,
which indeed is supposed to be most free when it has sur-
rendered itself to entire obedience. No doubt when it has thus
made an entire surrender of itself, and become, so to speak,
the pure channel of the Divine will, it is of the same holy
kind, one with it, truly God in man ; and without doubt, too,
it is then at its best estate, most free, since it has reached in
the completest discharge of its possible functions the fullest
perfection of which its individual nature is capable ; but
with all that it is not easy to understand how it can be said
to be free in the sense of not being determined. The free-
dom of the fullest expression of energy belonging to the

THE THEOEY OF EEBEWILL AND ITS DIEFICULTIE3. 6

highest nature of a thing is intelligible ; the freedom of an
energy from any mode of determination is not intelligible to
human apprehension, which apprehends only under the
category of causation. Instinctively urged by this difiBculty
the theologians have found it necessary to call in the will of
God as supreme determinant. Perhaps, however, they
might maintain, if challenged directly and pressed to answer,
that the high intuitions of consciousness are not fettered to
apprehend under the category of causation.

So it has come to pass that, accepting the doctrine of
invariable law in the physical world, they hold that the spirit
of man stands above such physical laws and ' can co-operate
with God Himself.' They believe that they can by such
Divine co-operation fetter and so ennoble their wills, until
they are finally delivered from the melancholy liberty of
doing evil, and placed nnder the happy necessity of doing
well. So believing, their consistent prayer is the prayer
of Malebranche to be delivered from the fatal liberty of
doing wrong,' and to feel themselves in the grasp of the
hand of God, which will never let them go.'' The highest
evolution of freewill is freely to lose its freedom. Nor is
this to be deemed, as to vulgar apprehension it might seem,
a contradiction in terms, or the use of one term to negate
the definite meaning of another, and so to leave both with
the appearance of life in them but with all meaning taken out
of them; rather it is to have the deep metaphysical sense of a
mystical union of gaping inconsistencies or of actual contra-
dictories which reaches its climax in the identification of
opposites. In this relation, however, it will not be amiss to
remember, by way of caution, that many persons do not
thoroughly consider whether they distinctly know their own
meaning, but deceive themselves in imagining that they
have any distinct meaning at all ; and that of the two issues

■ Sauveur des p^chenrs, venez me dyivrer de cette fatale liberty que j'ai
de mal faire, de la certitude du p6ch6, de ce pouvoir que je n'ai que trop
d'abuser du mouvement que Dieu ne me donne que pour m'Sever jusqu'a lui.
— Malebranche, Meditations ChrHiennes.

' 'The devout man,' says Foster, in his essay on JTaiit in BeUgiout
Character, 'feels this confirmed habit as the grasp of the hand of God,
which will never let him go.'

6 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

— first, that opposites are identical ; secondly, tliat meaning-
less propositions are made — the latter is the more probable.

The consistent advocates of the Divine inspiration of
the truly free -will used at one time to make large appeal to
the will of the Devil, who worked through the evil desires and
passions with which he inspired human breasts. Presumably
there was a perfect construction of the brain in the first man,
and for that reason there was no let or hindrance to an entire
obedience of the perfect will in him to the perfect will of
God ; but unhappily injury was done to this excellent struc-
ture by the fall in Eden, and so the arch-enemy of mankind
gained admission and made his congenial home there. They
recognised justly, as moralists have always done, the existence
of a double nature in, fallen man — the higher and the lower
nature, the spirit and the flesh, the good and the bad angel
in him, the old Adam and the new creature — in like manner
as they recognised two principles, a good and an evil one,
warring always against one another in the outer world ; and
the Devil they acknowledged to be the lord of the part of
man's nature the inclinations of which were evilwards.
' Doth Job serve God for naught ? ' cynically asks Satan,
deeply sensible of the influence of motives upon the will to
make it do well; and in the operation of the successive
motives, each weighing more heavily, which he brings to
bear upon Job in order to make him curse God, he affords us
an illustration of the way in which he works upon the wUl
to make it do ill. But it was plainly necessary, on the theory
of a Devil always at work to beleaguer and besiege the
citadel of human virtue, to limit his power, as God limited
it in the interesting psychological experiment which in a
caprice of freewill he suffered him to make upon Job •
otherwise what would have become of human freedom?
Had man been left under the melancholy necessity of doing
evU, where would have been the happy liberty of loving God
and of doing that which was right in His sight ?

It was necessary that the Devil should have not un-
limited power, but full power only to work his worst within
fixed bounds; first, because he was in the ultimate event
controlled by Divine power, who hath put all things under

THE THEORY OF PREEWILL AKD ITS DIFFICULTIES. 7

Him, and without wliom was nothing made that is made —
not excepting the Devil and his deeds — and who (according
to the Westminster Confession of Faith) has for ' the mani-
festation of His glory predestinated some men and angels
unto everlasting life and preordained others to everlasting
death, to the praise of His glorious justice ; ' and, secondly,
because He wrought through the passions and other low
impulses of the human heart, which, by the antecedent
postulate as to the will's nature, could not cross the inter-
vening gulf to touch its inmost self-determining essence. It
would be well could we have it plainly expounded some-
where why this inmost spiritual essence, being untouched by
earthly affection or hindrance, unswayed by motive, accessi-
ble only to Divine influence, absolutely free to do as it likes,
at any rate in the way of well-doing, does not like to rule as
it might ; but it is a problem which is suffered to remain
as obscure as the question why the pure essence can
habitually and easily cross the gulf between itself and the
physical organism, when the gulf is quite impassable in the
opposite direction. However that may be, it is plain that
we have no means by which we can measure and register the
quantity and kind of energy which the Devil exerts upon
the will within the bounds set to his operations — no workable
Diabolometer or Satanometer so to speak — and that we have
here again a large region of human events which is outside
the natural law of causation, and therefore outside the range
of scientific knowledge ; a region, moreover, of quite unknown
extent, seeing that it is impossible to define its limits or to
get them defined. Apart, then, from the disturbing and
undefinable operations of an undetermined will in human
events, we have the disturbing and undefinable operations of
will determined by diabolic power. Meanwhile, if we are
really to think of freedom as absolute and perfect in man — a
perfect freedom from the necessity of any antecedence — we
ought logically to think of it as free from all influence of
God or Devil, as will, that is, in which the Omnipresent is
not present and the Omnipotent has no power.

Notwithstanding these theories of a will that is itself
an inexhaustible source of self -procreating energy and of acts

8 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

of will instigated by supernatural agency, men have always
conducted practical life on an implicit theory of a quite
opposite nature ; they have lived and acted in all places and
at all times and on all occasions as if the will were governed
by natural motives, and as if its operations could be reckoned
upon with some assurance. The dogma of freewill has been
a cherished dogma of the study, but it has not imbued the
regulations made for the conduct of life; exalted and
esteemed as a theoretical article of faith, it has not been used
as a working belief in human affairs ; an ideal of the imagi-
nation inspired by the heart, it has had no place in the work
of the practical understanding. When it has been neces-
sary so to train men as to be able to rely upon their conduct
with certitude in the most arduous circumstances, they have
been subjected to stern discipline by the rigid enforcement
of uniform motives ; and accordingly the military organisa-
tion affords the best example of a case in which, the exact
nature and number of the motives being known, their opera-
tion on will is plainly shown and confidently counted on. Were
the motives as definite and as exactly known in every other
case, and their secret operations through their manifold
indirect, subtile and circuitous paths traced with equal
plainness, is it not likely that a similar uniformity would
be made known ?

Laws have been made from the earliest times and punish-
ments inflicted systematically upon lawbreakers under the
tacit implication that will is not an undetermined power, but
that it may be influenced by motive to act in this way or
that. The execution of a murderer would be of no use as a
warning to likeminded evildoers had they the freedom of will
not to be moved by the example ; the aim and use of punish-
ment are to determine the ill-disposed will from the direction
of wrong-doing and to constrain it to take the path of a higher
and freer development in well-doing. And that has plainly
been the slow effect of the administration of laws upon the
conscience of mankind through the ages ; necessary in the
first instance to constrain moral action, and by repetition so
in the course of generations to ingrain the habit of it as a
moral feeling, they become unnecessary as determinants in

THE THEOEY OF FREEWILL AND ITS DIEFICULTIES. 9

well-constituted beings, once tlie sense of right and wrong
has become instinct in their natures. In such case the
reasoned object fades out of sight, and the operation becomes
immediate and instinctive ; it is an instance of use-made
nature such as is seen everywhere in the transformation of
laborious conscious into easy automatic function. Moral de-
velopment of the individual is a growth of wiU in the line of
good motive, moral deterioration a growth of wUl in the line
of bad motive. The progress of mankind from lower to
higher planes of thought, feeling and doing is the record of
better action founded on and guided by wiser insight, and of
the development of better feeling in consequence : higher
feeling has followed improved thinking and acting, and so
the quality of the will has been raised.

No one disputes that a knowledge of the past actions of
men in different situations and circumstances of life is the
foundation of a knowledge of the springs of human action on
which we rely in our present and count in our future dealings
with them. The study of history would be a barren labour
if the operations of a self-determining entity left no room
for dependence upon the determining effects of motives, nor
would the most sagacious statesman in that case be any
better off in the functions of government, notwithstanding
a lifelong experience, than a fool. In every department of
human activity the person who has had experience is
esteemed a wiser guide than the new comer, because of the
certitude that the thoughts and acts of men ai-e not in any
respect chance-events, but that what they have done before
they will do again when actuated by similar motives in
similar circumstances. The systematic provisions made for
the education and training of the young — which are really
means to manufacture them to an approved pattern by im-
planting in them the customary habits of thinking, feeling
and willing of the community — social institutions and
usages, forethought and skill in the conduct of affairs, all
the operations of daily life in the intercourse of sane men
are based upon the tacit implication that acts of will are
not motiveless and haphazard, but conform to law and
may be counted upon. Do T submit a dispute to an im-
2

10 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

partial judge ia the full assurance of having justice done to
me, I do it because I believe that he will decide according
to well-weighed reasons of law, and because I do not believe
in the hazard of his freewill. If a person of acknowledged
probity and of known purity of life were suddenly to do
something grossly immoral, and it were impossible to
discover any motive for his strange and aberrant deed, we
should ascribe it to an alienation of nature, and say that
he must be mad. Let the will be free in the full meta-
physical sense of the word, and it would be impossible to
run an express train from London to York or to cross the
Atlantic in a steamboat with the least assurance of safety.
Did not men in some measure foresee the acts of their fellows
from a knowledge of the operations of motives in their minds,
they would have to await them in helpless uncertainty, as
they await the decrees of the will of God.

The person who answers best, who alone answers near,
to the metaphysical definition of freewill is the madman,
since he exults in the most vivid sense of freedom and power,
heeds not any counsels of reason, and does things which he
does not himself foresee or meditate a moment beforehand,
and which certainly no one can foretell ; if it be not that, he
acts without motives, he acts from motives of which he is
not conscious, and which no other person can penetrate.
Consciousness plays him an ill trick ; for while he is really
the least free of men, irresponsible, his disease not he
instigating his deeds, it inspires an intense and exulting
conviction of the highest freedom. Is it not obvious that if
sane men possessed free wills, they, like the madman, would
be free from responsibility, since their wills would act in-
dependently of their characters, just as they listed — not
otherwise than as a wayward wind was once supposed to
blow capriciously ' where it listeth ' — and that no one would
have much, if any, motive left to try to better his character?
For why take diligent thought and pains to build up good
motives into the structure of a character, and to reject bad
motives, if he be subject to the chance of a freewill which
need take no account of them ? Consider this difficulty : if
there be complete equilibrium, a perfect indiiTerence, there

THE THEORY OF FKEEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 11

will be no-decision ; if a decision in equilibrium, the fact is
inconsistent with any essential connection between chai-acter
and action.

No deep attention to their writings is needed to discover
that the moral and religious authors who nurse the most
fervent conviction of freewill, and reject passionately the
notion of necessity in human actions, do nevertheless use
language hahitually which is imbued with the implication
of determination, containing it, as it were, by silent involu-
tion.' Indeed, it is impossible for them to help it : the fact
is embodied in all the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, even
the modes of sensibility, of mankind, and in the inmost
texture of the language by which expression is given to them ;
for such thoughts, feelings, and words are possible to any
individual now by virtue only of the law-governed acquisi-
tions, the experience-built mental structure, of an infinite
succession of generations of men. The exquisitely nice and
fine movements which we perform in each act of seeing or
hearing, without being in the least aware of them, represent
the sum of an incalculable multitude of slowly elaborated
experiences that have been organised as faculties or func-
tions : they are virtually unconscious reasonings. Our intui-
tion of space may well be in like manner the consolidations
of an infinite succession of human experiences that defi-
nite movements on our part have always definite and
uniform results which, when making thera, we can definitely
reckon on.

Be that so or not, however, there is not a word we utter,
not a movement we make, not a sensation we experience,
not a tool we make use of, not an article of clothing we
wear, that has not the same far-reaching significance. Our
forefathers, by intending their minds to realities, have
established a harmony of thought with external nature
which is a pre-established harmony in our nature. ' Oblige
me with a light ' is a trivial favour which one man begs and
obtains of another, hardly deeming that he is asking a favour

' To say that the will chooses which motives to reject, and which to accept,
what i-i that but to imply that it cannot act from the motives that it rejects,
and must act in accordance with the motives tliat it accepts ?

12 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

at all ; and yet if we consider tlie matter closely, and unfold
the constitutional history of the event, so to speak, the request
has stupendous contents ; for what a long succession of toils
and troubles, ingenuities and endeavours, trials and failures,
accidental hits and misses of experiment, tedious steps of
improvement it implies from the time when fire had not yet
eeen discovered to the time — only some fifty years ago —
when the lucifer match was invented ! Before the person
who asks the little fkvour exerts his freewill to ask it he
ought to make a sort of silent recognition of the successive
ages of human culture to the fruits of whose labours he is a
joyful heir. Happy for him that they did not content them-
selves with capricious freaks of freewill, beginning nowhere
and ending nowhere, but with many halting experiments,
with slowly gained insight and tedious labour, patiently
making each toilsome step gained the basis of new efforts to
reach a higher step, multiplied their relations with nature,
and brought themselves into ever-widening and closer
harmony with the order thereof ; so endowing him with a
large capital of silent wisdom to start with, with the
capacities of definite desires to urge him in the directions of
progress, and with built up faculties of will to execute his
desires.

To set forth explicitly in formal knowledge what is im-
plicit in the whole course and conduct of human life would
unquestionably be the exposition of a system of philosophy
in which a self-determining principle had no place — in which
a free, in the sense of an undetermined, will would be a
meaningless superfluity. But is it not the fact that know-
ledge has its foundation in experience, and is the conscious
exposition of what is unconsciously implied in human pro-
gress; that it exists in fact before it is self-conscious in
thought ? Implicit in action before it is explicit in formal
thought, it grows out of the twilight of instinct into the
daylight of clear consciousness ; nay, perhaps we must go
deeper than instinct, into the complete darkness of vital
relations, in order to reach the foundations of that which
we know self-consciously as reason. , It is proposed nowa-
days to get a sound and substantial knowledge of the laws

THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AND ITS BIFFICULTIES. 13

of thought bj a careful study of its genesis ; the purpose is
good, but it cannot plainly be accomplished by a method of
introspection, which will never take us back to the be-
ginnings, since the faculty of it comes to maturity only
when thought has reached a high development. Is it then
by a sympathetic study of the mental phenomena of animals
and infants that we shall succeed better ? It is a method
of much fruitful promise, but at the same time inadequate
and apt to be misleading, since we are unable to enter into
the comparative simplicity of their minds with a corre-
sponding simplicity of mind, and so are apt to misread and
misinterpret the signs that we observe ; and in the best
event it is not sufficing, since it starts a long way from the
actual genesis. Only by a close objective study of the un-
conscious operations of thought-generating organic matter
shall we ever attend at the birth of thought. Find out the
laws of adaptive interaction, in their simplest expression, of
that organic matter which, when its energies rise above the
horizon of consciousness, we call reason, and you will arrive
at the foundation-facts of the highest thought. So far as the
Amoeba reasons — and reason unconsciously it does in so far
as it makes vital adaptations to its surroundings — it exhibits
the principle of that which in its more complex evolution in
the brains of the higher animals and of man is reason.

By a study of the operations of intelligence in its highest
developments we perceive a reverse operation that brings us
to the same physical result — namely, to reason become habit
or instinct, that is to say, to reason incorporate in structure.
The simplest proposition we can make — as, for example,
that the dog barks — which seems neither to need nor to
admit analysis, means actually the consolidation of as many
laborious acquisitions as an habitual act which looks equally
simple, since we perform it without knowing it, but which
we have learnt only by long practice. Each simple affirma-
tion or judgment which has itself been acquired gradually
and fixed mentally, becomes, by association, an accessory
idea of, and afterwards, by closer integration, an unconscious
element of, a more complex judgment ; and so the process
goes on in ascending complexity to the formation of a

14 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPEC3T.

mental compound which means a great many simpler com-
pounds or elements. We might compare it then to a grand
and noble river which, when traced back to its source in a
little rill, is seen to have grown by the successive inflows of
many similar little streams.

We think so much of consciousness in the functions of
human intelligence that we do not suificiently realise how
much the body can do without it, but insist wrongly on
making it essential to operations in which it has really no
essential concern. Men do not divine truth and then work
to it with set deliberation : they reasoned during centuries
before they knew a single rule of logic; made instinctive
and traditional adaptations to natural laws before general-
ising about them; used language instinctively without
dreaming that it was a slow elaboration through the ages,
embodying the successive growths of intelligence ; practised
virtue as a custom before a single rule of virtue was ever
formulated. Indeed, had not man been virtuous before he
found out rules of virtue he would never have been virtuous
at all. Knowledge is instinct in life before it is under-
standiug, is in the air around before it is in the conception
and speech ; and when in mature season the unconscious
bursts into consciousness, the man of genius is the organ
through which the expansion takes place ; he is the inter-
preter of its blind impulses to the age, and gives them
thenceforth clear utterance and definite aim.

Such are the formidable facts which confront and con-
tradict the metaphysical theory of freewill : compendiously
stated, they are practical human life. For certainly the
practical experience of the whole world from the beginning
unto now is, that will as it works in human affairs is a power
which does not stand outside the range of natural causation;
wherefore when men have formulated scientifically their
practical philosophy, when they have set forth explicitly the
principles that are implicit in actual life, they will be hard
put to it to find there a suitable niche for the doctrine of an
undetermined will. Meanwhile the advocates of the dogma
may continue to cultivate freewill as an ideal, making of it
a sort of holy shrine in their minds, and from time to time.

THE THEOEY OF FEEEWILL AND ITS DIFFICULTIES. 15

as they bethink themselves, doing it reverence ; taking good
care the while, however, to leave it in holy seclusion, and not
to introduce it into the affairs of daily life.

Thus far then the dogma of freewill comes out as incon-
sistent — first, with the fact that true doctrine is the explicit
declaration of what is implicit in the constitution and ex-
perience of mankind, the uprising into formal consciousness
of that which existed tacitly below its threshold; and,
secondly, with the acknowledgment of the universality of
causation within human experience. A third class of
adverse considerations will be laid bare by a close criticism
of certain commonly accepted but not indisputably war-
ranted assumptions of the metaphysical method ; and it is
with them that I go on to deal in the next section.

SECTION II.

■WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS TTS C0NCEKNIN& WILL.

Let us now inquire closely what are the grounds and reasons
of the metaphysician's clear conviction that he has a will
and that it is free. His consciousness makes him the revela-
tion in so plain and sure a way that all the counterargu-
ments in the world cannot invalidate its direct and positive
testimony. A pity it is that consciousness in this matter
cannot swear its own interpreter. It will be well to examine
rigorously how much it actually does tell him in respect
of these two allegations — first, that he has a will; and,
secondly, that it is free ; since it may be that it does not
directly tell him all that he is in the habit of believing and
declaring it does.

Is it true then that we know immediately by conscious-
ness that we have such an entity as the metaphysician
means by -will? No, it is not true; for it appears, when
we consider the matter closely, that a great part of that
confident dogma is not an immediate deliverance which is
certain and cannot be disputed, but a mediate inference

16 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

which is liable to the causes of fallacy to which all observa-
tion and inference are liable. Consciousness tells us nothing
whatever of a general will or an abstract will-entity ; what
it does make known to us is a particular volition when we
have it, the expenditure of an energy in doing or in for-
bearing to do, and, antecedent to that energy, the possible
choice of another course than the one adopted : an alterna-
tive course which might be taken if it pleased us to take it,
which has perhaps been taken in similar circumstances before,
but which we take not now because it does not please us to
take it ; if a lower course, because we have higher likings at
the instant; if a higher course, because we have lower
likings at the instant. Take notice here that the choice iu
antecedent to the energy we are conscious of as will : not
known as a contemporaneous direct deliverance, and so
having the certitude of an immediate intuition ; known only
through memory, and subject to the fallacies to which every
act of memory, whether covering an instant or a day, is
subject.

Consider further what is the ' we,' the ego, the person,
who pleases or does not please in such case to do or not to
do. Not any abstract entity but the concrete individual ;
not any unseen noumenon behind the phenomena, but the
noumenon working in the phenomena; not any extremely
sublimed and fine essence from which all substance has been
eliminated, but a feeling, thinking and acting organism the
whole of which works in each part, and each part in the
whole. 'Tis ' I,' compact of nerve, muscle, gland, bone,
who choose to resolve to do or not to do on each occasion,
not any part or detached principle or sublimed essence of
me. From his holiest feeling and his loftiest aspiration, let
him torture himself as he will, the most saintly person
cannot detach the influence of the most despised organ of
his body. The creation of an abstract will that is supposed
to execute the particular volition and its further fashioning
into a spiritual entity is an inference or hypothesis, not a
direct deliverance of consciousness ; be it necessary or be it
gratuitous, that is its undoubted character. With equal
reason might one claim to make an abstract entity of sensa-

"WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEENING WILL. 17

tion, for ' I ' feel as well as will, and to maintain tliat thia
entity was necessary to produce each sensation ; or to postu-
late a special emotional entity operating in each, emotion ;
or, going further in the same direction of entity-making, to
create a spirit of greenness which is the cause of green things
looking green ; or to discoyer a spirit of stoneness which lies
behind the material nature of stone. In that way we might
please ourselves to people nature with infinite multitudes of
entities, or invisible spirits of visible things, but they would
be superfluous in fact, as they are not apprehensible in
thought, and of no interest save as playful essays of imagi-
nation always eager and pleased to exercise its energy. For
it is noteworthy that the imagination needs no spur in order
to work ; unlike the reason, whose exercise costs the pain of
effort, its function is too eager and easy, the hard matter
being to hold it in and discipline it. That is the reason
why it is so much easier to lie than to speak the truth : no
training is required to learn to lie, but the sternnest mental
discipline is necessary to implant a habit of strict truth in
thought and word and deed, and will not succeed then if the
foundations are faulty.

What the metaphysician has done is plain enough : he
has converted into an entity the general term which embraces
the multitude of particular volitions, themselves varying
infinitely in power and quality, and has then referred them
all to it as cause. So he talks habitually as if will had
always the same nature, whereas there is no such thing as
one and the same will-nature; each will having its own
nature and development, being itself an independent reality.
With the disposition, powers, and habits of each mind as
different as the constitution, temper and activity of each
body, and with the several variations of temper in each body
at different times, how can the will fail to be different ? Like
it may be in different persons, and on different occasions in
the same person, but it is never identical ; it is always in-
dividual, particular. A general will is not an entity, it is
no niore than a notion. No wonder that there is neither
common end nor end to philosophical disquisitions concerning
a notion of which each person is free to have his own notion.

18 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

If now it be admitted that in the common will-theory we
have to do with an inference not with a direct deliverance
of consciousness, the claim next put forward will be that it
is a necessary inference, because there must be some basis of
continuity, some bond of unity, between particular volitions,
between the will of today and the will of yesterday. Some
constant essence with sense of continuity and unity, some-
thing which is one behind the separate volitions, is a
necessary postulate of thought ; and it is inconceivable that
matter can furnish such a basis of unity. The ego would be
the sport of impressions, they say, if it had not a free power
over them to hold and to reject, to associate and to separate ;
not otherwise, I suppose, than as in chemistry, were there
no free chemical ego, definite sepai'ations and combinations
could not take place — one element not leave one compound
to join another, unless it were guided by that internal spon-
taneity.

Those who talk in that way think of matter as inert
and inanimate ; they fail to realise, first, that matter is not
inert, there being in the simplest molecule the complexity
of movement of the entire solar system; and, secondly,
they lack the conception of the most complex matter and its
manifold energies individuated as a living organism, and
what that conception implies.

Now, in regard of the common conception of matter, it
is plainly that of something gross and tangible, inert and
subject to gravitation ; and naturally so gross a conception
of it is utterly inconsistent with any possible conception
of the matter of mind. Because we cannot conceive a
millstone having anything to do with mind, we protest
that mind has nothing whatever to do with any sort of
matter.' But chemical atoms, which we have the best

' It is certain that from all the millstones in the world heaped together we
could not derive mind, nor from all the inorganic bodies in the world, nor
from all the organic substances other than the most complex organic develop-
ment of matter in the highest nervous system ; but does it therefore follow
that we could not get it from this last ? Are not the energies of organic
matter as different as its qualities 1 And what is the special energy of the
most complex organisation of the highest nervous system, if it be not mental ?
Those who protest that it is not mental should at least tell us what it is.

■WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEENING WILL. 19

reason to believe are not, like geometrical points, pure
abstractions but realities, are exceedingly active, notwith-
standing that they are invisible, intangible, inappreciable
by sense of any kind, actually suprasensual — spiritualised
matter, so to speak: though we might say of them, in
Jeremy Taylor's words, that they cannot trouble the eye
nor vex the tenderest part of a wound, yet it is by their
union in infinite numbers that they form dimensions and
constitute the gross matter of the world that our senses
take cognisance of. Manifestly then the first necessity is
a just conception of the infinitely subtile activities of the
infinitely minute atoms of matter.

Next, in regard of the conception of an organism, it is
necessary to apprehend and realise that it is a physiological
union of various tissues and diverse organs, each tissue,
and much more each organ, itself infinitely complex, so
bound together in structure and function, and so unified
by suitable co-ordinating mechanism, that the part every-
where works in the whole, and the whole in every part;
nowhere else in nature are diversities and integration of
diversities carried to such a height ; nowhere is the realisa-
tion of complete unity in manifold diversity more signal.
Since Bichat's time, who first directed and enforced attention
to the properties of the particular tissues, showing that the
life of the organism was the sum of the lives of their indi-
vidual elements, we have learnt to know that the unity of
organism does not mean a mysterious vital entity, of quite
special and superior nature, non-material, hidden in the
secret centre of things, and holding the parts together by a
powerful spiritual grip, but that it is the expression of the
complete consensus or harmony of the many and divers parts
arranged in that organic form. Apart from all question of
mental unity, there can be no question of the existence of a
sufficient bodily unity.

There is in regard to the bodily organism a further
consideration which is not always adequately realised —
namely, that it is a self-adjusting and self-registering struc-
ture ; the modifications which it undergoes through exercise
passing not away without after-effects in it, but being

20 "WILL m ITS METAPHTSICAL ASPECT.

embodied in the structure and made part of its nature, so
that they enter into its life and function ever afterwards. Its
life-principle is indeed a principle of continuity : in the
living present the incorporate past is active. The organic
registration affords an instructive instance of the opera-
tion of the law of conservation of energy in the fashioning
of will; for we perceive that in an act of will, which
always renders a next like act of will easier, not all the
energy is expended in the outward effects that it accom-
plishes, but some of it goes to lay in structure the foundation
of future will. So it is that will remembers and learns to
will, exercise building up faculty, and conduct character;
and that it becomes, according to its training, either the
calm agent of strength, or the shifty accomplice of weakness.

It is in this organic registration, too, that we discover
the physical basis of all memory. Memory being the recur-
rence of a mental state means physiologically the same part
of brain in activity as on the former occasion. But that
is not all, since there is in addition to the recurrence the
consciousness that it is a recurrence — a reminiscence : it
might recur without such consciousness, as it does in certain
morbid states sometimes, and it would not then be mental
memory. Now the physiological considerations that bear
upon this recurrence are these : — first, the before-mentioned
organic after-effect of the first function whereby it occurs
the second time more easily; secondly, that although the
same part of the brain is in action as before, it is the same
part with the difference that it has been in action before,
and has ingrained record thereof; wherefore the declaration
which this after-effect makes of itself in consciousness must
be something added to the first consciousness — that is to
say, will be the consciousness of the recurrence ; thirdly,
that in every part and function of the organism the whole
works consentient, and that such fundamental unity cannot
fail to make, as all bodily states do, some sort of declaration
of itself in consciousness. And if that declaration be not
an intuition of the ego, what is it ?

Having this individual unity and continuity of physio-
logical organism, it will not be amiss to ask whether we

"WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS. TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 2 1

have not in it tlie sufficient basis of the unity and continuity
of volition, the real and constant foundation of the conscious-
ness of the ego. Impossible, says the metaphysician ; a con-
"sciousness one and continuous through all differences and
successions of states, not a totality of so many separate
consciousnesses — that is what I cannot conceive as the
subjective aspect of the unity of organism. But why not,
if the organism be, as it plainly is, one and continuous, and
be not, as it plainly is not, so many separate elements, any
one of which can have life at all apart from it ? Let us try
to understand the why not, which is this or something like
it : the organic unity, being of material breeding, is not
self -known (a plain assumption of the whole question), does
not make itself known within, is known only from without
by observation of sense ; but inasmuch as a unity is known
from within, which it is impossible should be the unity that
is known by observation, the conclusion is inevitable that it
must be the unity of an internal something, an immaterial
ego. It is a purely internal intuition of unity, and although
there is a corresponding external unity manifest enough to
others, that has nothing whatever to do vdth it. We are
required to reject the real unity which we perceive and
know, and which others perceive and know, and to create
another unity to run parallel with it, in order to keep
rigorously separate the domains of subjective and objective
observation ; not minding the while to consider adequately
how that any present phenomenon of self-consciousness is
possible only by reason of past states of consciousness that
were excited objectively and have been wrought, so to speak,
into the structure of the mental organisation. Why not, it
is natural to ask, a unity not of mind separately nor of body
separately, but of mind and body, known by the two ways
of internal and external observation ? Why not, indeed, find
here, as we well might, the concurrence of extension and
thought, of body and mind ?

Considering that it is not good philosophy to multiply
causes needlessly and to invent secret powers to do that
which there is an obvious and sufficient power at hand to
do, it is clearly our duty to find out what the body can do

22 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

by itself in the way of maintaining unity and continuity,
without help of an imposed intangible entity which may
after all be superfluous. At any rate, until the body's in-
competency has been plainly demonstrated by a rigorous
and exhaustive preliminary inquiry into its powers, and the
necessity of a cause of an entirely new order so proved
indisputably, the hypothesis of a will-entity to supplement
its deficiencies cannot be accepted as a necessary inference.
Rather may we call it the introduction of a cataclysm
by way of explanation, and compare it to the catastrophic
explanations that used at one time to be fashionable in
geology. That being so, the analysis of the so-called direct
and positive testimony as to the existence of a will-entity
has brought us to these two results — first, that the testi-
mony is not an immediate deliverance, but a mediate
inference ; and, secondly, that the inference is not a neces-
sary inference, since another theory capable of accounting
for the facts is possible and ready at hand.

If an intruder of an inquiring turn of mind, unawed by
the conventional assumptions of metaphysics, were to venture
into that province of thought, fixed in resolve to question
freely and think sincerely, he might perhaps be tempted to
call in question the absolute value of that intuition of unity
which self-consciousness yields, and to dispute whether it
does bring us into so immediate and certain a relation with
the noumenal ego as is assumed. From the high meta-
physical standpoint he might well argue that we never can
know the self-in-itself ; that pure abstract noumenal mind is
as unknowable as pure abstract matter ; that the only know-
able is mind in a state of determination, that is, in a par-
ticular state ; that the highest intuition of self-consciousness,
having that character, has therefore no more authority than
any other phenomenal manifestation. Moreover, from the
same standpoint he might go on to make this reflection :
that the consciousness of unity and continuity is after all no
more than a condition or form of thought, a category under
which we, by our infirmities or limitations, are bound to
think, just as we are bound to think under the forms of
time and space. I perceive and think the world under the

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 23

conditions of my senses and faculties, which conditions are
the forms of time and space ; and thereupon I say that the
external world exists in time and space, making of time and
space sorts of realities. They are really not existences of
that kind ; they are relations of two terms — the self and the
not-self. We have behaved in a like manner with regard to
continuity and unity, playing upon ourselves the trick of
transforming a form or condition of self-consciousness into
a direct intuition into the self-in-itself, and so into an
absolute revelation of the unity of pure mind.

It might be hard to see an end to the inquiry were we
once to set diligently to work to examine and to set forth
how much innocent dupery we habitually practise upon
ourselves in the region of metaphysics. Being compelled
in so attenuated an atmosphere to make violent exertions
in order to sustain a flight at all, we imagine that we are
making a great advance when we are whirling in a circle, or
are little better than stationary. The term consciousness is
by no means free from misleading vagueness and obscurity
of application ; it being a common practice to speak of states
of consciousness, as if consciousness had its states, were
really an entity behind the states and had existence apai't
from them, when it is itself only a gtate of something else,
whether that something be soul or body ; not otherwise in
fact than as it is the practice to speak of the will exercising
its several wills, whereas it is the man who wills and there
is no general will apart from the particular will. There is
no such existence as a general or abstract consciousness in
the individual ; it is as imaginary a noumenon as abstract
will or abstract force ; there are so many particular con-
sciousnesses ; a general consciousness is merely a notion.
Indeed, if there be one thing in the world which is particular
to the individual, a special quality of his which he has no
better warrant to abstract from his personality and to make
absolute than his individual temper or individual gait, it
is consciousness. We are entirely ignorant what are the
physical conditions of consciousness, which nevertheless we
must admit to exist wherever mind works by brain. Obeying
the necessity of having some physical hypothesis, we may

24 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

suppose — and one supposition will answer our purpose as
well as another where any hypothesis wants positive base —
that each thought has, whether on the same side or in the
opposite half of the brain, its reflecting centre — that is to say,
a correspondent or consentient centre in which it is instantly
repeated or reflected with more or less completeness and
exactness ; such reflection of it being the condition of con-
sciousness. What a gross absurdity it is at once seen to be
to find in the particular consciousness anything that trans-
cends its antecedents, anything supra-individual, anything
universal or absolute !

Eesisting these easily made digressions, which at every
turn tempt us to leave the main track of the argument, let
us now examine critically the second positive declaration
concerning will which consciousness is said to make — that
which is interpreted to mean that the will is free. Is
consciousness as clear and competent a witness as it is
thought to be? One thing is plain at the outset: that it
only illumines directly the mental state of the moment,
revealing nothing of the long train of antecedent states of
which the present state is the outcome ; all is dark beyond
where its light immediately falls, and it cannot testify any-
thing concerning what is going on outside the range of its
illumination, any more than a person in the light can testify
concerning what is taking place silently near him in the
dark. As a great ocean wave might be supposed to rise so
high as to catch on its crest the glow of the rising or of the
setting sun, while the waves around remained below the
level of illumination, so a mental state rises above the
threshold of consciousness as the outcome of the energies of
multitudes of more or less active states that remain below
the threshold. Consciousness makes known the actual
choice or volition, but does not make known the pre-eiistent
order of events: it does not reveal what has taken place
and is taking place in the unillumined region: it is the
self-revelation of the moment and no more. But how in-
finitely small is that revelation compared with what we
learn by observation and experience of self and of others and
by the history of human doings in all times and in all places,

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING "WILL. 25

needs not to be pointed out. The one is tlie coruscating point
of a moment, the other embraces length of time and extent of
space. As the testimony of consciousness moreover is imme-
diate, that is to say, is strictly the expression of its present
state, it cannot by the nature of the case have direct regard
to any former state of consciousness ; otherwise we should
have to admit that a present state of consciousness could be
itself and a former state of consciousness at the same
instant. If it steps beyond the instant, we have no longer
to do with the direct deliverance of itself, but with the
indirect evidence of memory of antecedent consciousness,
not with introspective certainty but with retrospective
fallacy ; staying in the instant, how can it help falling into
the illusion of an undetermined will ?

This last reflection, if followed out to its logical upshot,
wiU be found to reach far, since it implies that a present
state of consciousness has not, qua consciousness, real con-
tinuity with the consciousness of yesterday or of a year ago,
or of thirty years ago. The continuity is not a continuity of
consciousness but a continuity of memory, the basis of which
is not consciousness but organic registration. Now inasmuch
as the self of today is very different from the self of thirty
years since, and as moreover the quality of the present state
of consciousness, even when it is a recollection, connotes and
witnesses to the present self, it clearly is not the conscious-
ness proper to the then self ; that it is impossible to revive ;
you might as well demand of an adulb that he should retread
tlie infantile steps which he made in learning to walk. The
sober truth is that there is no abstract consciousness with
the intuition of identity, no actual unity of consciousness ;
there are so many particular consciousnesses, and the thread
of continuity running through them is not a conscious thread
but a contianity in that which lies beneath consciousness.
"We should be in a bad way if we were compelled to base the
certainty of identity on consciousness alone.

Before assenting to its testimony concerning an unde-
termined will as final and sufficient, it behoves us to inquire
and consider well what has been going on in the unillumiued
region. Now whoever will be at the pains to carry his

26 ■WILL m ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT,

volitional self-inspection patiently back from tlie present
state of consciousness to tliat state whicli went before it,
and from that again to its antecedent state, and so back-
wards along tbe train of activity whicli has issued in the
latest conscious outcome, lighting up in succession as well
as he can each link in the intricate nexus of many-junctioned
associations, may easily convince himself that he would not
have a present state of volition were it not for past states of
volition. Whatever be the nature of will, it is certainly as
impotent to will without previous acts of will as a child is to
talk and walk which has never learnt its words and steps.
In order to have liberty of will it is necessary to have not
only the absence of constraint so that it may act freely, but
the presence of capacity or power so that it may act at all ;
it is of no use being free to read Homer if one does not
understand a word of Greek, or to play on the fiddle if one
cannot distinguish one note of music from another. The
present volition contains the abstracts of many former voli-
tions by which it has been, literally speaking, informed.

No one who reflects adequately on the matter will deny
or seriously dispute that an individual's thinking, feeling, and
acting as he does at any moment of his life is the outcome
of his nature and training, the expression of his character ;
that his present being is the organic development of his past
being, the issue of a pre-existent order ; that he is linked in
a chain of causation which renders it impossible he should
ever transcend himself. It is a chain, too, which a little
reflection will prove to reach an indefinitely long way back
in an ancestral past. As it is evident enough that a person
inherits a father's, grandfather's, or more remote ancestor's
tricks of manner, of speech, of walk, of handwriting, of
gesture and the like, it may be without the least imitation
on his part, since the father or grandfather was perhaps dead
before he was born, so it is not less evident that he inherits
modes of thought and feeling and will which, being charac-
teristic of him individually, seem to those who are familiar
with him to be essentially spontaneous, especially his own.
In tbe internal parts of the body, as in its external con-
figuration, and especially in the supreme structure of the

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING WILL. 27

brain in Tvliich all parts, internal and external, have repre-
sentation, direct or indirect, there are lines of ancestral
resemblance which condition his modes of thinking, feeling,
and ■will — all his modes of consciousness. When he has had
the inspiration to do well in some sudden and urgent
emergency of life, in which he hardly knew at the time what
he did, he might justly give thanks to the dead father or
grandfather who endowed him with the actuating impulse
or the happy aptitude which served him so well on the
critical occasion. Thou didst not behave like a fool in that
overwhelming emergency? Claim no merit thyself in the
matter, but render deep and silent thanks to the giver. The
circumstances of the particular crisis, the bodily change
incident to an epoch of life, the novel stimulus of a fever or
other bodily disease, or some occult cause of which we can
give no account, will kindle into activity an ancestral quality
that had been latent till then, unnoticed and perhaps un-
suspected. What man is there who does not, in his manner
of making love to his mistress, show some trait of character
and behaviour which he never noticed in himself before, but
which he might perhaps have noticed in his father had he
been present at his father's wooing.

It must seem strange to those who view mind from a
pure psychological standpoint that such ancestral aptitudes
should exist in it for a long time in a perfectly silent or
latent state, without the least consciousness on its part of
their existence, and start suddenly into activity on the occa-
sion of some unforeseen stimulus. Where are they during
all that time of latency ? If in the mind, how is it that the
mind does not comprehend its own contents ? It will ftot
help to say that they are in the memory, for how can the
memory contain that which, never having been personally
known, has never been put into it ? Is it that we must
admit unconscious mind ; and if so, what is its relation, on
the one hand, to conscious mind, and, on the other, to the
physical organisation of mind ? Is brain, after all, uncon-
scious mind? The fact, however, is quite consistent with
the experience of one who is hugely pleased with some
brilliant conception or expression that occurs to him, and

28 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

whicli lie believes to be entirely original, when tlie real truth
is that he met with it in some author years before, stored it
unawares in a recess of his mind, and now brings it forth in
all the freshness of novelty as a new birth of thought. He
meanwhile, happy parent, cackles over it with delight, like
a hen that has just laid its egg, or is as proud and pleased
as a woman who has just accomplished the nowise original
or uncommon business of bringing a child into the world.
Such the naive joy of production everywhere in nature !

Here, then, is another instance of mental being that is
ignorant of its being ; an instance not easy to explain on the
pure spiritual theory of mind. It is plain proof at any rate
of the incompetence of self-consciousness to perform a com-
plete mental self-inspection. Nor would it be right to
ignore such unconscious mental being on the ground of an
assumed non-intervention of it in conscious life, seeing that,
though latent, it is not entirely passive ; for besides its deep,
silent, but effective work in moulding the mental nature, and
weighting the expression of it in speech and conduct, im-
pulses from its depths spring into consciousness unawares
oftentimes, we know not how or why. Now and then in
everybody's life it happens that an unforeseen impulse
starting forth from the unconscious depths of his being
drives him to say or do what he had not the least intention
to say or do a moment beforehand, or in like manner with-
holds him from doing what he had full reasons and motives
to do. It is not improbable that the singular daemon of
Socrates was an impulse of that nature, unmotived in con-
sciousness but not so in the character ; a kind of inspiration
apt naturally to spring up in a richly endowed, much-medita-
tive mind that was habitually exercised in observation and
reflection. So also may it have been with those fine ideas or
intuitions of Plato, which came into his mind in so unforeseen
and startling a way that he imagined them to be reminis-
cences of a former higher existence. How is it that when
two persons give the same opinion or counsel in almost the
same words in the same circumstances the effect is some-
times so different? Is it not because there is the weight
of character behind speech, the depth of inarticulate nature

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCERNING Wlli. 29

beneath the partial and inadequate art of expression ? The
total energy in each case is, if I may so express myself, the
snm of the potential and kinetic energies of the individual.
A great character, like a great work of art, moves men not
so much by that which he expresses as by what that which
he expresses suggests. It is a very poor definition, then, of
the ego to make it, as some do, the sum of agreeable or
painful sensations, actual or ideal, which determine the con-
duct ; when there is not a state of consciousness, as known to
self or as revealed through its proper channels to others,
that has not the whole character, mental and bodily,
beneath it.

When we reflect how much time and what a multitude of
divers experiences have gone to the formation of a character,
what a complex product it is, and what an inconceivably in-
tricate inter- working of intimate energies, active and inhi-
bitive, any display of it in feeling and wiU means, it must
appear a gross absurdity for any one to aspire to estimate
and appraise all the component motives of a particular act
of will. Its sources are too remote and hidden, the paths
of motives are too fine, intricate, circuitous and various, to
admit a complete analysis of its constituent parts.: the keen-
est self-inspection in the world can never make them plain,
since it is not possible to seize and measure each minute and
remote operative thrill of energy, to bring all the coefficient
factors into the light of consciousness. As well think to fix
and measure the force of every little wave that goes to swell
the great tidal wave that dashes finally upon the shore, or — a
less complex but perhaps juster comparison — to measure the
numerous and exquisitely fine and delicate thrills of motion
that make the varying modulations of the human voice.
To dissect any act of will accurately, and then to recom-
pose it, would be to dissect and recompose humanity. Acts
of will being acts and manifestations of self, outcomes of
the person's essential nature, a thorough self-knowledge is
now, as it ever has been, an unattainable aim of knowledge.
To aflirm that will is ever undetermined is then to postulate
an omniscience of self in face of the certitude that not one-
self only but every self is inscrutably complex. Nevertheless,

30 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICii ASPECT.

the philosophers who refuse to acknowledge the incompe-
tence of self-consciousness must continue to do it.

It is in the natural order of the development of the
mental organisation, indeed a daily experience of it, that
energy becomes element, so to speak, the conscious motives
of past years being thus incorporated structurally as un-
conscious factors in the motives of today: there is the
materialisation of motives as the basis of future function,
the structuralisation of simple function as the step of an
a,dvance to a higher function. We can no more bring back
the motives to consciousness in their primitive characters
than we can bring back the life-function of a leaf which is
embodied in the structure of the branch on which it grew ;
or than we can, in our instantaneous visual judgments of
size, distance and the like, rehearse in full detail the slow
and tedious steps, now incorporate in structure as habit or
instinct, by which they were originally acquired.

The progress of intellectual growth is a progress from
the concrete and simple to the general and abstract — from
the feeling to the image, from the image to the idea, from
the simple idea to the complex idea, from complex ideas
to abstract conceptions ; thereupon the general or abstract
term becomes the sign of a class of perceptions or concep-
tions, is used as a convenient representative unit or sub-
stitute for them, like an algebraic symbol, and functions as
such in subsequent mental operations; and this substitu-
tion of substitutes in ascending abstractions goes on as far
as our minds are able to go in that direction. One may
easily imagine, as correspondent on the physical side, so many
superimposed layers of cerebral structure successively or-
ganised in function, higher centres being brought into play
to co-ordinate lower centres — superordinate to them subordi-
nate — and the whole together forming the mental organisation
or the texture of mind, so to speak. When we wish to know
the true meaning of the abstractj to test rigorously what it
actually represents, we must always go back to the concrete ;
and when we do that we find that in the last resort it repre-
sents the mode of affection of an individual by an object or
a class of objects and his special mode of reaction to the

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEENING "WILL. 31

object. That is Hs apprehension of it, which apprehension
or mental grasping, be it noted, includes movement as a con-
stituent element ; is not, as commonly implied, receptive only,
but is also reactive — a bi-polar event, sensory and motor.

Little as we think of it, the discriminations of seilse,
whether of sight or of touch or of any other sense, imply
movements of muscles, without which they would be impos-
sible ; all the impressions which it is capable of receiving
might be made on each sense without any discriminative
perceptions on its part, in the absence of the proper motor
adaptations by the muscles connected with its organ. Indeed,
without muscular action it may be questioned whether we
should feel at all. In the first instance, the impression upon
the sense produces a disturbance of equilibrium which dis-
charges itself in vague motor reactions on the external world;
but these motor reactions become by degrees special and
adaptive. Now mental development in man does not stay at
this sensori-motor level ; for the adaptive reactions are duly
represented or registered in the higher centres of the brain,
and thereafter are not expressed externally in visible move-
ments, but take place internally in their cerebral representa-
tions, such internal operations being what we call perceptions
or ideas. Thus ideas signify fundamentally adaptive reactions
at one remove ; complex ideas combinations of such repre-
sentative reactions ; and abstract ideas cerebral representa-
tions at still higher removes. The understanding of an
abstract term, or each operation of our highest reason, im-
plies then a deep fund of slow acquisition by culture and
exercise, not fundamentally different from, though vastly
more delicate and complex than, the faculty of performing
some skilful bodily movement which has been gained by
diligent practice : as impossible to the undeveloped and feeble
intelligence of a low savage as the cleverest feat of a juggler
is to an untrained child. The commonest operations of in-
telligence postulate a succession of functions that have been
capitalised in structure as faculty.

A very rich fund of faculty is of necessity presupposed
when will is influenced by reason in the moral sphere, and so
acts in its highest capacity; for the supreme reason which

32 WILL 'br ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

then inspires it is not any simple, pure, spiritual entity that
requires no support in experience, but it is the highest and
most refined outcome of enlightened experience ; something
which comes not miraculously into a man but grows in him
by'consummate development from the not supreme, and is no
more possible without it than the flower is possible without
the plant. To know the real value in sterling coin of the fine
theoretical talk about the declarations of supreme reason one
must bring them in the last resort to the test of practical
application. And it is the same with moral principles : the
difficulty in morals has never been the enunciation of lofty
general principles, but the application of the principle to the
particular case ; and the eternal barrenness of books about
ethics is that they may give us no code of exact rules to
help at this practical juncture. Even Kant, sad to say,
sends us to common utilitarian standards for the practical
uses of his grand categorical imperative.

To search adequately into the unillumined region of a
person's character, in order to find out the motives of his
conduct on every occasion, would manifestly necessitate the
complete unravelling of his mental development, if it did not
compel us to undertake, in historical retrospect, an analytical
disintegration of the mental development of the race from its
beginning. But a very cursory inspection of any one's
behaviour suffices to show that there are many energies at
work below the threshold of consciousness, whenever an
energy rises above it as a conscious state. Hence come the
gross and ludicrous illusions into which men oftentimes fall
with regard to their motives on particular occasions, the subtile
ways in which they innocently dupe themselves, the signal
self-deceptions of which they are sincerely capable. An
actively conscious state attracts to itself reinforcing energies
of consonant vibrations from the infraconscious depths of
the character, grouping around it the ideas and feelings that
are of a sympathetic nature, and thus, once cherished,
obtains an abundance of congenial support, and easily feels
itself amply justified.

A person is persuaded that he has acted in full freedom
of will from certain high motives of which he was conscious.

"WHAT CONSClOrSNESS TELLS US CONCEENING WILL 33

when these, after all, were not the real motives that actuated
him, and when even a wayfaring man, though a fool, may
perceive plainly that they were not. How is it that friends
of humanity are often the enemies of their homes, and that
undetected wife-poisoners make zealous professional philan-
thropists ? 1 am not sure whether one person who lived in
the society of another for a month, in circumstances fitted
to strain and test his qualities, though he might not be a
particularly acute observer himself, would not know more of
the other's real character than the latter would know of it
himself after years of toilsome introspection and scrupulous
self-analysis. Certainly we may get a truer explanation
sometimes of a person's conduct on a particular occasion by
a knowledge of the characters of his near relations than by
his exposition of his motives or one's own divination of
them ; for in the traits of their character we may see in full
development, written out, as it were, in plain characters, that
which is potential mainly and of occasional outcome in him.
'Tis a philosophic use to make of relations to use them to
teach self-knoviiedge.

When acts appear to be incommensurate with motives,
as they sometimes do, or when the same motive appears to
produce different acts, the just conclusion is not that an
arbitrary power has intervened capriciously and upset
calculation; but that the motives which show themselves
in the light of reflection are only a part of the complex
causation, and that the most important part thereof lies
in the dark. When the same motive acts differently in
different persons or in the same person at different times —
when, for example, one sacrifices wealth, repose, reputation,
even life itself, for a motive which scarce touches another ;
or when one man is moved to the depths of his being by the
glance of a woman which has no more effect upon another,
or perhaps upon himself at another time, than upon a statue
of marble — it is ridiculous to speak of the motive being the
same : the so-called motive is hardly more than the occasion
of the unloosing of the real intimate motives that are
immanent in the structure of the character. If the ego
represents the consensus of the several parts of the organism,

34 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAI, ASPECT.

it is plain that disorder of any part will affect directly the
consensus, and so indirectly the disposition of the ego, which
must needs thereupon react differently to a stimulus from
what it would have done had its temper not heen so modified.
A face that provokes instant aversion in one person may
stir as instant a liking in another, because its features are
signs that appeal by a subtile eloquence to antipathic or
sympathetic qualities in the beholder's nature ; the like-
kindedness or unlike-kindedness of nature being itself
perhaps the result of the embodiment of intimate ancestral
relations between persons of similar character and phy-
siognomy. Would you learn best what a person's motives
have been, what is the real worth of the freedom of will
that he has enjoyed, study the history of his life; that is
his character, and there you will find the unequivocal record
of what he has willed.

It is of the first importance, when discussing the de- ,
termination of will by motive, to apprehend clearly that
motive and cause are not the same things, and to take diligent
heed not to confound them. The motive may be little,
seemingly quite trifling, and the effect something vastly out
of proportion to it, for the motive is the slight touch which
liberates the pent-up forces, the sum of which and of
conscious motives together constitutes the cause. That a
little thing will produce a great effect when the mechanism
is accurately framed and fitted to respond to it, we know as
well by the easy starting of a locomotive as by the violent
sneezing which a grain of snuff in the nostril wiU occasion ;
when cutting or tearing the mucous membrane of it would
have no such effect. In like manner, by touching a button
with the little finger, or by giving a sharp tap to a piece of
dynamite, one might, if suitable preparations had been made
beforehand, blow a thousand persons into eternity. The
touch or tap may be the motive, but is not the efficient cause
in that case ; it is the initial step of a series of events which
issue in the explosion. Things being disposed exactly as
they were in a complex sequence, the result was a necessity ;
but a very trivial intervention, disarranging the order of the
nicely adjusted antecedents, would have sufficed to prevent

■WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS TELLS US CONCEENING WILL. 35

the explosion. So in some sort it is with will, which in
every case is a most complex involution of energies; the
motive which occasions the discharge is not the cause, it is
one of the many co-operating conditions the sum of which is
cause. On what seemingly trivial things — the purest hazard
or the meanest incident — have the great movements of the
world sometimes hinged? Had Cleopatra's nose been a little
shorter, says Pascal, the whole face of the earth would have
been changed.

What an awful and overwhelming reflection this of the
momentous issue of trifling motive, when made in refer-
ence to individual life, if one really possessed freewill! A
minute omission, a trivial commission at a critical juncture,
which a little sharper foresight or a little more resolution
might have avoided, has turned the whole current of a life.
One would be driven to take refuge in fatality in order to
escape a crushing weight of despair, if a single wrong choice,
an accidental inclination this way or that, could have such
momentous issues, so awful the responsibility otherwise. Be
comforted : you are at the mercy of no such accidents ; the
trivial incident was but the occasion of the internal explo-
sion, so to speak, and without it or under the impact of
some other equally light motive the individual nature would
have declared itself and had its way. The will is not deter-
mined by motive but by cause — that is to say, by the sum
of conditions, passive and active, on which the event follows ;
in other words, it has as antecedents, not only the motives
of which we are conscious, but the motive energies that are
active below the threshold of consciousness.

It is easy to see how, in the absence of any knowledge of
these infraconscious energies, men might fall into the opinion
of a freewill; for when the will acted without apparent
motives, and more particularly when its action was not in
accord with the apparently prevailing motives, it was the
most natural thing in the world to ascribe the impulse to
caprice, freedom, something self-determining in it. Behold-
ing with surprise the very different volitions of the same
person in the same circumstances, and reflecting on the
similar experiences of self — a seeming identity of antecedents

36 WILL IN ITS METAI>HYSICAL ASPECT.

with a manifest diversity of consequents — it was an obvious
question liow the individual could form so different a judg-
ment and exercise so different a will were the will not free.
The answer of course is that he was not the same person
and had not the same wiU ; any more than he is the same
person and has the same wiU at puberty as in childhood, in
manhood as at puberty, in old age as in manhood, in the
hour of death as on the day of his marriage. Here, too,
comes plainly out the justice of the argument on which
stress has been laid by sober-minded writers on philosophy
— that the right and proper opposite of necessary is not free,
but fortuitous or contingent; the contingency or chance
lying not in the absence of determination but in the presence
of unknown determinants.

At this point, then, I hope to have said enough to estab-
lish my second proposition, and, having first proved to the
metaphysician that consciousness does not tell him that he
has such a will as he imagines, to have now proved that it
has not the authority to tell him that his will is undeter-
mined. He has based upon its declaration a superstructure
which it is unable to bear. Be the doctrine of an undeter-
mined entity true or not, consciousness is not competent to
decide the question by an immediate intuition. It will not
be amiss to go on now to make a further examination of the
nature and conditions of the authority of consciousness.

SECTION III.

CONCEEliriNG THE AUTHOEITT OP CONSCIOUSNESS.

Is there not large assumption, and perhaps a good deal
of fallacy in the large assumption, made on behalf of the
authority of its self-intuitions ? Let the inquiry be sincere
and searching, and it will disclose reasons to suspect some-
thing illusory in the assertion that the knowledge of mental
states through self-consciousness is more certain and positive,
because more immediate, than the knowledge of external

CONCEENING THE AUTHOEITT OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 37

objects through the senses. The latter knowledge is after
all just as immediate in itself, since it consists actually of
states of consciousness.

When I perceive an object it manifestly is not the
object that is known to me directly, but the state of con-
sciousness: the odour is not in the rose, but in the rose-
smeller ; the colour is not in the flower, but in the flower-
seer ; the harmony of fine sound is not in the instrument,
but in the sensibilities of him who hears it, existing not
for him who has no ear for music : the external conditions of
colour, odour and sound are not in the least like the
sensations which they excite. Whatever it be mediate of,
however, the state of consciousness is itself immediate.
In like manner, the knowledge of those states of conscious-
ness which are described as immediate — the Descartian
cogito, for example, which is to convince me that I am — is
without doubt immediate in itself, but it is none the less
mediate of something of which it is an affection ; and
this something, if we suppose it to be a mental self, is far
more difficult to know in itself than the external object,
being no more than it within the compass of introspective
intuition, and, unlike it, not being within the compass of
objective observation. A state of consciousness that is at
all definite, whether of internal or external origin, cannot
certainly be either the subjective or the objective thing in
itself: it is a relation of self and not-self, and implicates
the one as necessarily as the other term. Cogito, ergo sum,
'I think, therefore I am,' has a ring of transcendental author-
ity, until we interpolate after ' I ' the quietly suppressed but
none the less surreptitiously understood ' who am,' and let
it read, as it should read, thus — ' I [who am] think, there-
fore I am ; ' after which it does not appear to carry us
beyond the simple and subjectively irreducible fact of con-
sciousness, beneath which, it must not be forgotten, there is
in all cases the more fundamental fact of an organism that
is one.

To assert that the feeling of which we have direct ex-
perience is not bodily but mental, is to make two statements
v^hich are not self-evident, and which certainly cannot be

38 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

proved ; for, in the first place, we hive no means of knowing
that it is not bodily, since it has never yet been shown,
though it is freely assumed, that consciousness is not the
function of a particular bodily structure ; and, in the second
place, we have no means of knowing that it is mental, or at
any rate we do not know that in afiBirming it to be mental we
mean anything more than that it is sui generis — that is to
say, an experience distinctly different from that which we get
by any other channel of knowledge of what bodily function is.
Mental in that sense, and special in any sense, it certainly
is, but the question really is whether the special result be
due to the special channel through which the information
comes, or to the existence of a special entity ; to our mode
of apprehension, or to the secret presence, in the back-
ground, of a substance which is not substance, being insub-
stantial — immaterial substance.- Here, again, we strike
upon one of those expressions that seem to common appre-
hension to be a contradiction in terms and a mode of robbing
language of definite meaning, but which the mystical sense
of high philosophy perceives to be a conjunction of opposites
that bespeaks a deeper unity.

We may acknowledge readily that the direct experience
of consciousness is quite unlike our experience of any other
bodily function, and ought to be described in different
language, but it follows not therefrom that it is not bodily
experience. Metaphysics will remain in any event a special
study; not perhaps as the study by a physical being of
something that has no essential relation to physics, since
physics plainly lies beneath psychics, but as an aspect of
physics known by another channel than any of the ordinary
sense-channels by which we know physics — something which
in that sense is truly beyond physics (jisr^ rh (jyva-iKo),
It is impossible to .describe a sound in terms of sight, or a
sight in terms of smell, or a touch in terms of taste ; a green
sound or a blue smell or a bitter light would not be thought
by sane men to be terms of much meaning ; but these
different senses may all be affected by one and the same
object through its different properties, and they are all
functions of one and the same body. It is protested loudly

CONCEKNIKa THE AUTHORITY OP CONSCIOUSNESS. 39

enough that movement cannot explain thought ; and it
certainly is impossible to think the transformation of that
■which we perceive objectively as movement into that which
we are conscious of subjectively as thought : to say so is
equivalent to saying that light cannot be heard, nor sound
seen, nor one mode of perception ever be another mode of
perception. But if any one could conceive himself capable
of perceiving movement subjectively — that is, by self-con-
sciousness, and of perceiving thought objectively — that is,
through the senses, the reconciliation might not be incon-
ceivable; in that case metaphysics, objectively studied,
would be the physics of mind, and physics, subjectively
studied, would be the metaphysics of matter.

We do not insist upon keeping rigorously apart, because
each is special, the respective testimonies of the several
senses ; on the contrary, we justly insist on bringing them
together, comparing and combining them so as to get the
fullest information we can about the object by which they
are severally affected ; we will have the concordant testimony
of two or three witnesses, or rather of all the witnesses that
we can succeed in bringing into relation with it. The con-
sequence is that one witness supplements and sometimes
corrects another, and the evidence is strengthened. When
I know an orange, I know it by what sight and touch and
taste and smell have respectively told me about it, my per-
ception of it being the organised association of their ex-
periences ; and if one of the witnesses chances to be mistaken
the other witnesses come in to supplement its deficiencies or
to correct its mistakes. But it is not so with the internal
revelations of consciousness; it works alone, independent
and self-sufi&cing ; and if it chances to go wrong there is no
one to warn or to correct it. It can never feel therefore
that it is wrong and that it requires to be supplemented or
set right, any more than a particular sight or sound can be
self-corrective ; indeed, it never is wrong in its direct de-
liverance, since this is purely the expression of its state at
the time, the direct statement of its immediate experience.
There is no doubt of the feeling, be it sound or morbid, and
that is all that there is no doubt about.

40 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

But to lay hold of that indisputable fact and forthwith
to base upon it the dogma of an infallible authority of con-
sciousness with respect to the worth of these direct deliver-
ances, the value in sterling coin of experience which they
represent, is a procedure that is by no means legitimate ;
they may be sterling or they may be trash ; it merely makes
them known, as the sun illumines indifferently mosque or
mud hut. Any direct deliverance of consciousness at any
moment is what it is by virtue of the manifold objective and
subjective experiences of the individual, by which has been
built up by degrees the mind-nature of which it is the
present outcome ; and its value, little or much, as true or as
false coin, depends upon the character of these antecedent
processes. It is vain pretence then to discover in the intui-
tion of consciousness an immanent criterion of truthfulness,
for whoso begins with the ego will infallibly end with the
ego : the inward revelation must be brought into comparison
with the knowledge obtained through other sources in order
to be tested and approved. Can there be a greater absurdity,
when we think of it, a more completely knowledge-annihi-
lating device than to pretend to keep provinces of knowledge,
however acquired, rigorously asunder ! To assert liberty and
self-sufficingness in one science, and necessity and inter-
dependence in all other sciences, is really the negation of all
science. It is a gaping contradiction in the very foundation
of knowledge, which renders any stable superstructure im-
possible ; for how can man, being one, have real knowledge
unless it is unity of knowledge ? How make for himself a
synthesis of the world if he is required to preserve an
absolute separation, an impassable chasm, between two
regions of knowledge ?

If you would know what is the positive value of the
direct deliverance of an individual consciousness, you must
compare it with the deliverances of consciousness in other
persons ; it must be supplemented and corrected by these
aids in the social organism, as one sense is supplemented and
corrected by another sense in the bodily organism. My
subjective states are to be appraised by another's objective
observation of them in their modes of outward expression.

CONCEENING- THE AUTHOEITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 41

as his subjective states are to be appraised by my objective
observation of them. Assuredly tbey are not of the least
value except in their objective relations ; for however price-
less to him as direct intuitions of his consciousness, they
cannot be communicated by direct sympathy to another
person's self-consciousness. There is a common sense arising
from the uniformities of experience of similarly constituted
beings in similar circumstances which corrects the vagaries
of the individual, who may have some peculiarity of constitu-
tion or be affected by some peculiarity of circumstance.
Were all people on earth compounded, framed and consti-
tuted exactly alike, and placed in exactly the same circum-
stances, they would, freewill notwithstanding, all feel exactly
alike, think exactly alike, act exactly alike ; it is in fact
what they do now in respect of matters in which they are
most nearly alike— ^their sexual relations, to wit. Similarly
constituted mentally and having a similar experience, they
must of necessity arrive at certain common truths ; just as,
their bodies being what they are, they are bound to develop
certain common bodily movements. Scientific truths are no
more than truths which any man of sound intelligence who
had the adequate special experience and training could not
help reaching, if he set himself to work in the proper
quarter. The sciences are the developments of common sense
in special directions.

A logical inference, the perception of a general law, a
mathematical demonstration, the certainty of an arithmetical
calculation, the confidence of each daily action among men
and things, the understanding of another's language and the
certainty that mine in turn will be understood : — all these
appeal, as it were, to some certainty in me which is more
than myself. It is the common mind of the race in me,
which belongs to me as one of my kind — the common sense
of mankind, if you will. Because the kind is in me and I
am a living element of it, I cannot help consciously or un-
consciously appealing to and silently acknowledging its rules
and sanctions. There is no rule to distinguish between true
and false but the common judgment of mankind, no rule to
distinguish between virtue and vice but the common feeling
4

42 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

of mankind. Wherefore the truth of one age is the fable of
the next, the virtue of one epoch or nation the vice of
another epoch or nation, and the individual vrhose judgment
is deranged has his private truth-standard that is utterly
false. Common sense, which embodies that which is
common in the experiences of multitudes of different
individuals — that in them which is generic and essential,
as distinguished from the incidental and passing — is there-
fore more sensible than any individual in all cases, save in
the exceptional case of a pre-eminently gifted person of
genius who has a special insight and is in advance of his
age ; to his level must common sense slowly rise by a gradual
development of such more special sensibilities and reactions
as he possesses. But even in that rare case the superiority
is in some special direction of thought and action rather
than a general pre-eminence ; it does not embrace the re-
lations of mankind all round, so that it remains atrue saying
that no one has so much sense as the common sense of
mankind.

It has been the custom to make a mighty deal of the
difference between instinct and reason, the inchnation always
being, from a desire to exalt reason, to put a wider gap
between them than actually exists. In regard to that
matter I shall take leave to make two propositions by way of
raising the low and bringing down the high — first, that logic
is just as mechanical as instinct ; and, secondly, that instinct
is virtually the stereotyped common sense of the species.
It is impossible for any human being of properly developed
understanding who comprehends distinctly the premises of a
simple syllogism, to avoid arriving at the plain logical
conclusion ; he is compelled to it by as fatal a necessity as
any animal is to obey its instinct; all the liberty of his
reason, if it be sound reason, is to obey that necessity. Is
there any instinct more mechanical than that? In the lower
animals their few simple wants, determining a few simple
relations with the external world, are met by certain
fixed habits or so-called instincts of action, and they
necessarily make no mistake so long as the external rela-
tions are not changed; their instincts represent the

CONCERNING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 43

generalised and capitalised experiences of the kind in adap-
tation to those relations ; they are, as it were, the embodied
common sense arising from the nniformities of experience of
similarly constituted beings in similar circumstances. In
some of the highest animals these primitive wants and
desires are also the centres of a few simple ideas and voli-
tions which revolve round them, and, aiding in their
gratification, are supplements to them ; but being very
simple in character for the most part, and of the same degree
of development in the individuals of the same species, the
actions which they lead to are pretty uniform in the same
circumstances ; it is only when a change of circumstances
makes a demand upon the animal's powers of adapta-
tion that we observe decided proofs of their existence. In
man the uniformities of belief and conduct are far less, since
multitudes of elements enter into complex reasonings, judg-
ments and volitions ; and, as these differ in different persons
according to differences of constitution, temper, age, experi-
ence, circumstances of life and the like, issue in results that
are necessarily various, uncertain, seemingly capricious, and
free; for when there are as many judgments and wills
concerning an object as there are individuals to judge and
will — of which only one in the end can be right — the opinion
may well arise that they indicate self-determination. It is
not, however, that they are really undeterniined, but it is
that the determination is contingent, and not therefore to be
predicted. The prerogative which man has over animals to
err, is the mark of his larger and freer capacity to receive
and to respond to impressions from the external world ; the
superiority lies not in the mistakes which he makes but in
the power which he has to make them, that power being the
correlative of the power and inclination which he has to
make more special and complex adaptations. While inequali-
ties of intelligence therefore make inequalities of judgments
and acts in all complex cases, there is in plain judgments
concerning simple cases an absence of mistakes, a uniformity
of general agreement that is hardly less mechanical and
authoritative than instinct. So would it be also in the more
complex cases if we had all the elements of the problem and

44 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT

their exact relations to one another as clearly in view. A
man might as Tvell, from a consciousness of power in him-
self, think to elude the law of gravitation in his actions, as,
from any seeming self-sufficient intuition of consciousness,
imagine he can in his thought dispense with the common
experience of the race.

If the foregoing reflections be well founded, they warrant
these conclusions ; first, that the deliverance of conscious-
ness, whether the state thereof be stirred by internal or
external causes, is just as immediate in the one case as in the
other, and neither state has an exclusive prerogative or
even a pre-eminence of dignity and authority over the other ;
and, secondly, that the interpretation of the value of the
direct deliverance is in both cases a matter of observa-
tion and experience, not an instance of direct intuition —
in the one case by the co-operating aids of the different
senses, as the result of the unity of the bodily organism, and
in the other case by the co-operating aids of the deliverances
of self-consciousness in other persons, as the result of the
unity of the social organism. We invoke that common
store of sense, feeling, opinion which results from the
social union of men similarly constituted and working
together in a common medium by common methods to
common ends, and which, incorporate in language, laws,
customs, habits, institutions, envelopes and penetrates them
like a social atmosphere from the first hour of life to the
last. To descant upon the self-suflSciency of an individual's
self-consciousness is hardly more reasonable than it would
be to descant upon the self-sufficiency of a single sense. The
authority of direct personal intuition is the authority of the
lunatic's direct intuition that he is the Messiah; the
vagaries of whose mad thoughts notoriously cannot be
rectified until he can be got to abandon his isolating self-
sufficiency and to place confidence in the assurances and
acts of others.

May we not justly say of the individual that he is bathed
in a social atmosphere which he breathes and is nourished
by mentally, just as each individual element of bodily tissue
is bathed in a fluid medium poured round it from the blood?

CONCEENING THE AUTHORITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 45

And as tlie blood is a highly manufactured fluid which has its
place and function intermediate between the living element
within and the aliment supplied from without the body ; so
the social atmosphere is a highly compound and, as it were,
humanity-manufactured medium that is intermediate between
the individual and direct personal relations with the external
world. Without its social atmosphere, its sustenance and
support, a mind could no more live and breathe than an
element of tissue could live without its nutritive medium :
the feeling of solidarity -pervades the individual, as his blood
circulates, unconsciously, vitalising him as a social being.
Let the social medium undergo disintegration, as it does in
catastrophes like the French Eevolution, and what a terrible
spectacle of violent distrust, insane suspicions, unreasoning
hatreds, fearful brutalities, crimes, frenzies and horrors does
man present ! Without its support he falls into mental
convulsions, as the' body, drained of its blood, falls into
physical convulsions.

It will not be amiss by way of summary to set forth one
final reflection before ending this section. It is the obvious
reflection that everything which we know is a synthesis of
subject and object, the outcome of subject j)Zits object ; and,
therefore, every phase of consciousness being that, directly or
remotely, neither matter-m-itself nor mind-in-itself are words
that have any meaning. The consciousness of the ego is
itself phenomenal, a relation ; and if so, a relation of what ?
It matters not what you call the synthesis — subject and
object, mind and matter, or what not — it is the only know-
able ; the absolutely unknowable is object without subject
and subject without object. The hypothesis of an external
world is a good working hypothesis within all human expe-
rience, but to ask whether the external world exists apart
from all human experience is about as sensible a question as
to ask whether the shadow belongs to the sun or to the
man's body ; for what an extraordinarily perverse and futile
ingenuity it palpably is to attempt to think anything outside
human consciousness, and what a signal absurdity to apply
any terms of hum.an experience to what is not within human
experience ! To say there is an absolute and to caU it the

Hi WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

unknowable, is it a whit more philosopliical than it would
be for a bluebottle fly to call its extra-relational the unbuz-
zable ? It is true that we can speak, and in some sort think, of
mind and matter separately, as we think, or think we think,
separately of inside and outside, circumference and centre,
but we cannot divorce them in fact. The divorce is a philo-
sophical fiction. If any one insists on making a divorce in
theory which is impossible in fact, he may build up a
theoretical system of philosophy, laying it down as a founda-
tion-principle of such philosophy that it is impossible to
conceive the passage from the one to the other — whereby
happily also it is saved from a tragical collision with facts —
but it is a philosophy of words at the end of all. Having
defined matter as that which is multiple, divisible, and
occupies space, and having then defined mind by aa exact a
negation of these qualities as he can make^that is, as
something that is simple, indivisible, and does not occupy
space, he may ask prettily and triumphantly how can that
which has extension act upon that which has not extension ?
Therein he is very much like a professor of moral philosophy
who, having defined light as the absence of darkness, and
darkness as the absence of light, should go on to ask his
admiring pupil to set forth the relations between these two
fundamental existences. Beginning with two contradictory
and mutually exclusive definitions, it is somewhat gratuitous
and superfluous to vex oneself by inquiring how they can be
brought into any sort of accord. From that standpoint the
idealism of Berkeley is assuredly unanswerable ; nay, per-
haps the welcome and truly logical outcome of it would be
Leibnitz's theory of two clocks going and striking together
by a divinely pre-established harmony.

A separation of subject and object cannot ever be the
starting-point of a philosophy that is not a self-foolery.
The simplest, primitive, irreducible affection of consciousness
which we call feeling is not really the simple thing it appears
inwardly, but actually a very compound effect. There is
a necessary order of events antecedent to it : a stimulus
to a nerve of sense, a conduction of energy to the brain, a
particular change of a part of the brain in consequence,

CONCERNING THE AUTHOEITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 47

and thereupon or therewith an inseparably consequent or
coincident state of consciousness; nor could all the con-
sciousnesses in the world ever have a sensation of the
meanest sort without these physical antecedents, immediate
or remote. Neither the cerebral change nor the coincident
state of consciousness can be described as pure object or
pure subject; both represent object jplus subject, either
immediately as direct experience, or intermediately through
the registration of past experience ; and the notion that con-
sciousness can come into any relation with the object directly
and purely, or with the subject directly and purely, is
revealed as a manifest absurdity.

It was a very natural rebellion which the common sense
of mankind made against the Berkleiau doctrine that matter
had no existence save in the idea which we have of it, when
the accepted opinion of an idea was that it was the pure
affection of an essentially separate and independent internal
entity called mind, having no aflSnity with matter, and the
separate affections of which had no causal connection with
the cerebral reactions to objects, no relation with them but
that of an arbitrary parallel concomitancy. It was the in-
stinctive rebellion of consciousness against a suicidal doctrine
that would rob it of half its being. For the idea is truly
a synthesis, the ego and non-ego necessary correlates ; and
not to think the existence of the not-self is as impossible as
to think the non-existence of self — indeed, to think the
existence of one without the other is unachievable. The
belief of them, like all other beliefs, may be brought back
by analysis in the last resort to the simple basis of a reflex or
sensori-motor process; the receptive or passive side thereof
furnishing the basis of the ego, the reactive or active side
the basis of the non-ego. That is the physiological unit of
mental function. Why is it that the primary properties
of matter always seem to be more objective than its so-
called secondary properties ? It is because, being more
gross and palpable, we perceive more plainly the causes of
our affections by them, can react upon these palpable causes
by fitting movements, and so, grasping them physically,
apprehend them better mentally. The recoil of these

48 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

movements upon consciousness tlirough the channels of
muscular sense— the backrush, as it were, of their formal
sensibilities whereby they become particular motor intuitions
— must needs be a different kind of consciousness from that
which is stirred through any one of the external senses,
except in those cases in which similar muscular adaptations
take place, as is notably the case in trained vision and less
notably, but not less certainly, so in every discrimination of
sense. That special mode of consciousness will be what we
call consciousness of resistance or object-consciousness. It is
to touch and its motor adaptations primarily, to sight and
its motor adaptations secondarily, but to motor adaptations in
all cases, as Main e de Biran pointed out long ago,' that we owe
mainly, or entirely, our conception of the non-ego. Is there
a single state of definite consciousness into which a motor
element does not, explicitly or implicitly, enter ? And if not,
how manifestly absurd it is seen to be to talk of the ego as if
it had existence or meaning apart from the non-ego !

That the physiological unit of which mental structure is
built up is a reflex act, is a statement, objectively reached, that
accords well with what self-consciousness teaches are the
simple and irreducible facts of psychology — namely, sensation
and the sense of reaction ; which last is, in other words, the
sense of effort or resistance. Now these irreducible feelings
are the conscious expressions of deeper unconscious facts —
namely, of definite susceptibility to impression's and definite
reaction thereto, which are common properties of all organic
matter. It is the superaddition or accompaniment of con-
sciousness that makes them sensation and effort ; and with it
comes necessarily at the same time the desire to ensue pleasant
and to eschew painful impressions. Were it not to digress too
much, it would be interesting to trace the physiological unit of
a simple reflex act through a succession of its multiplying asso-
ciations, and to exhibit its corresponding outcomes in compli-
cating processes of belief and will. For if we inquire closely
what a belief in its ultimate basis is we shall find it to be the
conscious representative of an organised complex reflex act.

' Following in this, as it appears, an earlier inquirer. See Reeue PMloso-
pliique, October 1882.

CONCERNING THE AUTHOEITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 49

My belief is really my open or tacit conviction that on the
occasion of certain definite impressions upon my senses I
shall be able to react in relation to them by certain definite
and fitting adaptations. It might be described as habit, or
rather habit in the formation, as habit might be called un-
conscious belief ; for it is formed, just as habit is formed, by
the repetition of impressions and of the fitting reactions to
them, until a definite function is fixed. We are restless and
dissatisfied, in doubt, until we have formed the habit or belief,
because doubt is an active state of "attempt to make the
fitting adjustment, belief a quiet state of accomplished
adjustment. Infuse passion into it from the depths of the
organic life, and you get passionate belief. One needs not
really for one's comfort a true belief, whatever that may be ;
all that is required is a belief that one believes to be true.
Belief is not a fixed but a fluent state, though its motion
sometimes, like that of a great glacier, may be so slow as to
be perceptible only in a reach of years. Individuals advance
or retrograde from one belief to another, as mankind advance
or retrograde from one system of belief to another ; for ideas
and doctrines being mortal, like all things human, grow,
decay, and die. To do in his place in life is the proper func-
tion of man, the true end of thought and belief; the mean-
ing at the bottom of belief is what habit of action it pro-
duces ; action therefore is the test of clear meaning in a
belief. To know the truth it is necessary to do the truth ;
and to know what a man's real beliefs are you must study
his conduct. "We rightly seek the meaning of the abstract
in the concrete because we cannot act in relation to the
abstract, which is only a representative sign ; we must give
it a concrete form in order to make it a clear and distinct
idea ; until we have done so we don't know that we really
believe, only believe that we believe it. A truth is best cer-
tified to be a truth when we live it and have ceased to talk
about it.

Consider well, then, what a multitude of elements any
belief implies ; not elements only that have contributed to its
formation and become integrant parts of its structure, but
those also that co-operate silently in its function. Ccn-

50 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

sciousness is signally incompetent to give a satisfactory-
account of them, since they mostly belong to the domain of
infra-sensibility, and only a few rise into sensibility and intel-
ligence. Oftentimes we invoke studiously two or three
conscious arguments for a belief, and are content with them,
whereas they are perhaps the least part of its true basis,
which is actually a great multitude of inferences and
analogies that have combined in mental synthesis below the
threshold of consciousness ; the tide of them, as it were,
breaking into consciousness with a force and in a direction
that differ greatly according to varying bodily states, states
of memory, present circumstances, and the like. How often
does it happen that a person believes and decides, on the
occasion of some pleasant impression that is utterly unre-
lated to the matter in hand, or of a happy sense of bodily
comfort, something which he never would have believed and
decided had no such pleasant impression been made, and
which he would perhaps have believed and decided otherwise
if, instead thereof, an unpleasant impression had been made !
Prom the depths of our beirg reinforcing and opposing
forces come into action continually to urge and to check,
without our being in the least aware of their nature and
operation.

Is it not a little remarkable that the purest of pure
idealists shows virtually the greatest distrust of consciousness
at the very moment when he exalts its authority to infalli-
bility ? In maintaining that all which we know positively
and immediately, all that we are indisputably sure of, are its
subjective states, he actually declares that the very positive
revelation of an external world which it makes us, including
therein all other human beings and their consciousnesses,
may be pure illusion. Now it is quite certain that every-
body feels as sure of the reality of the external object,
illusion though it be, as he does of the reality of himself,
the subject, that he has as positive an intuition of the one
as he has of the other ; wherefore it is plain that conscious-
ness is deceiving him, if not as to the existence of an
external world, at any rate as to the value of its testimony
in any case, forasmuch as it testifies to the object quite as

CONCERNING THE AUTHOEITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 51

positively as it does to the subject. If, then, it speaks with
as strong certitude when it is saying what may be false as it
does when it is telling the truth, how are we to know when
to trust its assurances ?

Suppose a number of dreamers to be going through the
same dream-drama at the same time ; able to communicate
with one another by a subtile sympathy, so as to know that
they were all witnessing the same dream-events in the same
order; and never awaking to find it was a dream; — they
would certainly believe in the objective existence of their
subjective experiences. May not that be life? And the
true question be not what the external world is, but how we
are delusively thinking it? After all, the world which we
apprehend when we are awake may have as little resem-
blance, proportion, or relation to the external world of
which we can have no manner of apprehension through our
senses, as tbe dream-world has to the world with which our
senses make us acquainted ; nay, perhaps less, since there is
some resemblance in the latter case and there may be none
whatever in the former. Our dreams are founded on the
experience of our senses in waking life ; the supposed
dreamers of the same dream never could have dreamed it
had they not been awake at one time, and so obtained
through similar sense-experiences the material and the forms
of perception which served them in the dream. Clever in
invention as the dreamer is, he never dreams the ultra-
relational — the external world as it is outside his relations
to it, in itself. But the external world as it is in itself may
not be in the least like what we conceive it through our
forms of perception and modes of thought; no prior ex-
perience of it has ever been so much as possible; and there-
fore the analogy of tjie dreamer is altogether defective in
that respect.

The analogy is not, however, without instructive appli-
cation to the external world, not as it is in itself, but as we
know it ; which is the question now. Is there such external
world ? We may suppose, I think, that mankind, like the
dreamer, never could have constructed the illusion of a world
outside it, without having acquired the material and form of

52 -WILL m ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

the illusion in real experience : tlie conception of external
illusion would be impossible without the conception of an
external not-illusion ; to speak of an illusion of sense is t6
imply necessarily a prior real experience of sense in the
race or in the individual ; otherwise the word illusion would
have no meaning, and could not ever have been formed.
Were common sense suffered to intrude into such high
matters, it would probably conclude that men never could
have constructed ideally the external world in the same
fashion all the world over, had they not had long and patient
experience of it, first, preconsciously, then dimly consciously,
then through all degrees of brightening consciousness from
its dawn up to clear noontide. Is not the dream of it, if
dream it be, founded on that basis of antecedent experience ?
Organic matter means by its very nature an involution of
the external, as will be set forth more at length hereafter ;
and between human thought and the external world there
lies all the experience-involuted organic matter from its
simplest protoplasmic speck up to its highest evolution in
the nervous system of man. The worth of the testimony of
consciousness as to an external world, then, may well be
greater than the worth of its subjective testimony, since it
is pretty certain that the consciousnesses of other persons,
and the consciousnesses of animals, in so far as they are
similarly constituted, give the same kind of evidence.

What the world may appear to the sensations of a
creature whose organisation is not in the least like mine, is
quite another matter. The external world which the oyster
perceives or feels is assuredly an external world entirely
other than that which I perceive. But its poor perception
— if it gets so far — and its answering reactions are relations
of its self or ego to a real external ; one which 1 perceive to
be around it, far outside the range of its relations, as I,
whom it perceives not in the least, am myself. It is a
useful incidental lesson for me, who may learn from it how
much is outside my perception and what monstrous absur-
dity, on my part, it is to make any proposition concerning
it. The only noumenon which either oyster or I know is
the noumenon that is in the phenomena ; it is impossible

CONCERNING THE AUTHOKITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 53

either of us should know anything except as it is manifested
and is felt or thought, not in itself, but in us. I don't want
to think the thing-in-itself, but I want to think it m me : if
it is out of me, it does not exist for me — cannot possibly be
more than a nonsensical word in any expression of me ; and
for me to think it out of me, as it is in itself, would be anni-
hilation of myself. Now it is plain that the world which I
perceive, but which the oyster perceives not, has an existence
outside the oyster's consciousness, whether that existence
and the oyster itself be real external existences or, as some
might argue, only subjective existences within me. If the
latter be so, then it is possible that I, in like manner,
may exist only in the consciousness of a being as much
above me as I am above the oyster. In any case, however,
it is quite clear that I and my consciousness exist outside
the oyster's consciousness, even if the oyster exist only in
me ; that there is a real world of that sort external to the
oyster or to my special oyster-consciousness, since in no case
is the latter co-extensive with my consciousness.

By like reasoning I feel compelled to admit the existence
of a real world external to me, whether it be a world of
supreme consciousness or a world of supreme substance.
Indeed, is it not the fact that every other person's con-
sciousness is a real existence external to me ? Will the
most extreme idealist undertake consistently to maintain
that the consciousness of Newton had no real existence
outside the consciousness of the servant who blacked his
boots? Where, then, do we come to? If there be a world
of consciousness external to me, and if the only reality be in
consciousness, then my real existence to another person is
in his consciousness — that is, external to myself; and his
real existence to me in like manner in my consciousness
— that is, external to him. But where does he get his
consciousness of me, seeing that he can't get at my con-
sciousness, which is the only real me ; and where do I get
consciousness of him, seeing that I can't get at his con-
sciousness? He has got my real existence in him, and I
have got his real existence in me ; notwithstanding that we
have not the least power of getting at one another's con-

54 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT,

sciousnesses, which are the only realities. All which is a
triumph of philosophy or a reductio ad dhsurdum, according
to the light in which one elects to view it.

One might pursue a similar argument with regard to
freewill. I am free to myself, as thing-in-itself, says
philosophy, not free to others as phenomenal objects which
they observe, study, determine and calculate upon ; as another
person is free to himself, as thing-in-itself, but not free to me
who observe, study, determine, and calculate upon him. His
freedom then being to me and to all other persons pheno-
menal, that is to say, being in all practical relations, in every
expression of it, a case of determination, and my freedom
having the same aspect to him and to all other persons, my
freedom has no real existence in any consciousness outside
my own ; it cannot therefore be counted upon, or even ad-
mitted, by others in the events of life, and if not a pure
illusion of my own, is, being not ever apparent, as good as a
non-existent, except so far as the belief or illusion of it may
be of subjective use to me.

Discussions of the kind are struck with an eternal
barrenness, because they are based on the notion of a self
that has being apart from external nature, instead of a self
that has being only as a part of it : they are little better
than discussions about the contents of consciousness when
beforehand its contents have been emptied out of it. Self
and the world do not exist apart, and cannot be thought
apart; and it would be just as true, if not more true, to say
that it is the not-self, not the self, which alone has real ex-
istence, as it is to say that the world exists only in the abstract
consciousness with which, by a self-beguiling trick, psycho-
logists invest each individual. Consciousness testifies to the
not-self with as good evidence as to the self, since there is
no consciousness apart from a particular state thereof, and
each such state, whether it be a mode of simple sensation
or of complex will, is a synthesis of the two. It is the
custom of the psychologist — who would persuade you that he
can discover and expound the machinery and working of
the clock by watching the pointer, or at any rate can set
forth an ideal machinery that is more real than the real one

CONCEENING THE AUTHOEITY OP CONSCIOUSNESS. 55

— to affirm autlioritatively that lie knows immediately his
own consciousness, implying or asserting that he does not
know the external world immediately ; but to say that he
knows his consciousness is nonsense, since it is the conscious-
ness that is the knowing, and to say that he is conscious is
to suppose an ego prior to consciousness. What he knows
or is conscious of in any case are the contents of conscious-
ness ; and they are neither more nor less immediate or inter-
mediate in one case than in another.

Seeing that every act of consciousness is a synthesis of
ego and non-ego, and that without a non-ego there could not
be any consciousness at all in me, is it not perfectly legiti-
mate to say that I know the external world immediately,
and hare as good testimony to it as I have to myself? And
none the less legitimate, if you assume the ego to be the
contents of consciousness of which alone you are supposed
to get immediate knowledge by it ; for the ego without the
non-ego is impossible in fact and meaningless in thought, and
the abstraction of the ego from the bodily organisation and
the intuition of itself by itself as a non-bodily entity is an
artificial and deceptive process. To any affection whatever
of consciousness a prior state of brain is essential ; and to
say so much as that is to involve the external world in every
act of consciousness, since it is by involution of the external
that the structure of the mental organisation has been
framed. All which, if true, clearly leaves no place where
the will may get the self-sufiicing nature which the theory of
its freedom demands. Certainly no absurdity can be greater
than those are guilty of who, accepting the external world
as illusion, fly for a reality to a self-evolving universal and
absolute Will in nature, the evidence of which must needs be
just as illusive. 'Tis but another instance of the relative
pleased to dupe itself with the conceit of having got beyond
its relativity by merely enlarging its relative conception.

56 WILL' IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

SECTION IV.

THE POSITIVE ASSTTEANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Without doubt there are many persons who will say that
they care not a jot for these vain and empty disquisitions
concerning the authority of consciousness, being positively
sure of one thing : that on a particular occasion every one
has the power to choose and decide between two actions, as,
for example, to turn this way or that, or to move this foot or
that, when he has no motive to do the one act rather than
the other ; and that he can at any moment make the experi-
ment to test and prove this. He has no shadow of doubt
that he possesses that freedom of acting.

So far good ; but let it be noted, in the first place, that
he is by the nature of the supposed problem under the
compulsion of motive to choose to do the one or the other ;
that the extent of determination is very great, and the
extent of freedom very small, being the narrowest freedom
only within the limits of determination : in the second place,
that , he could not choose to do the one or the other, could
not resolve to move hand or foot as required, except for the
power of definitely willing either act, which he has gained
by previous training and practice ; the particular freedom
resting upon that consolidated basis of antecedent deter-
minations ; his whole nature, inherited and acquired, lying
in its executive capacity as means and instrument between
motive and act : in the third place, that he has selected for
experiment a seemingly completely indifferent instance — one
in which it is not of the smallest consequence which way the
decision goes ; in which therefore the motive that causes the
descent of the one scale of the oscillating balance must be of
the lightest kind possible, hardly more than the shadow of a
motive, not so much as presumably appreciable. Is it great
wonder that he fails to apprehend it ? He thinks perchance
after some vacillation that he will turn to the left, and then,
just as he is on the point of doing so, he determines, out of
the caprice to show his freedom, to turn to the right, bring-

THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 57

ing into operation that motive. Anyhow the area of un-
determined will has, by the conditions of the problem, by the
antecedent conditions of the power to will at all in the
matter, and by the exceeding lightness of the motive needed,
been brought to a more than microscopic minuteness.

For as to the determination : it is plain that, in order to
try the matter, he ■ has made a general determination to do
one of two things, the one or the other of which must ensue
from the continuance of the act of determination once started ;
secondly, that he has determined to leave the final decision
to the last moment and to the last then intervening impulse
or accident, insomuch that, so far from deliberately choos-
ing and willing it, he cuts himself off from the opportunity
and power of doing so : he leaves, in fact, to accident the •
particular diversion of action by which his general determina-
tion to do this or that becomes the particular determination
to do this. It is as if a person, rolling a stone down a steep
declivity, which, once the impulse is given to it, he knows
must go with gathering force to the bottom, were undeter-
mined on which side of a given mark, the narrowest visible,
it should go, determined only that it should go as near the
ma,rk as possible on the one side or the other. His act of de-
termination, once started, continues in force, and necessitates
a particular result ; but what the result shall be is not the act
of his choice or wUl, but the effect of some chance-collision
which the stone makes in its descent, or of the accidental bias
which all unawares he has given to it in the initial throw.
Then as to the exceeding smallness, the intangibility, so to
speak, of the impulse or incident which determines the par-
ticular result in the fore- supposed case of oscillating will :
it is not thought anywise strange that there are objects too
small to be seen except by the highest power of the micro-
scope, or even to be seen by any power thereof; nor is it the
least doubtful that intensely active molecules imperceptible
to sense, veritably extras-sensual, are the foundation of the

58 -WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

little material, as to be inapprehensible in themselves and
known only by their effects.

Where there is nearly an equilibrium of vice in a
character a little virtue goes a long way, but where there
is a perfect equilibrium of choice there can be no decision.
It was Bonnet, I believe, who made the supposition that if
a soul independent of the body were placed between two
objects exactly alike, or which appeared so, two desires of
exactly equal weight and quality, it would rest in equilibrium,
since there could be nothing to incline it to the one or to
the other : it would realise in itself the ideal position of
perfect freedom, being a will so free from motive as to be
incompetent to move, so exempt from determination that it
could not determine. For what could determine it the one
way or the other ? Not the objects, since they are exactly
alike. Not desire, since there could be no desire to one or
the other ; or if to one, then equally to the other. Not a
caprice of liberty, since there is nothing to stir caprice in
so pure and refined an immaterial substance placed exactly
in the centre of indifference ; the very notion of caprice in-
volving necessarily the simultaneous notion of not-caprice
or motive, which is excluded by the statement of the con-
ditions of the problem. But let this soul be united to a
body, it is then indifferent no longer, for it is subject every
moment to numberless impressions, of various degrees and
kinds, streaming into it from every part of the divers
structures of the complex and individual whole; some of
them more, others less, sensible , to consciousness, many of
them insensible. Then it is impossible for it to be indif-
ferent. But because its tone is thus affected intimately and
deeply by impressions' which it is unconscious of, it is
ignorant that it is moved by any pressure, and believes itself
to be acting indifferently.

Assuredly the brain is not to be conceived rightly as a
soft and inert substance, quiet in the molecules as in the
mass, but far otherwise : as the seat of countless multitudes
of molecular tremors that are in relation with every part of
the body, repelling and attracting one another, reinforcing
and neutralising, uniting into complex and separating into

THE POSITIVE ASSUEANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 59

simpler harmonies ; and it is the sum or outcome of the
whole of these intimate, intricate, and impalpable intestine
motions which appears in^ the illumination of consciousness.
It is a little strange perhaps that it has not occurred to
some one, reflecting how imperfectly our gross conceptions
of matter cover the infinitely minute and subtile elements of
matter that minister to mental functions, to propound the
theory of a special ether pervading the brain, if not the
universe, more subtile even than the space-pervading lumini-
f erous ether, and to call it the mentiferous ether.

In the previously supposed case of the individual in a
state of as great indifference as possible, in a state conse-
quently which the least impulse was capable of disturbing,
if he did not act from a caprice of showing his freedom by
doing the opposite of what his first thought was to do, but
acted without thinking or caring in the least what he did,
without any conscious motive, he certainly acted from the
inclination of his present nature ; the required little turn
between the two paths, one of which he must take, being
given probably by some insensible bodily impulse. Do you
ask by what impulse? By one or another of a thousand
possible bodily impulses : perhaps by an artery of one side
of the body going more directly to the brain, or having a
fuller stream of blood in it, than the corresponding artery
on the other side; perhaps by a slight difference in tem-
perature between one nerve-centre and another; perhaps
by the insensible impression of some visceral organ upon the
brain, or by one of many other similar conceivable causes.
The shades that wander forlorn in the realms of Tartarus,
being well-nigh rid of their bodies, are they therefore more
free than we who are heavily encumbered with the trammels
of them ? Alas ! they have perhaps discovered that in
losing their bodies they have lost the very sources of will,
and now feel it their- eternal misery to wander eternally
\yill-less. It happens frequently, in a matter about which we
find it difficult to choose or decide, that we know not in the
least what determination, we shall come to until we actually
come to it ; then perhaps we are at a loss to know what
determined us, and either remain puzzled and uncertain, or

60 "WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

are not satisfied until we have thought out some motive
which, though it had little or nothing to do with the result,
we are happy to persuade ourselves was the actuating one.

It may be assumed that pure intelligence or pure reason
could not determine action at all, since such purity would
be the extinction of desire, perfect repose, a passionless
peace of mind ; the fundamental spring of action, through
whatever complex developments of sentiment it may go, is
the desire to gain pleasure and to shun pain — that is to say,
the impulse to maintain and increase life. The conflict
between two issues in the mind is not a conflict really
between reason and desire, intelligence and passion, as
simple opposing forces, the mighty intelligence of a man
like Bacon being notoriously powerless to overcome one of
the meanest passions of human nature, but a conflict
between desire and desire ; the counterpuU of the one
against the other not being for the most part a single desire,
but the resultant of a complex interaction of desires in that
which we call deliberation or reason. May we not say of
passion that it is distributed through the whole body, and
of reason that it is confined to the supreme centres of the
brain, because it is in them that the desires fight out their
battles, and by the struggle which they make for existence
attain and maintain an equilibrium? What number of
conflicting or modifying sentiments shall go into the opposite
scales of the balance in deliberation, and in what forms,
gross or refined, they shall show themselves, will depend
partly upon the native capacity of the mind, its natural
heritages and aptitudes, and partly upon the degree and
character of its development. In the young child and in the
savage, present desire passes instantly iato action, because
it is not confronted by opposing desires derived from past
experience and laid by in the mind, ready to be kindled into
restraining or modifying activity ; in the man of large and
much meditative understanding, desire may be so neutralised
by the many desires brought into deliberation as that
resolution is ' sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,'
and action paralysed. Tou shall sometimes see a man
whose powerful reason has grasped all the relations, weighed

THE POSITIVE ASSUEANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 61

all the circumstances, and forecasted all the issues of events
exactly, fixed nevertheless in hesitating impotence to act,
because he is in the hapless plight of having no inferior
powers to execute the decrees of judgment.

If one wished to present an instance of a supposed and
seeming operation of cool intelligence untinctured by desire,
and to observe it in its deep actual relation to the natural
passions of human nature, one might be tempted to select
the appreciation of some purely scientific theory. Here,
surely, there is no necessity for the elimination of personal
prejudice, no mixture of passion to prevent a dear and
sincere apprehension of it, no room for envy, no cloud of
feeling to dim the white light of the understanding, nothing
but a calm and pure love of truth ! Alas ! this is an ideal
vision. Self-love is at work as a powerful factor ; it operates
so deeply, intimately, and unconsciously that the intellect
cannot act freely even with the best intentions, feeling its
backward pull when it goes against it, its forward push
when it goes with it. A clear and cold love of truth, a
passionless serenity of reason, will not withstand it. Reason
must be beguiled, or bribed, or ruled, without knowing it.
In the best case one must oppose to it an enthusiasm for
truth, which is truly passion into which self-love has been
cleverly enticed, and so transformed as no longer to know
itself. Now when we get to the depths of self-love in the
attempt to fathom motives we strike upon those yet unex-
plored strata of the constituents of mind that are contri-
buted by the organic life.

Let me go on now to supplement the foregoing example
of motives in apparent equilibrium by the presentation of
another example, in which the scales are very unequally
weighted, and deliberation therefore is a very swift affair :
an infant on the verge of toddling over a precipice and a
humane person standing by with the power to interpose and
save it. There is no balancing of motives then. Theoreti-
cally, the man has the choice of two courses — to do or not
to do anything ; but practically the will is constrained to
such instant action one way, by the sudden unloosing of
human sympathies in him on the touch of the fit occasion,

62 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

that it Jbas not the least power to incline to the opposite
course. Hia act of rescue is instant and instinctive, no less
essentially, though more circuitously, reflex than the quick
movement which he would make to save himself, were he
himself on the point of falling over the precipice. Where,
then, is the freedom of his will ? All its freedom lies in the
power to do what it is constrained to do, as all liberty is the
liberty that a thing free from constraint has to obey the
necessity of its nature. "Were sufficient time given for re-
flection, there would be the opportunity of choosing the
course of not stirring a step to save the child ; but could the
humane man choose it ? We should not blame a dog which
made no movement in like circumstances, because it has not '
the social nature in its mental constitution, and the occasion
therefore unlocks no inward forces in it ; but if any human
being did so, his conduct would, by the universal consent of
mankind, be pronounced most extraordinary and unaccount-
able, and stigmatised as unnatural and inhuman ; people
would find it impossible to conceive the motive which could
have actuated him. Were he to assign the freedom of the
will as a sufficient explanation, consistently claiming foi
himself a freedom of will to think and feel as well as to
act, he would be thought to add an insult to the under-
standing of mankind to the outrage against its humanity..
If he assigned as a good reason his conviction that the
deaths of a great manj- children would be truly a blessing,
inasmuch as there are far too many alive for whom to hope
even a moderately happy existence, and still people go on
begetting them recklessly, as they would take a pinch of
snuff, without the smallest regard to anything but their
own momentary gratification, he would be execrated as an
inhuman monster, though all that he said might be soberly
true. Were he to protest that he had not been actuated by
any motive, his assertion would be scouted with scorn, for it
would be assumed that the very singularity of his conduct
implied a very extraordinary motive. Madmen are the only
persons who are allowed to act without motives, or at any
rate without such motives as commend -themselves to, and
can be counted on by, sane persons. With the latter the

THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 63

necessity of motives to actuate the will, either as first agent
in the series of processes that issue in it, or as one of the
antecedents starting into clearer consciousness than the rest,
is such that when they are not educed nor supplied by the
occasion, and the decision hangs accordingly in suspense,
recourse is had sometimes to lots or chance in order thus to
obtain anyhow the preponderance of motive to act upon the
will. I never yet heard of anybody who maintained that a
penny showed freewill, because, when it was tossed into
the air, he could not predict whether it would fall heads or
tails uppermost. Everybody knows that it will fall with the
one face or the other uppermost ; that the result, whatever
it be, is a necessity, though a contingency; and that it
would be no contingency, but foreseen as a certainty, if the
size, shape and structure of the coin, the exact quality,
measure, and direction of the force used in tossing it, and
all the external conditions, were formulated in the proper
complex problem, and that were worked out accurately.

Between the two extreme instances adduced — ^the one, of
vacillating irresolution in wliich reasons are balanced so
evenly that the shadow of a motive suffices to turn the oscil-
lating scale; the other, of instant determination where a
moment's deliberation is excluded — a multitude of instances
might be brought forward to illustrate every step of a grada-
tional transition from the one to the other. One instance
more may suffice here : that of two persons placed in circum-
stances of temptation as nearly alilce as possible, who act
quite differently ; two men passionately in love and in inti-
mate intercourse with the objects of their affection, the one
of whom yields recklessly to the temptation of seduction,
while the other does not. Will any one soberly maintain
that these persons had the same strength of passion, the
same power of choice, the same freedom of will ? Or can
any one suppose seriously that the virtuous person was not
actuated by strong motives of prudence or conscience in his
successful stand against the urgent temptation ? The will,
— or preferring facts to phrases, let us say the man — was not
less determined in the one case than in the other ; in the
one his freedom was in doing, in the other it was in not

64 WILL III ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

doing, but in both it was in acting according to the motives
which urged him — that is to say, in not being vicious when
his will was virtuously motived, and in not being virtuous
when it was viciously motived. Character and motives
being what they were, the virtuous man was not free to be
vicious, nor the vicious man free to be virtuous. It is not
likely that any one would care to question or dispute this in
the particular case, especially if, in order to make the ex-
ample stronger, we suppose the vicious man to have been
little higher than an idiot, and the virtuous man little lower
than an angel ; he may like better to suppose the case of a
person who has succumbed to temptation on one occasion,
but who withstands it on another similar occasion. Herein
he sees proof that he might have resisted successfully on the
first occasion.

But there is no such proof. What is proved is that the
person has done differently when he and the circumstances,
although very nearly, were not quite, the same. It is not
possible to have a recurrence of the same, or to suppose
the recurrence of exactly similar, circumstances to the
same person, and so to test the will's freedom by the de-
monstration of its power to act differently in them; the
circumstances and events are necessarily different on the
second occasion ; they are a recurrence — that is, the occur-
rence of circumstances as exactly similar as possible pliis
the experience of the first occasion. That difference in the
antecedents suflSces to make the difference in the conse-
quence. On both occasions the individual does that which
pleases him best at the moment, choosing, if he chooses ill,
the semblance of good; for he and the occasions are dif-
ferent. Moreover, without the superadded antecedent made
by the precedent experience, there might easily be manifold
differences in the antecedent and constituent elements of the
volition, imperceptible or unperceived either by himself or
by others. His passion may have had less force by reason
of different physiological conditions of which he was un-
conscious; his reflection may have had a little freer play
because of the mitigation of his passion ; the susceptibility
of sense, or the rate of conduction in nerve-fibres, may have

THE POSITIVE ASSUEANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 65

been a little lowered by a lower temperature of them, or by
other causes, so that the message came ever so little later,
or with ever so little less iirgency.' His mistress may have
said or done some trivial thing which stirred ever so little
revulsion of feeling at the critical moment; a look, a gesture,
a whiff of odour, a tone of her voice may have struck and
diverted his attention at the instant, or have been a dis-
cordant jar in the tension of his high-strung feeling and
produced a revulsion thereof; some seemingly small thing in
him or in her, impinging on one sense or other and affect-
ing the organic tone, would be enough to make the circum-
stances and the result different. And in every nature the
mood or feeling is a deeper fact than the thoughts and fan-
cies, and has a greater influence upon thought and conduct.
Reflect how slight an impression — the glance of a woman, or
the tone of her voice — moves a man to the depths of his being,
thrilling through every fibre of him ; and moves him in that
way at one time, when his body is in a certain physiological
tone, while it has no effect at another time and in another
state of body. Has it not happened sometimes, in an inter-
view with another person, that we have said what we had re-
solved beforehand not to say, or have not said what we had
resolved beforehand to say ; not from anything said by him
directly to provoke or to check the utterance, but because a
tone of voice, a gesture, a shade of expression, something,
however little — we know not perhaps what — vibrating through
the inmost mental recesses, has sufficed to loosen a spring or
to repress one ? A sensation that is so slight as seemingly to
be petty and indifferent will assuredly act sometimes in a far-
reaching and surprising way to excite or to inhibit.

The same individual in the same circumstances or acted

' When a stimulus acts upon a nerve, there is an appreciable period
between the application of the stimulus and the nerve's response to it, which
period of ' latent stimulation ' is known physiologically as the ' excitatory
stage.' This period is measurably longer when the temperature of the nerve
is lowered, and during it the nerve is insusceptible to stimulus. In like manner
the rate of conduction in a nerve is lowered by a low temperature. And does
not cold benumb thought and freeze passion ? It is not likely that Newton
would have thought out the law of gravitation had he lived near the North
Pole.

66 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

upon by tlie same motives — is a conception which an ideal
philosophy possessed of an omniscience of self will alone
dare to entertain ; since a philosophy which took an account
of the complex facts could never hope to comprehend and
appraise the individual in that exact way. An accidental
and passing occasion shall bring back distinctly into sudden
illumination, without a perceptible connection, some remote
event which otherwise we should have forgotten for ever. It
was there, though we knew it not, but where? And if
somewhere in our inmost being, not dead but sleeping, latent
but not patent, when we know not of its existence, how
estimate its influence by any self -inspection or psychological
intuition ? It happens to us frequently to recollect a par-
ticular conversation or event in the remote past because it
made a deep impression upon us at the time, and yet to
forget numberless other impressions that really exercised a
more deep and lasting influence while we thought not of
them. Consider, for example, the very positive efiiects on
character that are produced insensibly by the circumstances
of the particular circle of society in which we live ; we are
not aware of the modification which we undergo ; but if we
enter a new social circle, or return to an old one, it is
revealed to us, by the instant pleasures or aversions which
we feel, how gradually and silently our character has
been modified. Perhaps we have longed to go back to a
former manner of life which is surrounded in memory with
a halo of enjoyment, during several years spent in another
and quite different sort of life, eagerly promising ourselves
the renewal of former delights ; but how sadly and some-
times ludicrously disappointing is the experiment, if we
make it ! We discover with dismay that our feelings and
judgments are different; that we are entirely changed,
though we knew it not ; that our self-inspection has com-
pletely failed us, and our self-consciousness completely
deluded us ; and we hasten to escape from the scenes that
we had so ardently longed to revisit and from the experi-
ences that we had hoped to repeat. Growing to his modes of
impression and exercise, as in his subordinate motor so in
his higher mental functions, the individual feels as little at

THE POSITIVE ASSUEAUCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 67

home in an old circle ■whicli he thus re-enters as he does
when he returns to practise a difficult exercise of bodily
skill that he had relinquished for years.

It is impossible for any one who has not made a diligent
study of the physiology of the body to appreciate the many
and various influences which continually work upon the
mind, and the divers subtile ways, direct and indirect, in
which they work, to determine its moods, feelings, and
impulses — to trace back to their origin the roots of the
factors that go to make motives and to discover the intricate,
circuitous, and far-reaching inhibitions and impulsions, the
weakenings and in vigor ations, to which they are exposed
both in formation and function. He apprehends only that
which is within the light of consciousness, whereas these
are outside it, below its threshold, insensible, a complex
composition of intricate forces that is known only or mainly
in the result. It is probable that a study of the light-
bearing experiments and discoveries of Claude Bernard
respecting the functions of the sympathetic system of nerves
and the intimate phenomena of life, might yield him more
insight into that matter than all the disquisitions of philo-
sophers can ever do ; at any rate, without such adequate
conception of facts, as the foundation of his enterprise, he is
ill furnished to make a fruitful study of mental functions,
and well fitted to continue in barren and futile discussions.

Is it not an inexhaustible wonder that any one should
think to divorce mind-functions from the body to which they
are inseparably united, should deal with them as the pro-
perties of an abstraction called a non-bodily self, and sliou],d
maintain that they may be studied adequately from a purely
internal station? A singular philosophy, indeed, which
aspires to measure and appraise impulses of will springing
out of the passion of sexual love, without giving the least
thought to the existence of sexual organs and the essential
influence which they and their differing states exercise in de-
termining, not only the very quality of sensibility, but the
specific nature and strength of the passion and of its motor
outcomes ! It would be curious to see explained from the
moral data of pure psychology the changes of mood and the

68 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

violent outbreaks of temper that occur in an elephant, hitherto
invariably good and gentle, after it has undergone the phy-
sical changes of puberty ; or to observe what place religion,
poetry, and morality had in the pure and abstract mental
philosophy of a sexually emasculated mankind. The meta-
physical psychologist — who for a long time maintained that
all men had naturally equal capacities of intelligence, the
inequalities of their actual understandings being ascribed to
differences of culture on their part, and who still maintains
for the most part that all men are equally capable of good
naturally, and might be equally good actually if they so willed
it — would be content to imagine the stomach, liver, or heart
of one person transplanted into the body of another person
in the place of its own organs, in the confident assurance
that it would make no difference in his character; or,
perhaps, to imagine the brain of one new-born infant taken
out and put into the skull of another, in the full conviction
that ancestral heritages would not hinder the one from being
just as good, and doing just as well, as the other.

In reality the psychologist would be much nearer the
truth were he to assert a difference in mind in every case,
human or animal, in which he observed a difference of body.
Could one imagine the paws of a lion fixed to the ends of
the legs of a sheep in the place of its own feet, we should
justly look for a correlative change of character in the sheep ;
not at once, if the organic transplantation were a recent ex-
periment, because some time must elapse for the foot to
obtain its proper representation in the sheep's brain; but
when in full time the innermost and the outermost had been
brought into accord, the brain into correlation with the foot,
then the sheep's character would certainly be mightily
changed. The animal would not be converted into a lion,
it is true, because it is the whole organisation of the lion,
not a part only, that makes its ferocious character, and it is
the brain which expresses it, as containing in innermost
representation and in due co-ordination all the characters of
the outermost ; but the sheep would be no longer a sheep,
its character would be entirely changed ; it would, in fact,
be a new animal, morally as well as physically.

THE POSITIVE ASSURANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 69

It were mucli to be wished that the philosophers of the
study would consider frankly and loyally the instance of a
weak and timid animal whose urgent instinct is to save
itself from its natural enemies by instant flight, but which,
when it has young ones, faces its dreaded enemy and engages
in a desperate and absurdly hopeless battle in their defence.
It assuredly does not stay to reason either when it flies or
when it fights ; for in either case it acts in obedience to its
predominant impulse or instinct. But how has this very re-
markable transformation of nature been brought about?
By maternal affection obviously ; out of which feeling has
sprung the impulse that preponderates over its strong natural
impulse to save itself by flight. In the one case it perceives
intensely — feels vividly rather than perceives definitely
perhaps — its enemy and nothing else, its consciousness
being concentrated in the perception, feeling and action asso-
ciated with that vividly active nerve-centre, and other
consciousnesses being inhibited ; in the other case, it perceives
or feels intensely its young and their danger, its conscious-
ness being concentrated in that group of perceptions, feeling
and conduct, and other consciousnesses being inhibited.
Like one in an ecsta'sy, or like a hypnotic person, it is
absorbed in a circumscribed psychical activity, the rest of its
mind being inactive. There is no conscious reasoning in
the matter, no advised action, no deliberate determination of
will, nothing more than different feeling and different action
springing instantly from changed bodily conditions. It is an
organic machine that is put into the two different frantic
actions by two different springs. Is there any mental philo-
sophy which can give the least explanation of the new
motives that occasion so new and brave a will, one too which
is so entirely alien from the ordinary timid nature of the
creature? Philosophy has been in face of the fact since its
own birth unto now without getting any further than the
discovery that it acts from wstinct — that is to say, that it
acts so because it is in it to do so. Is it any better mental
philosophy which, ignoring the not less powerful bodily
causes that affect man's moods of will, discusses them as
qualities of pure abstractions ? To have any understanding

70 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

in the matter we must substitute for tlie metaphysical notion
of a mental unity the physiological conception of a con-
federation of nerve-centres, that are severally in intimate
relation with the various organs and specialised functions of
the body, and endeavour by patient observation and experi-
ment to find out and to set forth the special correlations
between the distant parts and the innermost nerve-centres.

It is as easy as it is puerile and profitless to prove the
undetermined nature of an energy by excluding arbitrarily
from the problem all consideration of the most important
determining conditions, as those necessarily do who begin
by enforcing the adequacy of a method of introspective
inquiry which cannot possibly take account of them, and by
rejecting the method of inquiry which alone can give an
account of them. It is to carry the pleasant comedy a little
further to put an abstraction in the place of these excluded
real energies,and to invoke its agency as an all-suf&cient expla-
nation ; thus, as always, the apt word being made to do duty
for the lacking idea. The particular volition is an act of, or
caused by, the will ; the will is not caused by anything but
itself; the former we may observe and deal with practically,
as we do with other forms of energy, the latter is super-
natural and known only by intuition : all the changing
volitions of daily life, bettering or worsening as we advance
in years, strong in health and weak in sickness, infantile in
the child and imbecile in idiocy, inspired in the man of
genius and common-place in common-place people, brutally
vigorous in some practical men and weak and impulsive in
moat women, always fluctuating, never exactly the same, in
quality and energy in the same individual ; — all these are
caused by the will ; they vary infinitely in power and quality,
but it changes not in its essence ; they acknowledge time,
place, and conditions, but it is serene above time, place, and
conditions. Why meanwhile they should change so much
in the individual when they have an unchanging cause does
not clearly appear. If it be perchance owing to the imper-
fections and the varying states of the instruments or organs
through which they are constrained to manifest themselves,
then one cannot well see how its subjection to imperfect

THE POSITIVE ASSUEAilCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 71

instruments can fail to weigh heavily upon the freedom of the
will in all the manifestations of its energy, or what ad-
vantage it is to have a freewill which cannot ever manifest
itself freely ; or how we contrive entirely to escape from the
entangling fetters of the inadequate instrument when we get
the self-conscious intuition of its absolute freedom.

SECTION Y.

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OP CONSCIOUS IDENTITY.

Theee is hardly any one to he met with now-a-days who holds
strictly and consistently to the belief that mind can work in
the exercise of its function without a brain, at any rate in
this world. While making this general concession, however,
many people do actually in their inmost minds, if not in
outward declaration, make reservation or exception of the
particular functions of will ; or rather perhaps, as with many
persons is not unusual, believe vaguely the general proposi-
tion and the particular contradiction at the same time,
without acknowledging or even perceiving any inconsistency
in themselves. Some of them, if they were pressed closely
to answer definitely and lucidly concerning a matter which
they prefer to leave hazy and indefinite, might admit that
the power of choosing, in which lies the freedom of will, goes
along with some sort of cerebral action, antecedent, contem-
poraneous, or instantly sequent. That knowledge is not got
by introspection ; for consciousness, which cannot even tell
us that we have a brain, is certainly not capable of making
known the different brain-changes that go along with its
manifold affections. If emotio mentis means commotio cerebri,
as we have the best reason to believe it does, the emotion
itself does not give the least hint of the cerebral agitation,
though other bodily disturbances do. From the commotion
of feeling itself we could not derive the smallest suspicion
of a subjacent molecular explosion.

72 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

The odd thing is that from this admitted incompetence of
consciousness to testify concerning what it is not its function
to observe, we are required to draw the nowise legitimate
conclusion of its essential independence of brain. Instead, of
drawing what seems the sober and natural conclusion that
consciousness has no authority to declare whether its states
are the consequences of brain-states or not — as they clearly
may be for anything it has to say one way or the other in the
matter- — we are to see in its ignorance the absolute certitude
that they are not ; not otherwise than as if we were asked to
accept from a man without smell the testimony that a rose
was scentless, or to be satisfied with the evidence of a person
who should declare that the rose had no smell because he
could not see its perfume, or protest that it was not red
because he could not smell its colour. As the inquirer tests
the authority of the man without smell by comparing it with
the testimonies of other persons who can smell, and so proves
the failure to be not in the rose but in him ; and as he tests
the evidence or want of evidence of one sense by comparing
it with the evidence of other senses ; so he should test the
authority of introspective consciousness by comparing it with
the evidence of those other methods of observation which
have convinced him that he has a brain and that changes in
it move parallel with changes of consciousness. It may
come to pass in the process of time that these intimate and
hidden workings of the brain shall be watched from without,
and their exact correspondences with changes of thought
and feeling noted, and they perhaps measured by some
exceeding delicate psychometer; but even when that has
come to pass, if it ever do — when that which appeals now
secretly to consciousness is then known openly to sense —
consciousness vrill still be as far as ever from giving the least
hint of them. That fact will not be superadded testimony
to its independence of matter and to its spiritual sufiBciency;
it will only add to the strength of the proof of its incom-
petence as a witness in the matter.

Let it be granted, for the sake of the argument, that
consciousness is in some unknown way the direct effect of
intimate cerebral action, one could not then logically expect

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 73

it to reveal and declare by direct intuition the material energy
tLat caused it. For what else would that be but to demand
that consciousness should in the moment of intuition be itself
and its molecular antecedents — the effect and the cause at
one and the same instant ? Consciousness lives only in the
instant and cannot go back in direct intuition to its most
proximate antecedent; and to go baci to its material ante-
cedent would be to go back to that which is not it, but its
cause. Like a muscular contraction, which is a series of
shocks or waves following one another so rapidly as to appear
continuous, consciousness is a series of instants of con-
sciousness so rapid as to seem continuous. Its failure to
testify in that matter is no more proof of its independence
of material cause than the failure of an individual's self-
consciousness to reveal to him that his self is anywise de-
pendent upon a grandfather is proof that he could ever have
come into being without a grandfather. Already it has
been shown that the first obscure sentiment that any one
experiences, the most primitive manifestation of his con-
sciousness, whatever that be, presupposes in the constitu-
tional structure of his body aU humanity that has gone
before : does self-consciousness tell him aught of that mo-
mentous experience or even give the smallest hint of it?

When we experience a state of consciousness that we are
not able to refer to an exciting cause, as we refer the sensa-
tion of sound to the external body, we invent a faculty as
the cause of it ; for example, when we feel an emotion, we
are conscious of no material cause of it, and we accordingly
imagine an emotional faculty as part of the furniture of
mind, as we m like manner refer an outcomiag volition to a
faculty of will. All the while there are perhaps suflBcient
physical antecedents of the emotion and will in the states of
the internal organs of the body that are hidden from us ;
but having no perceptions of these organic affections, we
please ourselves with the mental faculties which we create and
put in their places. There is no one who does not think
a smell or a taste to be more essentially subjective, more
intimately mental, than a sight or sound, because its cause
is less gross and palpable, more subtile and latent ; indeed,

74 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

SO seemingly objective are the latter senses that had we
possessed them only, and no higher mental life than the
sensations which they furnish, it may be questioned whether
we should ever have felt the need of inventing a spiritual
mind at all. We know well now, however, that taste and
smell are not more specially mental than sight and sound,
because we have convinced ourselves by more exact observa-
tions and larger experience that the sensations have their
objective causes in the properties of special material
substances. There remains to be done a like useful
service for emotion and will : a service not to be successfully
done for a long time to come — first, because they are rooted
in the organic life, the intimate, intricate, and manifold
affections of which, and their essential relations with cerebral
functions, are hardly known at all ; secondly, because the
conditions of emotional sensibility in the brain, the different
categories or forms of human feeling and will, represent the
structuralised experiences of an indefinitely long line of
ancestors; and, thirdly, because in accordance with that fact
their natural stimuli are social, in any and every emotion
the energies of a complex social involution in structure being
unlocked by the fitting social stimulus. As we now perceive
plainly that the uniformities of our notions of the external
world are due to the uniform operations of our senses, so
when we have attained to an accurate and exact knowledge
of the material substrata of thought, feeling, and will, we
shall perceive plainly that the uniformities of our feelings
and passions are due to the uniform operations of the
internal organs of the body upon the historically structu-
ralised brain.

Meanwhile, the immediately urgent business of the
serious and practical student of mind is to betake himself
diligently to an earnest study of the body, in order to get
clear and distinct conceptions of what it is organically, and
what it can do and does habitually as an organic machine
without extraneous help. Let him be as metaphysically
minded as he will, his proper course is to undertake this
pre-essential enterprise, postponing to its thorough accom-
plishment the more aspiring studies of those things that are

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 75

assumed to be beyond the capacities of physical agencies.
Proceeding in that way to the study of the body with
frank and open mind, he perceives that it is a physiological
unity ; that the essential principle of its being and function
is a principle of individuation ; that it is in fact unit and
individual, an ego. It is the most perfect example in nature
of an intimate and essential correlation of manifold diverse
parts working together in the unity of the whole. There is
no need then to rush to the conclusion that in the self-
consciousness of the ego he has an intuitive revelation which
excludes the possibility of a physical basis, lest haply he
should otherwise be left without resource for his belief in
the ego. He perceives next that the physiological unity,
although changing its particles day by day and continually
taking new developments in new circumstances, keeps its
identity as long as it lives ; unlike as it may be at fifty
years of age that which it was at five years of age, it is yet
at fifty the development of that which it was at five, and
bears in its nature" inefiaceable traces of its sufierings and
doings at that early period. It represents a principle of
continuity or filiation, whereby the present is a development
of the past, and not of the past of the individual only, but
of the past of the kind ; for he is not merely one, but one
with his kind, co-member with others of a common social
body and all members one of another. Why, then, the hot
haste to ascribe the consciousness of continuity to an
intuition of identity which excludes the possibility of a
physical basis and necessitates the instant appeal to an
immaterial entity ? Self-consciousness shows itself in a bad
way here ; for, isolating the individual mind as it needs must
by its method, it breaks actual continuity with the past,
yields no explanation of the inborn lines of thought and
feeling, and shuts out all opening for any such inquiry.
Were its method sufficient, the individual would have to be
studied as a thing apart, having no connection with the
past, no portion in the future ; but as he does not thus stand
apart in nature, but has a part in it, we may without exag-
geration say that the more self-sufficient it is as a method,
the more inefficient it necessarily is.

76 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

Are not, in tmth, the individual's conscions memories of
his affections and acts far less complete and stable than the
organism's registered memories of its affections and acts?
The former are transient and may be effaced, the latter are
fixed and well-nigh ineffaceable. If identity had no better
foundation than conscious memory, there is no one who
would not lose continuous consciousness of it before he was
thirty years old. Who in ripe manhood could persuade
himself that he was the same self as when he was a little
child, were his self-consciousness the only witness ? To recall
to mind my sentiments, inclinations, and opinions at different
epochs of life — so far as that is possible — remembering how
well they pleased me at the time, and, comparing them with
my present very different sentiments and inclinations, to
reflect how ill they would please me now, must be to convince
me that my present self is more unlike my former self than
different persons are unlike each other ; indeed, to imagine
myself confronted with myself at each of these different
epochs would be to be confronted with so many individuals
with whom I had little or no sympathy, nay perhaps to
be actually affronted by them if they made a claim of near
relationship ; and in the end I must needs feel very much
obliged to my body for enabling me to preserve the conviction
of my identity. I am only sure that I am myseK by going back
in memory through the succession of experiences which it
has had in different situations and circumstances, and bj
linking together its pursuits, fortunes, and adventures. The
consequence is that when I return after many years to visit
a place in which a considerable part of my life was spent, I
cannot realise how I felt and acted there, and can hardly realise
that I ever lived there ; the piece of history seems to want
reality, to be very much like a dream ; and the reason is that I
am so much changed and that my changed identity cannot
identify itself with the unchanged identity of the place. I
am dependent really upon my memory of events and circum-
stances, and I go back to the past scene therefore, not with
the direct and vivid certainty of an intuitive consciousness, but
with the dim and discontinuous consciousness with which I
go back to a dream. Disease may sweep clean away my

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 77

consciousness of identity, notwithstanding that, though
changed, I still am.

If any one chooses to assure me that not a single particle
of my body is what it was thirty years ago, and that its form
has entirely changed since then ; that it is absurd therefore
to speak of its identity ; and that it is absolutely necessary to
suppose it to be inhabited by an immaterial entity which holds
fast the personal identity amidst the shifting changes and
chances of structure : — I answer him that other people who
have known me from my youth upwards, but have not my
self-conscious certainty of identity, are nevertheless as
much convinced of it as I am, and would be equally sure of
it even if, deeming me the greatest liar in the world, they
did not believe a word of my subjective testimony ; that
they are equally convinced of the personal identities of their
dogs and horses whose self-conscious testimony goes for
nothing in the matter ; and lastly, that admitting an imma-
terial substance in me it must be admitted to have gone
through so many changes that T am not sure the least
immaterial particle of it is what it was thirty years ago ;
that with the best intention in the world therefore I see not
the least need of, nor get the least benefit from, the assumed
and seemingly superfluous entity. It might indeed be right
to go further, and in turn to assure .him that his intuition
of identity is really the explicit declaration of its physio-
logical unity and identity which his body makes in con-
sciousness ; and that to attribute to the mere translator the
credit and authority of author, to the transcript the authority
of the original, is to make a singularly ungrateful return for
what he owes to the body.

Those who speak of mind and consciousness as co-exten-
sive and yet not having extension, as their wont is, aftd treat
the notion of unconscious mind as a gross absurdity, should
soberly explain where, during a particular conscious state,
all the rest of the mind is ; where in fact all that furniture
beyond the particular piece then in use is stored. Here, is
something that does not occupy space, that exists only so
far as it is conscious, and which nevertheless on any occasion
has not so much as the thousandth part of its being in con-

78 WILL m ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

scions activity. Where is the non-active part of its being?
Is it for the time being not in existence because it is not in
conscionsness ? Well might they say with St. Augustine,
if they reflected as closely as he did upon the wonders of
memory — ' Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself.
And where should that be which containeth not itself? Is
it without it, and not within ? how then doth it not com-
prehend itself? '

The abstract notion of a metaphysical identity has para-
lysed positive observation and occasioned an almost entire
neglect of the concrete facts as they bear upon the subject
of personal identity ; patent as the day, they have been as
unseen as the stars when the sun is bright. The entity in-
voked, there was an end of question and inquiry ; even curi-
osity was unborn and belief unquestioning, as from of old
belief has always been most unquestioning in those domains
of mystery which inquiry and question might not enter,
where they were not even conceived as possible. Eecoiliug
from* the danger of intruding upon sacred ground, and from
the hardly less deterrent dif&eulty of resolutely forming clear
and definite ideas and expressing them in exact terms and
phrases, men have persistently dealt with words instead of
things, and with words as things. Had I the constant in-
tuitive feeling of being the same, as I am metaphysically re-
quired to have, I should not know that I was the same, any
more than a person who lived always in one sensation could
know that he had a sensation ; for is it not by feeling the
changes or differences in myself that I know that I have a
foundation of sameness — that I mark a continuity of de-
velopment ?

To say that memory has registered the successions of
changes so that I am able to recur to them by its means,
is not to make the smallest step forward in actual know-
ledge; it is merely to transform a descriptive name into
a faculty, and then to proceed to conjure with it. It is the
body which registers the changes in its structure, not any
abstract memory-entity, and the recurrence of the acti-
vities in it is memory. It is no exaggeration to say that
the memory of a series of events is never quite accurate and

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDEKTITY. 79

never exactly tlie same on two occasions, for the condition of
self at tlie time of the recurrence in memory tinctures deeply
the colours or qualities of the remembrance : the exact and
perfect memory it is impossible to have. How deep and far-
reaching too these changes of self! "When a person minded
to write a biography of himself sits down in mature age to
describe the events and feelings and circumstances of his
childhood, it is a romance, not a history, that he really com-
poses ; as he himself plainly perceives if, after he has done
his work, he chance to have the opportunity of comparing
his story of the sorrows or joys of some important event in
his career with a particular record of it written by himself
at the time. Inflamed with the fire of youth, the individual
walks with head erect, confident and cheerfully defying des-
tiny ; sobered and saddened by experience and age, the same
individual bows in mind and body under it. Naturally,
therefore, is the sentiment of freewill much stronger in
youth and vigour than in age and feebleness ; for the desire
to assert the self as against other selves and things, which is
the essence of the sentiment, is no other than the self-con-
servative instinct of life in its highest conscious expression ;
passionate and confident therefore in youth, more deliberate
and diffident in age. Whoso is suffering pain has a less vivid
sentiment of freewill than he has when he is enjoying plea-
sure, for in the one case he is undergoing a repression, in
the other case an expansion, of self. See, again, how great
a transformation of the ego is produced by the oppression of
disease ! He whose brain is exhausted by overwork becomes
impatient, irritable, acrid, and above all things wishful for
rest. At the same time, his tastes, sentiments, judgments,
and volitions are changed: he takes no pleasure in that
which formerly and ordinarily gave him pleasure ; is critical,
captious, and full of offence ; has no confidence in his own
judgments, which it is a pain to him to form, and well-nigh
an impossibility to express ; feels no animation of hope or
aim, and is destitute alike of energy to wish or will. His
friends who know him well, seeing that he is no longer
himself, make allowance for him, not minding what he says
when he speaks bitterly to them ; and he himself, when he

80 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

recovers from his prostration, looks back in shame and amaze-
ment on the transformed being that he was.

The ego is not a constant but a yariable. It represents
the aggregate of sensations clearly or obscurely felt at any
given moment, whether springing from the original consti-
tution or from the acquired nature and habits of the organ-
ism ; these sensations themselves representing the sum of
silent multitudes of activities that are going on below the
threshold of consciousness, and which, albeit unperceived
and unfelt immediately, vibrate subtHely in the most intimate
and intricate interactions of organic depths, and in the result
affect deeply the tone of consciousness. One may take leave
to doubt whether the holiest saint could preserve in his de-
votion the most serene and sacred tone of spiritual feeling,
if one or two of his disordered viscera were propagating act-
ively a succession of discordant vibrations to their represent-
ative territories in the brain, or whether the most subtile
and exalted intuition of consciousness into the mysteries of
the inner being could triumph over the discordant jars of a
deranged liver. When the aggregate of vibrations that are
distinctly above the threshold of consciousness is in harmony
with the whole of the multitudinous vibrations at and below
the threshold — when the strings, so to speak, of all the in-
struments of the orchestra, both of the players in sight and
of the players out of sight, are in unison — then the ego is
whole, complete, harmonious. On the other hand, when
that is not so, when the illumined energies are not in har-
mony with the unillumined energies, the present state with
the character, or when some especial discord prevails in the
orchestra, then the ego is incomplete, partial, discordant;
the individual not at one with himself. Introspection itself,
had it been thorough and faithful, might have opened this
field of inquiry, but here again the all-sufl&cient abstract ego
stood like a forbidding angel in the way of patient and plod-
ding inquiry, and precluded all fruitful study of the nature
and affiections of the real ego.

It is a favourite axiom of the metaphysician that the ego
has not extension and is not divisible, its definition being
made out of blank negations of these positive qualities;

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 81

but it is an axiom whidi after all is confronted, if not confuted,
by evidence which goes far to show, if we examine it fairly,
that the ego has extension and is divisible. Here, indeed,
may be noted a very pretty inconsistency on his part : while
telling us that space is essentially a form of thought, innate
in the ego, he assures us in the same breath that the ego
has not extension ; in other words, that which has not ex-
tension thinks extension by virtue of its innate form. Mean-
while may it not actually be because the ego has extension
that it can and does think space in every act of consciousness
— in every thought and feeling, as well as in every percep-
tion — and that, as will be seen later, it is capable of disinte-
gration by disease? Another consideration: Those who
protest so much that mind has not extension, would do well
to explain clearly whether every sensation, as such, is not a
function of pure consciousness. It is impossible for them
seriously to dispute it. But it is certain that every sensation
takes place through an extended part of the body, and
though not itself material, is quantitative and qualitative ;
that it must have that foundation in extension, and be felt
somewhere in definite, even measurable degree, and of
definite quality. Here, then, we have mind in its capacity of
sensation taking on the qualities of extension. Lastly, let
us consider this : That the moment an individual has said to
himself I — whether as I feel, or as I think, or I am — he has
enunciated his own limitation. The very consciousness of
the ego is the betrayal of its limitation in time and space,
and the proof of its extension ; for it is impossible for him
to say I without positing a non-ego from which he is defined
by limitation. So it turns out that the fundamental fact of
consciousness is itself the most absolute declaration that the
ego has extension. Certainly, if that be so, it will not lessen
the trouble of comprehending how the finite, having form
and occupying space, can declare itself to be made in the
image of the Infinite, which is without form and does not
occupy space.

Our introspective psychologist of the study, who specu-
lates at his ease about an abstract will that has only a
notional existence, which accommodates itself pliantly to his

82 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

needs and moods of thought ; meddling not with the various,
far from readily confonning, concrete volitions that are the
real existences with wnich practical psychologists and men
of the world have to do ; cannot ever he brought to apprehend
adequately the divers insensible conditions of body that
make themselves felt as essential elements in the feelings,
judgments and volitions of the individual. Could he do so,
he would not fail to perceive that suicide and self-sacrifice
are equally instances of a person's doing that which pleases
him at the time ; that which, being most agreeable to or
agreeing most with the then inclinations of his nature, seems
to him best to choose. ' Did ever any one,' asks Bishop
Butler, ' act otherwise than as he pleased ? ' ' On different
occasions I have talked freely and argued vainly with persons
who, entertaining the notion of suicide, have subsequently
carried it into effect, some of them having gone through a
vast amount of previous suffering in their struggles to with-
stand the deep inclinations of their natures ; and I have not
seen reason to entertain the least doubt that, in yielding
obedience thereto, they acted otherwise than as they pleased.
Tou will say perhaps that they were mad and not therefore
to be reckoned valid and useful instances. To that I answer
that, even if they were mad, they were not on that account
outside the range of a philosophy whose stern concern is
with the solidities of facts : secondly, that, so far from being
mad, some of them were as calm, cool and rational as any one
I ever talked with ; too rational in fact, having too great a
preponderance of intellect over desire to live happily in
illusion : lastly, that those of them who were mad afforded
by their disorder the best proofs of the determination of the
likings and volitions by bodily causes.

In the full strength of buoyant health and bodily energy
a person delights in active exercise, even when he has no
other purpose in the exercise than the expenditure of energy ;
he is sure he is making a free choice, because he is doing that
which his organisation prompts most strongly and has most
pleasure in. What more repugnant to him then, more sad-
dening, than the thoughts of inactivity and death ? But why
' In his second sermon on ' Human Nature.'

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OV CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 83

is he not disquieted and sad because lie cannot fly, which
would plainly be the freest and best exercise if he could take
it? Indeed, we may well imagine the eagle, as it wings its
swift way high in the heavens, and discerns with piercing
eye, itself invisible to them, the little creatures creeping
painfully about on the ground far below it, being struck with
a wondering pity for them, or with pitying wonder that they
can have a sufficient sense of pleasure to go on living in so
sadly maimed a way. Man's body not having been so con-
stituted as to enable him to fly does not inspire his mind
with the desire to fly, and accordingly he envies not the
eagle, nor ever thinks his freedom of will thwarted because
he cannot choose or will to fly. Nor does he disquiet himself
in vain because he has not a third eye at the back of his
head, although he would manifestly see a great deal more of
the world if he had it. In all things, great and small, his
desires and volitions bear the impress and limitations of his
bodily structure and state, just as do the desires and volitions
of each kind of animal. The tiger would not wish and will
to tear with tooth and claw, if tooth and claw were not con-
stituent parts of it : the feline structure of body, animal or
human, bespeaks a feline nature of mind.

In the feebleness and decrepitude of age, in the hour of
mortal sickness, in the shadow of approaching death, how
repugnant the notion of activity ! How little repugnant,
nay how welcome oftentimes, the idea of death ! Leave me
at peace, let me rest, is the instinctive cry, the prayer of
the expiring powers. As the bodily hold on life relaxes
with the failure of the energies of the tissues, the mental
hold is loosened also, until the near extinction of life is the
extinction of all desire to live. A man has never so little
appetite for immortality as when he is just putting off mor-
tality. The horror of death is not the horror of the dying
man in fear of his own annihilation, but the hoiTor of the
living friends around him at his annihilation for them ; who,
moreover, being themselves in full life and vigour, revolt
instinctively against the repugnant notion of ceasing to be.
Nothing is more remarkable than the complete indifference
to life commonly evinced at the near approach of death ;

84 will'ht its metaphysical aspect.

notMng more hard to conceive in tlie full vigour of life than
the possibility of ever being indifferent to it. The judgment
of the ego in each case is the bodily judgment.

It is the first duty of the sincere student of mind to
emancipate himself from the bad theological fashion of
despising the body, and to endeavour to gain and hold just
conceptions of its admirable structure and functions. There
is mighty little nobility in the spectacle of a soul scorning its
earthly tenement as long as it is united to it, and clinging to
it with a miserable tenacity, desperately unwilling to leave it,
when the time comes for the inevitable separation. Let him
cease to be blind to himself and to things as they are, and
keen-eyed to see himself as he is not, and he will then put his
mind into that open and candid disposition in which he will
be able to apprehend things truly as they are and to reason
rightly of them. Before all things let him undertake a
frank and searching inquiry into what the body can do by
itself, giving to purely reflex acts and instinct their natural
interpretations ; that is to say, not reading the higher into
the lower, consciousness into reflex function or mind into
instinct, still less making of instinct some mysterious, quasi-
divine impulse, but drawing from the phenomena of instinct
and reflex action the simple and natural physical lesson of
what the body can do, since that is what they do prove ; not
seeking the first blind and tentative efforts of an immaterial
substance in the operations of matter, but discovering in the
functions of highly organised matter the beginning of those
phenomena of intelligent adaptation which, in their highest
conscious expressions, are thought to necessitate the hypo-
thesis of an immaterial agency. He may then perceive
that instinct is misread and perhaps undervalued in some of
its manifestations, and that intelligence is habitually over-
valued in its essential signification.

Two errors are in common vogue in regard to instinct :
first, that it never errs ; secondly, that it never adapts itself
to changed circumstances. In reality it does both ; on the
one hand, it errs when in changed circumstances, not
changing to them, it performs old acts that are obsolete,
and, on the other hand, it does sometimes make imperfect

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF CONSCIOUS IDENTITY. 85

and tentative adaptations to changed circumstances. As
regards intelligence too, it is quite certain that nine-tenths
of a man's daily acts that were originally intelligent and
now seem voluntary are not really voluntary, but automatic.
The same complex mechanism is used for their performance,
whether it be put in action by a command of the will or by a
stimulus of another sort, as we observe when any one shuts
his eyes voluntarily, and at another time shuts them in-
voluntarily on the occasion of a local irritation or of a
threatening gesture, and in a thousand similar examples;
and therefore it is that such actions are habitually and
tacitly supposed to be voluntary by one who, observing
them, thinks of himself as an essentially conscious being.
Meanwhile, after they have become thoroughly fixed and
habitual they are not voluntary ; the will is not required even
to start them ; the least excitation will do that ; the difliculty
indeed sometimes is to prevent them, the will being called
upon to do so and perhaps failing.

Here then are actions precisely alike in complex and
purposive nature; we call them instinctive or reflex, and
pronounce them to be bodily, when we know not that con-
scious intelligence has preceded them in the order of de-
velopment; we think them something quite different, and
ascribe them to an immaterial entity, when we have watched
the process of conscious adaptation that has gone before
them. What they really prove is this — and it is the right
lesson to be learnt from them — that the so-called intelligent
design and execution of an act neither implies the existence
of a pre-designing consciousness nor requires the interven-
tion of any extra-physical agency in the individual organism ;
that they are examples of what the body can do by itself in
virtue of its constitution as a complex organic mechanism.
The unconscious is the fundamental and active element, the
conscious the concomitant and indicative; and the aim of
true scientific inquiry must be to find out and set forth how
much is essential, and how much or how little the incidental
has for its part in the functions ; not to seek for the origin
of the operations of matter in any form of consciousness,
with which they can notably dispense, but rather to seek for

86 "WILL In its metaphysical aspect.

the origin of consciousness in the highest operations of
matter, with which it notably cannot dispense. At any rate
this axiom should sink deep and be held fast in the mind —
that the purposive nature of an act does not involve of
necessity a pre-designing consciousness ; that matter does
not get purpose from consciousness, whether or not it be
that consciousness gets it from matter.

Suppose that the inquirer who proceeds in this fashion
end's by ascribing to matter all the grandeur and glories of
mind : has he really affected in the least the moral meaning
of his own nature ? He has glorified and aggrandised the
functions of matter, and they in the end are just as mysterious
and incomprehensible to him as mind. If he is honest with
himself he cannot help confessing that any conception of
spirit which he entertains is either an indefinite negation of
matter, and therefore no actual conception at all, or really
the conception of an exceedingly subtilised matter. A
fundamental postulate he must have, whether it be molecule
or mind ; and it is a question of words rather than of things
whether he chooses to spiritualise matter or to materialise
mind. He recoils from a material conception, however
refined, though it is in the order of all his other conceptions
of i3&ture, and clings to an indefinite spiritual conception,
mainly because of an instinctive aversion to lose his conscious
individuality; for in the full energy of conscious life he
cannot bring himself to realise the possibility of its extinc-
tion with the death of the body. Nor does the revolting
and humiliating spectacle of the corruption of the body
after its death, as it undergoes the process of decomposi-
tion into simple elements, tend in any way to lessen that
hindrance to a successful glorification of matter. Meanwhile,
there are not wanting persons in different parts of the earth
— ^in the enlightened as well as in the dark places thereof —
the destruction of whose individualities he can contemplate
with easy serenity, as there are doubtless many persons who
in their turn can contemplate with equanimity the future
destruction of his individuality.

SECTION VI.

CONCLUDING EEPLECTIONS.

The foregoing exposition of some of the faults and fallacies
in the foundations of the metaphysical doctrine of freewill
ought, if itself sound, to prove that they are nowise so sound
and surely laid in the testimony of consciousness as it has
been assumed and asserted they are. In fact self -conscious-
ness seems especially adapted to deceive us in that matter,
both in respect of that which it omits to tell us and in
respect of that which it does urgently tell us. As already
explained, its capital omission is that it illumines directly
the results, but does not illumine directly the causes, whence
the natural illusion of an undetermined will ; its testimony
is the testimony of its present affection, which, however,
actually is the outcome of all the preceding affections of
consciousness experienced by the individual and his fore-
fathers. In that which it does directly tell us, on the other
hand, there is a singularly forcible suggestion of inde-
pendence. For in every voluntary determination there are
certainly two elements : the consciousness of an energy or
effort, and a distinct feeling of satisfaction in making the
effort ; which last is probably the expression of the desire to
assert self, in accordance with the fundamental instinct of
self-conservation.

The consciousness of effort is in truth a fundamental
fact of experience; no explanation will ever enable us to
get behind it; it springs from the relation of self to the
not-self, their opposition and interaction, and is at once the
revelation of their difference and identity. In the sense
of effort there is involved necessarily a resistance, which is
the basis of the belief of the non-ego. "Were there an
entire and perfect fitness of relations between the ego and
the non-ego, a complete certitude in every respect, a full
and exact harmony, consciousness would be extinguished.
The consciousness of will may be said to mark the incom-
pleteness and uncertainty of the relations. One surmounts

88 WILL IN ITS METAPHySICAl ASPECT.

self only by not tHnting of self, coalesces with nature by a
complete self-surrender to the order thereof. Individuality
is a passing severance from the larger life of nature, death-
doomed therefore by its nature as a severed part. Could a
man bring himself into complete harmony of relations with
nature in every respect, mental and bodily, identify himself
with it thoroughly, he might be immortal, but in that case
he would secure immortality at the cost of individuality.

The second constituent element of volition — namely, the
distinct feeling of satisfaction attending it — is well adapted
to inspire the individual with the conviction that he has
wUled and acted with perfect freedom : it is probably the
main factor in that illusive consciousness. See how the
drunkard, the madman, the passionately jealous or angry
man, let his conduct be never so ridiculous, believes himself
to be acting with entire freedom so long as his mood or
passion lasts ; he has at the moment so distinct a feeling of
satisfaction in what he does that he never felt more sure of
his freedom; but when his passion cools or his mood
changes he perceives clearly that, swayed or constrained by
it, he was nowise so free as he imagined. His gesticulations
and fury were not, as he flattered himself, triumphs of re-
sistance to constraint and proud proofs of his independence,
but the jubilant contortions of his passion as it bore him
irresistibly along in its current. If an angry man listens at
all to the admonitions of prudence and sense addressed to
him during the heat of his rage, they serve only to inflame
his reckless determination to do as he likes ; he rebels against
them as impertinent attempts to constrain his freedom, in-
sulting and exulting over them. Let him think of them
afterwards when he is calmer and clearer in mind, then he
is amazed and perhaps ashamed that he did not suffer them
to affect him. But when appeal is made from Philip drunk
to Philip sober the appeal is to two different natures with
different likings ; and it is not legitimate to leave that fact
out of sight and to base an argument of freedom of choice
on the assumption that the appeal was made to the same
natures ; for assuredly the actuating inward powers — namely,
the force of passion which prevails on one occasion, and the

CONCLUDING EEFLECTIONS. 89

force of prudence which prevails on the other — are not in the
same proportionate strength on the two occasions. The
problem of the motive elements of a particular act of will is
a problem of the particular state of the individual at the
time, not of his state a day or a month before or a day or a
month after ; not even of his state a few minutes before or
after, if there has happened meanwhile the pain of a colic,
or the torpor of a sated passion, or some other bodily change
too mean and trivial for the appreciation of high philosophy,
but not too mean and trivial to produce far-reaching effects
in the extremely complex, intimately united, and mobile
elements of the organism.

In discussing the motivation of will, it is not always suf-
ficiently borne in mind by those who advocate its so-called
freedom that the individual is a whole, compounded not of a
single sentiment or passion but of several sentiments and
passions, each of which has its especial object and gratifica-
tion, and that in doing what pleases him best he may stiU
be doing very differently at different times, according to the
particular sentiment or passion that is then uppermost. The
strongest desire of one occasion shall not be the strongest
desire of another occasion, and yet it may remain true
that the will follows the strongest desire. Nothing but
interminable disputations, futile and profitless, will come
of treating the matter as one of abstract will and abstract
desire. In order to be fruitful, the discussion must leave the
void of the abstract and fix itself upon the particular will
and the particular desire.' In fact, though the organism
subserves one large end — the welfare of the whole — there are
many subsidiary ends included within this main one, each of
which has its own desire of, and pleasure in, fulfilment ; a
special gratification, moreover, which in moderation and due
subordination is good in the particular and good for the
whole, but in over-indulgence or excess is bad in the parti-
cular and for the whole. As many such ends as there are, so
many correspondent wills are there ; as many as are the dif-

' It is not in the multiplication of voluminous systems of psychology,
but in the exact scientific exposition of a single well-studied case of indi-
vidval psychology, that the real hope of progress in psychology lies.

r

90 WILL' IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

ferences in the dignities of these ends, so many are the differ-
ences in the qualities or dignities of their several wills.

By the power which a man has of looking before and after
he is freed from the necessity of living in the present and
of yielding to the immediate impulse, as the infant, the idiot,
and the lower animals for the most part do ; in a particular
conjunction of circumstances he can look back to other con-
junctions of circumstances, or in a particular social medium
he can refer back to, and, in referring, realise to some de-
gree, other social mediums experienced by him personally,
or known to him historically; so he, having a historical
being, makes the past present, and is able to postpone a
present pleasure out of regard to a future gratification of the
same kind or of a higher kind. Suppose the case of one
who, after some passing thoughts of resistance, yields reck-
lessly to a present temptation of sense in spite of the gra-
vest warnings of reason and in clear foresight of the pain-
ful consequences of his indulgence ; with deliberate will he
gains his hour of bliss, though he knows he will have to
suffer a week of woe afterwards : shall we say of him that he
is or is not acting with freewill ? Is he not actually vindi-
cating the freedom of a lower from the coercion of a higher
will ? What he does is to resist the attempted coercion of
the higher motives that press upon him and to indulge in a
reckless freedom of will ; the very sense of defiant freedom
which he has in his resistance to, and rebellion against, the
constraint of higher motive being the pleasure that actuates
him and assures him of it. He prefers the easy freedom of
lower will to the constrained freedom of higher will; in
other' words, he prefers one to another of a hundred possible
wills, all having their several motives of determination, that
are in some of a higher, in others of a lower order. But
he is not free, says the alarmed moralist, when he yields to
the lower motives that lead him down-hill ; he is free only
when ije obeys the higher motives that lead him upwards,
and most free of all when he has made such obedience into
the servitude of habit. In that case, his self-consciousness
deceives him grossly, for it is certain that it tells him and
makes him believe he is as free in the one case as in the

CONCLUDING EEFLECTIONS. 91

other ; and if he be deceived in the one, he may well be de-
ceived in the other also. The moralist who has come to the
clear opinion that liberty and supreme reason are one —
that always ' freedom with right reason dwells ' — would not
do amiss to reflect that, in reality, no constraint is more
stern, heavy, and severe than, that of reason, which, if
dominant, leaves a person no choice between two lines of
conduct ; he cannot choose, if he understands them, between
two mathematical conclusions, one of which is plainly right
and the other plainly wrong ; cannot choose, wishing to live,
whether he should live by taking food or by doing without
food. Its command is not a capricious, impulsive, transient
domination, the tyranny of an hour, obeyed with more or less
pleasure, as that of passion mostly is, but a steady, persis-
tent, grinding despotism, weighing upon the individual with
a dull and mechanical pressure, as it were, and enforcing
an obedience that is attended by little pleasure. The ques-
tion of freewill, as commonly stated, is insoluble truly, but
insoluble only because it has no meaning when we cease to
talk of an abstract notional will and begin to occupy our-
selves with the particular volitions.

Little favour will these discussions have, and little will
they weigh, with the introspectionist, who in the end does
not fail to fall back dogmatically upon the direct intuition
-of freedom. Always, too, metaphysics is at hand to provide
him with abundant arguments to justify the intuition ; for
its sterile perseverance is like that of the barren womb
which never cries 'Enough.' As one might say — I know that
the sun goes round the heavens by the plain evidence of sense,
and arguments to prove the contrary, even though unanswer-
able, will not shake my faith in that positive testimony ; so
he will say — I know that my will is free, for I feel it in every
voHtion which I exert, and arguments to prove the contrary,
even though unanswerable, will not shake my unswerving
faith in the positive testimony of my consciousness. If the
answer be made unto him. Be not deceived, it is not the
sun which goes round the earth, but the earth which goes
round the sun ; and in like manner it is not you who are free
and nature that is under necessity, but you who are under

92 WILl m ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

necessity and nature that is free ; — lie will protest that the
answer is an absurdity. Nevertheless, it is not ; for if there
be freedom anywhere, it certainly cannot be in the conscious
world of the relative, but must be in the unconscious world of
the noumenal. As it was in the beginning so will it be at the
end of the argument : he has so great a faith in the intuition
of freedom that he will not doubt. Between what he wishes
when he is inclined to a favourite sin and his sense of duty
to resist the self-gratification he feels that he has a choice ;
and when he acts from the higher motive he pleases and
deludes himself with the notion that he has willed otherwise
than as he wished, forgetting that he has after all wished to
do his duty. ' Man always wills to do that which he desires
most, when he does not feel himself obliged by the sentiment
of duty to do that which he desires less : ' such is the con-
sistent inconsistency of the freewill doctrine, which — to say
nothing of the absurdity of making the desire in the senti-
ment of duty less than the desire which it overcomes —
actually represents a/ree man as being obliged to do what he
would not wish to do, and as rising to higher freedom in
proportion as the constraint of duty becomes stronger. To
common apprehension does that not sound very like deter-
minism ? It must at any rate be deemed a strange example
of the emancipation of will from motive, though rightly
viewed as an example of emancipation from lower motive.
The wishing or wUling of an end of any sort is really not
consistent with a conception of perfect freedom ; it is at once
to make an imperfection of it. Even God willing an end
would be, as Spinoza said, an incomplete God. A person can
be logically free only when there is such a complete equi-
librium between sentiments, passions, and reflections that
he is in a state of complete indifference ; when he is not
under the least shadow of constraint to act one way or the
other, or to act at all ; when therefore he, properly speaking,
cannot act at all.

Always in respect of freewill or liberty is it to be rightly
borne in mind that the notion of it, whatever its intrinsic
value, is helpful against the pressure of a particular passion
or motive. The belief of its existence therefore may do real

coNCLUDiisra- beflections. 93

work in tlie mind, even thougli tbe thing have no existence.
In its progress thus far mankind has owed perhaps more to
beliefs that have turned out not to be true than to truths
that have remained true. The notion of freewill becomes
itself, merely as notion, a centre of power in the mind ; it
gives time for pause and reflection, when it is stimulated
to action through the accomplished associations on the
required occasions ; and if it has happily been thus brought
into inhibitive action on many similar occasions, it gains the
strength and ease of habit. Here, as elsewhere, the conscious
energy of past function becomes the unconscious mechanism
of present function, which thereupon is able to work without
attention and almost without exertion; wiU loses its char-
racter, so to speak, in attaining to its unconscious perfection ;
and meanwhile the free, unattached path-seeking conscious-
ness and will, that are, as it were, the pioneers and perf ecters
of progress, are available to initiate new and to perfect old
functions. A passionate person who has by patient watch-
fulness over himself and by a course of steady perseverance
and practice accustomed himself to wear an outward air of
calmness and to speak in quiet, measured language when he
is inwardly in a towering passion, making thus a clever art
of his natural defect — as it is the part of wisdom to do with
all natural defects — succeeds in making that regulated dis-
charge of energy the habit of his life, and in the end does it
quite easily ; so much so that nine out of ten persons who
have to do with him imagine him to be a person of sin-
gularly calm temperament. To him meanwhile thus practis-
ing his clever art well-nigh automatically, there is this
advantage — that his consciousness is free to take clear and
full account of all the circumstances of the crisis in a
rapid reflection upon them, and to grasp the right issue,
instead of being swallowed up in the torrent of passion.
Here also the lesson does not fail to make itself evident, that
such excellence of culture cannot ever be reached by a life of
pure self-inspection and mental discipline in the closet ; he
alone can gain it who is content to gain it by diligent
practice among men and things, seeking and using the
occasions of exercise — by doing not thinking only, and doing

94 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

■with and througli and for others ; not, indeed, without feeling,
bnt -with feeling put into deed rather than into display.

If man must thus patiently manufacture himself to habits
of -well-doing by the diligent practice of doing well, and on
most occasions perceives good habits to be a better security
of good conduct than good principles, what becomes of the
opinion that freewill is the foundation and fountain of mora-
lity? For, next to the supposed direct intuition of free-
dom, the postulate of its moral necessity is the strongest
pillar of the doctrine. If man be not free to do well or ill,
how can he be deemed responsible for what he does? Well;
perhaps his responsibility is not for doing what he does,
being what he is, but for being what he is. Let us inquire
a little further into the matter. To deny the freedom of the
will, we are told, is to make morality impossible. Of which
crisp and confident formula, an opponent might declare that it
is no more true than it is true that an acknowledgment of the
law of gravitation makes walking impossible ; indeed, might
justly perhaps go further and say that moral responsibility
could no more coexist with freedom of will than a man could
walk without the law of gravitation. Were any man really
free he would be free from responsibility for his character,
which he could not then train and fashion ; it is because he
is not free, but a product in an order of development, that he
is responsible : responsible for the exercise of his reason to
establish a mental order. Does not then the recognition of
the reign of law in mind actually enlarge and enhance the
rational conception of freedom, by bringing home to the
individual a sense of responsibility not for what he does
only, but in some measure for what he feels and thinks and
is ? And by bringing home to one generation a stem sense
of responsibility for what the next generation shall feel,
think, and be? Tor certainly the circumstances of one
generation make much of the fate of the next.

It is hard to see how the notion of responsibility can
possibly attach to things that are not linked to one
another by the tie of causation, and how without such
unfailing tie there could fail to be chaos instead of kosmos
in the region of mind. Assuredly the sense of responsi-

CONCLUDING EEFLECTIONS. 95

bility is not founded on the consciousness of freedom, since
it exists in persons who deny positively the validity of such
consciousness, and who moreover argue that upon that
foundation, even if it be accepted as valid, not responsi-
bility but irresponsibility alone can be based. Eather
perhaps ought we to say with Kant that the categorical
moral imperative, which inwardly commands us to do duty
independently of all external attractions or distractions,
imposes the conception of freedom ; that liberty is of neces-
sity involved in this conception of obligation ; and that we are
bound by such implication of moral law to accept the concept,
even though but for it we should never have thought of
freedom in any department of knowledge. We are to take
it in fact as the implicate of a fundamental obligation,
instinct in us, to do uprightly ; for that is what it actually
comes to. It is the law in the heart, the monitor in the
bosom, suggesting with urgency, enjoining with power. In
other words, having first wrapped up a principle of liberty
in our conception of duty, we proceed in due time to unwrap
it, and having discovered it where we put it, we can properly
declare that it was involved there. On the one hand, then,
the freedom of will, as perceived by us in ourselves, is
maintained to be the basis of morality ; on the other hand,
the moral basis is affirmed to involve or to postulate implicitly
a freedom which we could not ever have perceived explicitly.
To which principle is our homage due ?

Without denying the categorical moral imperative, its
supposed implication is nowise self-evident, for it may fairly
be argued that the obligation no more involves such a con-
ception of liberty as is assumed, than the consciousness of
freedom involves morality. It is because mankind has felt
dimly and vaguely the inward imperative, because it has
been unawares under that constraint, and because it has not
been free to go its own way, that it has made the progress
which it has made from its lower to its higher stages of
being. The implicate of the moral imperative is not liberty
but constraint. Hence to our surprise we struggle against
passions that prompt and please in order to accomplish duties
that repel, and are at first almost painful ; the lower affini-

96 WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

ties and attractions of our natures, as in cliemical develop-
ments, sacrificing themselves to higher affinities, disappearing
in the process, and by such sacrifice constituting the higher.
Had man been left to follow freely the bent of such freewill
as he has he would most likely have gone the way of his
passions to an unspeakable degradation, if not to actual
destruction. At bottom that which we discern in his moral
instinct is the necessity of nature operating in the evolution
of the highest organic matter and so urging or compelling it
into more complex combinations and functions. Since the
process is going on continually in chemical combinations,
why wonder that a similar process takes place among the
several passions to accomplish a moral evolution, and that it
gives intimation of itself in feeling ?

A positive fact of observation it is that the power of
adaptation to surroundings within certain limits, intrinsically
and extrinsically fixed, is a property of all living organic
matter ; and assuredly this property belongs to the highest
evolution of matter, as it exists in the exceeding delicate
and complex organisation of the human brain, as well as to
the simplest particle of living protoplasm. The law of
adaptation which we thus discern and trace alike in every
instance of organic development and function, we discern
and trace also in the accommodation of the individual to his
social surroundings and in the consequent modification of his
character. Let him cease then to labour to know himself in
himself, and let him strive diligently to know himself — as
he can only, properly speaking, know himself — in nature ;
looking not for the source of any absolute criterion of
truth or right in himself, where he can never find more than
self, but seeking it in the common feeling or instinct
derived from the large experience of the race. Humanity,
not self, is the true concern of the individual who would
rise to a higher self. '

Here, then, is made plainly manifest the duty of the in-
dividual to place himself in circumstances of action in which
his character will be modified for the better — to do in order
to he ; the solemn responsibility under which he is to deter-
mine rationally in himself, by help of circumstances, that

CONCLUDING EEFLECTIONS. 97

wHcli may thereby be predetermined in his future conduct,
and in some measure in his posterity. If he has no living
posterity in whom thus to strive to predetermine a good
manner of thinking and feeling, any good work he does
which is an instruction, a joy, a help to those who come
after him, by awakening them to sympathy with thoughts
and hopes and feelings that otherwise they might have
heeded not, shall be his posterity. All which it will perhaps
be said is true, and can be entirely accepted ; but it does
not touch the indisputable fact that a person has sometimes
by a solemn resolution changed the whole line of conduct of
his life immediately. There have been many other moral
revolutions like that which converted Saul the persecutor
into Paul the apostle. True ; but will anybody seriously
maintain that the enthusiasm, the moral energy, the fiery
character, the sti*ong will, the intellectual power of that
apostle were the pure result of his conversion? Do you
not find as decisive evidence of his daemonic character in his
epistles and in the events of his apostleship as you find in
the energy that he displayed as a persecutor ? If a great
sinner becomes a great saint, and the greater sinner the
greater saint, he draws his inspiration not from the void but
from his character, whose energies have happily now got a
better direction. Without question, a deep moral agitation
produced by a powerful impression and reinforced by habitual
recollections, especially when it is swelled by the infection of
like emotion in many other persons, will reach below ordinary
habits of thought and feeling and stir the inmost elements of
character, fusing and welding them into new moulds. But
the material must be there, and must be of such quality as
to be capable of taking these new forms or moulds. Always
must there be something akin within to vibrate in sympathy
with the quality of the power without ; if not, the latter will
pass like wind. No motion will unlock the proper emotion
if the latter be not embodied in mental structure. It is a
foolish illusion to believe that any one in whose nature is
neither sincerity nor uprightness will become upright by
undergoing a sudden conversion ; if he was essentially un-
righteous before, he will be unrighteous still, being only a

98 -WILL IN ITS METAPHYSICAL ASPECT.

hypocrite in addition, consciously or unconsciously ; if sin-
cerely upright now, there was the hasis of sincerity and up-
rightness in him then : he was at least genuine in his evil
doings. Moreover, to ensure the permanent utility of the
new upheaval of feeling, to establish it in a steady and
stable moral growth, the impression that caused it must
have been so powerful as to recur ever after to the mind
in vivid force, or there must have been a subjection to a
succession of impressions of. the same kind as it. So will
be effected gradually that transformation of nature whereby
virtue becomes structural habit and its exercise a pleasure ;
and that is the guarantee of its stability and permanence.

It is Pascal who, after pointing out that those who quit
the service of God to return to that of the world do so only
because they find more pleasure in the world, goes on to say
— ' de meme on ne quitterait jamais les plaisirs du monde
pour embrasser la croix de Jesus-Christ, si on ne trouvait
plus de douceur dans le mepris, dans la pauvrete, dans le
denuement et dans le rebut des hommes, que dans les d^lices
du peche. Et aussi, comme dit TertuUien, il ne faut pas
croire que la vie des Chretiens soit une vie de tristesse. On ne
quitte les plaisirs que pour d'autres plus grands.'

PAET n.

WILL m ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL, SOCIAL, AND EVOLU-
TIONAL RELATIONS.

SECTION I.

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS.

Those who uphold a metaphysical will protest eagerly that
there is nothing in the known operations of matter, even
when in its most complex organic forms, that is in the least
like the energy we are conscious of as wUl, or can so much
as be conceived to be a physical basis of it. They would do
well, however, to explain what exact measure of meaning
they give to the word like when they say so. As it is
through self-consciousness that we know the energy which
we call vrill, and as it is through our senses that we know
the so-called physical forces, it is plain that we have no
right to expect thero to be like, as conscious states. The
effect which the same object produces upon the different
senses that it is capable of affecting is of course in each case
a quite different conscious state, being special, unlike any-
thing else, sui generis ; so much so that an object known
well to one sense would be perfectly strange to another sense
acting alone — ^the eye blind to thunder, the ear deaf to
lightning. If a person blind from birth obtains sight sud-
denly by some happy operation of surgery, he does not
recognise at all by the eye in the first instance an object
that he knows well by touch ; and did the two senses not
go on afterwards to act together in the apprehension of it,
to combine their results in perception, it would always be

100 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

a different object to them. Whence springs a not tmin-
teresting reflection : that if the several senses only acted
separately, an object would appear to be as many objects as
there were senses that it was capable of affecting, and so,
with a. dozen, things around him, a man might believe himself
to be living amidst a great many objects and revel in the
variety of his existence. Is it not perhaps actually because
of the fewness and the limitations of his senses that he
believes nature, which is one, to be so various as it seems ?

The experience of the outer senses then entirely contra-
dicts the notion that the information derived from self-con-
sciousness can be like that given by any of them. The same
object — the functioning brain — must necessarily produce a
very different impression (if it produce any) upon the in-
ternal sense of consciousness from that which it produces
upon the senses of an observer; the self-conscious state,
that is, could not be in the least like anything that we laiow
of the operations of cerebral matter: no motion of its
molecules, gyratory, undulatory, rotatory, nor any combina-
tion of such motions that we can imagine, could have any
conceivable analogy with a sensation: between them no
comprehensible relation can exist, an impassable gulf must
remain fixed. All which, put succinctly and plainly, is
simply this : no physics of body can possibly be the meta-
physics of mind. Certainly it would be strange enough if
that which is physical could be at the same time that which
is defined to be not physical — that is, beyond physics ; that
which appeals to outer sense be at the same time that which
does not appeal to outer sense. As I have already pointed
out, self -consciousness acts alone, without help from asso-
ciation, either with the external senses or with any supple-
mentary internal modes of observation; and it cannot
therefore ever identify a common cause of its affections and
of the affections of an external sense. But is it thereupon
absolutely necessary to conclude that these belong to
existences of an entirely opposite nature: the one to a
spiritual and the other to a material order of being ?

Light and sound, regarded purely as conscious states,
are as unlike as can be; there is no relation conceivable

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 101

between tliem in that internal aspect ; nevertheless, they are
not really so unrelated and so radically asunder as they seem,
since, by going deeper into an examination of their respective
natures than unaided sense could do, we have reached a
higher plane of knowledge, and from that we perceive them
both to be caused by undulations in elastic media and to
have remarkable analogies. Is it not the fact indeed that
the undulatory theory of light was first suggested by the
undulations of sound ? In like manner, the gulf between
the conception of the movements of cerebral molecules and
the self-consciousness of Tfill-energy may weU be due to the
different ways of acquiring them ; molecular motion and will
be one and the same event seen under different aspects, and
to be known as such one day from a higher plane of know-
ledge. Perhaps when that time comes the theory of an all-
pervading mentiferous ether may help to bridge over the
dif&culty. For if the object and the brain are alike pervaded
by such a hyper-subtile ether ; and if the impression which
the particular object makes upon mind be then a sort of
pattern of the mentiferous undulations as they are stirred
and conditioned within it by its particular form and proper-
ties ; and if the mind in turn be the mentiferous undulations
as conditioned by the convoluted form and the exceedingly
complicated and delicate structure of the brain ; — then it is
plain we have eluded the impassable difl&culty of conceiving
the action of mind upon matter — the material upon the
immaterial — which results from the notion of their entirely
diflferent natures.

Here in fact is a theory that gets rid at the same time
of the gross materiality of matter and of the intangible
spirituality of mind, and instead of binding them together
in an abhorred and unnatural union of opposites, unites
them in a happy and congenial marriage in an intermediate
region, and, if I may so speak, in an intermediate substance ;
a substance which, mediator-like, partakes the nature of
both without being exclusively either. If perchance you
object that the theory really only evades the difficulty by
putting mind, in the shape of a mentiferous ether, into
nature and virtually getting rid of matter, this answer shall

102 WILL' IN ITS PH.ysiOLOGICAL ASPECT.

suffice — that the special forai and structure of the brain are
necessary to determine such undulations of its pervading
ether as are truly mental; and that the undulations of
mentiferous ether in inorganic and most organic objects
cannot therefore have anything more of the character of
conscious mind than their material particles have. But of
vehat use is the theory in the end, since in no case does it
help us in the least to an expla.nation of consciousness, it
will be said ? There, indeed, like most speculative theories
of a grandly ambitious character, it wUl require consider-
able buttressing ; it must, in fact, in order to account for
consciousness, assume that which it is required to explain ;
must be supplemented by the hypothesis (which, being
positively wanted, may be said, according to true theoristic
fashion, to follow of necessity) that from the multitudinous
collisions of mentiferous undulations in the brain, and their
consequent infinitely complicated refractions and reflections
there — a sort of av/jpiOfj-ov yiXaafia of brain-waves, such as
one sees on the sunlit waves of ocean — eventually is evolved
such a complex modification of undulations, or such a system
of inconceivably rapid atom-quiverings, as expresses itself in
a certain quasi-luminosity or phosphorescence — that is to say,
in consciousness. If man is able to come and become by
evolution from molecules, why should not consciousness
come and become by evolution from undulations ?

Leaving for the present the high regions of this most
pregnant theory which, if set forth elaborately in a sufficient
number of chapters, with all the proper pomp and panoply of
swelling words and thought- simulating phrases, would, with-
out doubt, explain everything from the formation of a mole-
cule to the inheritance by a boy of his grandfather's habit of
scratching his nose — all things, in fact, under the sun and in
the sun, and in the heavens that are above the sun — let me
claim and fix attention to this plain fact : that, although we
know the events of our mental life by means of conscious-
ness only, these events do, nevertheless, sometimes proceed
without consciousness on our parts, and in that case must
be going on somewhere on the one side or the other of that
impassable gulf, that bottomless abyss, that lies between

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 103

physics and metaphysics. On which side ? We do not ob-
serve them directly, it is true, hut we infer them positively
from observing exactly the same signs and the same effects
of their operations that they produce when they are opera-
ting consciously. In such case, they come to us as objec-
tive knowledge ; and the objective knowledge, as such, must
cross the gulf in order to get into consciousness. How does
it manage to do that? It does succeed, perhaps, because
the truth, after all, is that the gulf between matter and
mind is not a gnlf between two entirely separate orders of
existence, but a gulf between two entirely different states or
modes of consciousness. Here, in fact, as everywhere else,
when we push the matter home, we perceive how much too
much we make habitually of the range of function of con-
sciousness in mental operations. Examine closely and with-
out bias the ordinary mental operations of daily life, and
you will surely discover that consciousness has not one-tenth
part of the function therein which it is commonly assumed
to have : it is with it there as it notably is with it in ordi-
nary vision, where we only see directly a very small part of
that which we think we see, for we directly see a few familiar
signs only, while all the rest is inferential ; that which is
inferred in the interpretation of the signs having been ob-
tained directly by previous experiences of vision and of our
other senses. Consciousness does essential service in the
building up of faculties of thought and action ; its part is
comparatively small in the use which we make of them
afterwards.

As the higher modes of consciousness unquestionably
rest on the lower modes, we may properly, intrj'ing to get to
the nearest approach of consciousness to molecular motion,
take for consideration the simplest mode of sensation that
we ever experience. Now it is certain that a sensation
that appears to consciousness to be perfectly simple is
sometimes a compound of more simple sensations, none of
which it really resembles ; these more simple sensations are,
in their turn, compounds of still more elementary sensa-
tions; and the elements of these, if not themselves, lie
beneath the threshold of consciousness, contributing to the

104 WILL IN ITS PH^IOLOGICAL ASPECT.

excitation which, when it reaches a certain height or a cer-
tain complexity, oversteps the threshold. In every conscious
state there are thus at work conscious, sub-conscious, and
infra-conscious energies, the last as indispensable as the first.
We descend in our analysis of consciousness to the very
borders o£ molecular motion — to the place where the two
aspects of being meet and seem to coalesce ; for, on the one
hand, where sensation actually expires, the continuance of a
connected reflex movement shall prove the persistence of
molecular motion ; and, on the other hand, the experiments
of physiology prove a definite measurable period of mole-
cular commotion, known as the ' excitatory stage,' to precede
invariably the excitation of the sensation. Moreover, the
same stimulus which when applied to the nerve suffices
ordinarily to excite a sensation, will not raise the ' excitatory
stage ' into consciousness, but will leave it in the state of
latent stimulation, if the temperature of the nerve be lowered
a few degrees ; so that a few degrees of temperature make all
the difference between soul and not-soul in a process other-
wise exactly the same. Here are combinations of infra-con-
scious energies to produce a sub-conscious or an elementary
conscious state, and thereafter combinations of elementary
consciousnesses to produce a conscious result that does not
resemble any of them; not otherwise than as chemical
elements combine to form a compound with new properties.
What reason can be given why these infra-conscious factors
of the period of latent stimulation may not resemble or be
actually molecular movements ? And if they be so, are they
so only up to the moment when the spark of nascent consci-
ousness appears, and do they then instantly take on a new
character ?

Two things are sufliciently obvious with respect to
them : first, that self-consciousness cannot tell us any-
thing whatever about them (it would not be self-conscious-
ness, but other-self-consciousness, if it could), notwithstand-
ing that, as we have the best means of knowing, they exist
and underlie its states ; secondly, that the means of observa-
tion by which we discover and examine them do not yield
the smallest information concerning the conscious states that

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAI, BASIS. 105

accompany or follow them. However, when we have traced
out and established the connections, we haye done all that we
can be required rightly or wisely need attempt to do. Why
brain functions as consciousness is just as barren a ques-
tion as why a rose smells sweet ; it is enough for us that we
perceive by experience that it does. Fragrance of smell or
fragrance of feeling^one is neither more nor less mysterious
than the other. In order to accomplish our proper work of
setting forth the unfailing order of the relations between the
objective fact and the subjective feeling, we must make use
of the two methods of investigation — that is, must look in-
wardly to perceive one aspect of the relation and look out-
wardly to perceive the other aspect of it. Are you dissatis-
fied with a science thus founded on a double method, fear-
ing a rending cleft in the foundations ? There is no cause ;
the two aspects, subjective and objective, will coincide and
corroborate one another; and so, perhaps, in the end psy-
chology will become the most certain of sciences, because
founded on the coincidence of two independent methods of
investigation — namely, on the direct and immediate method
of introspection, and on the objective method of physical
inquiry.

Having now done so much to clear the ground and to
set the problem in its true light, it is seen that the assertion
of the entire unlikeness of the deliverances of self -conscious-
ness to any operations which sense iuforms us of need not,
though really a truism, carry with it the stupendous con-
clusions as to two different orders of existences which it is
invariably weighted with. We will go on now to inquire
whether the operations of the body do not present anything
in the least like the most elementary and simple functions
of will. And here, of course, our duty is to take for consider-
ation the most simple and irreducible elements, not the
most complex. The function of a single secretion-cell,
thoroughly understood, would teach as much as the study of
a thousand such cells, for it would be the explanation of the
physiology of secretion ; and it is in the cojnplete function
of the simplest single cell that the required knowledge must
be sought. In like manner, when we inquire into the

106 WILL m ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

functions of reason and will, we shall do wisely not to begin
by thinking of Newton reasoning or of Napoleon willing,
but to do our best to attend at the humble birth of reason
and will. Nowise exalted is the birthplace of the divine
on earth : that lesson the manger of Bethlehem might have
taught us.

The first task is to take particular notice of the different
sorts of complex movement which the body is capable of
performing by itself, and to examine and appreciate their
true character. The simplest nervous operation, that which
is the elemental type or physiological unit of which the
more complex processes are built up, as a great house is
built of simple bricks, is what is called a reflex act. An im-
pression is made upon some part of the body; the mole-
cular change or the wave of motion produced thereby in
the sensory or afferent nerve is conducted along it to a
nerve-centre and unlocks the energy thereof; that energy is
thereupon transmitted or reflected along a connected motor
or efferent nerve, and actuates a particular movement through
the proper muscles, a movement that may carry a purposive
stamp or not. For example, a strong light is thrown upon
the retina, and the pupil contracts instantly in order, as we
say, to exclude, because the effect is to exclude, the excess
of light ; a blow to the eye is threatened, and the eyelid
winks involuntarily to protect it ; a lump of food is pushed
to the back of the mouth, and so soon as it gets there the
muscles contract, grasp and push it on ; the tip of the finger
is put between the lips of the malformed infant just born
without a brain, and it immediately makes sucking move-
ments. In these and multiform other movements of a like
kind, though each fulfils a definite end, the will has no part
whatever ; they take place not only without its concurrence,
but in spite of its resistance sometimes, as everybody knows,
and one of them — the. contraction of the pupil — even when
a person is completely unconscious in sleep or in apoplexy.

Most striking perhaps in this connection is the instructive
instance furnished by a well-known experiment on the frog :
if its thigh be touched with a drop of irritating acid it rubs
It off with the foot of that side ; and when it is prevented

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 107

from using that foot for the purpose, it makes use of the
opposite leg. Plain evidence, it might seem, of intelligent
design and will on its part, for when it is frustrated in one
adaptive effort it has immediate recourse to another. But
exclude intelligent design and will by cutting off the frog's
head, and the result of the experiment, if made with the
proper care, is the same : it tries first to use its right foot
to wipe off the acid, and when it is hindered from helping
itself in that way it bends the other leg across for the
purpose, exactly as it did when it had its head. Of the
two fundamental types of animal movements— that is to say,
movements of aggression, in order to ensue pleasure and
increase life ; and movements of defence, in order to eschew
pain and ward off what is hurtful to life — Goltz has obtained
examples of each in the decapitated frog. Tor besides the
above-mentioned remarkable movement of defence, he has
elicited the quack or croak which is the expression of joy, by
stroking the creature gently on its back, as well as the
movement of the male to embrace the female in sexual
congress, by gentle pressure and rubbing, at the proper
season, of its breast and the inside of its arms.

With what an admirable purpose then does the headless
frog act, howbeit it knows not what it does, any more than
the pupil does when it contracts in a bright light, or than
the branch of a tree does when, unable to get to the light
in one direction, it tries patiently another and more cir-
cuitous way. Behold plain proof of sensibility, intelli-
gence and will, may well be the exclamation of those who
are not sufficiently mindful that the true mode of viewing
the phenomena is not to read into them from a higher
experience what is not there, but to read out of them,
without bias, simply what is there. The truly warranted
conclusion is that the nervous system has the power,
instinct in its constitution or acquired by training, to exe-
cute mechanically acts that have all the semblance of
being designed and voluntarj', without there being the least
consciousness or will in them ; not otherwise perhaps than
as the ant performs all the duties of a good citizen in a
complex society, without having an elaborate theory of the

108 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

constitution of tlie society in its tiny brain. If people
choose to call voluntary the acts that are not conscious, they
do not thereby alter the facts, which remain quite different
in spite of the common naming ; what they do is simply to
destroy the definite meanings of the terms that they mis-
apply. We cannot have will where we have not conscious-
ness, but it may well be that we have in these adaptive
bodily acts the basis of that which, when it takes place in
a higher nerve-centre, we are conscious of as will — an
energy capable of executing purposive movements, and free,
so to speak, to choose the right one, but not free to choose
the wrong one. A perfect consummation and bliss : to be
freed from the liberty to go wrong, as Malebranche prayed
to be, and to possess the freedom of necessarily doing right,
which he prayed to have !

As soon as the young chicken is out of the egg it pecks
at a grain of corn with quick and exact aim ; that is to say,
without the least education or previous practice it is able to
put various muscles into action, concurrent and sequent,
with the nicest adaptation of the requisite degree of con-
traction of each muscle, to perform a very complex act.
Given the mechanism ready to hand, all the skiU of the
most accomplished workman could not put it into such nice
and adapted action to do the exact work. Many months
must pass and much tedious training must be gone through
before an infant can learn to pick up a grain at all, and no
amount of training will enable it to do so with the ease,,
nicety and rapidity which the chick shows without any
training ; indeed, the chicken's incapacity would be to
imitate the bungling attempts of the child. There must be
on the child's part much patient adaptation and many
repetitions of effort in order to accomplish the involution,
so to say, of an acquired energy that shall afterwards be
evolved and discharged in function. When the infant
has at last learnt tediously to do badly that which the
chicken does well at once we say that it acts from volition,
while the chicken is said to act from instinct ; in saying
which it is not meant to imply — at any rate, by those who
do not allow a word to do service for an idea — that instinct

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 109

is some wonderful entity in it, but simply that the power or
faculty of doing the thing is instinct or innate in the con-
stitution of its nervous system. It is but another way of
saying that the body has the power, in virtue simply of its
physiological mechanism, without any help of will, to execute
most complex purposive acts in the most perfect manner.
Whether a power of the kind is inborn, as is the case com-
monly in animals and in not a few instances in man, or is
acquired by training and practice, as is the case in a few
instances in animals and commonly in man, does not matter
as regards its essentially physical nature : in either case we
are entitled to see in it a pretty fair physical basis of a
rudimentary will.

Another step forward. As everybody knows, the will
has not the power to execute only, but it has the power to
prevent execution, to hold impulses in check; indeed, its
energies are most tasked and its highest qualities shown in
the exercise of this controlling function. Our appetites and
passions prompt or urge their immediate gratification ; it is
the nobler function of will, enlightened by reason looking
before and after, to curb these lower impulses of our nature.
An emotion springing from offended self-love calls into
action its congenial ideas of revenge, and instigates conduct
in the line of their resultant energies; it is the higher
function of a rightly inspired will, having regard to the
ultimate good of the whole being instead of the present
gratification of a particular function or passion of it, to
withstand these forces by summoning into action thoughts
of a higher and wider range, whether prudential, moral, or
philosophical. The question is, then, whether there is any-
thing in the operations of the nervous system which can
conceivably be the basis of this exalted governing function
— ^this capacity, when impulse urges, to act from duty.

When we pass in review the various reflex movements of
the body we perceive that there are some — and those essen-
tial to the continuance of life — over which the will has no
authority whatever : the movements of the heart and of the
intestines, for example, which go on regularly night and day,
asleep and awake, it can neither slacken nor quicken nor

110 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

stop by any exertion that it can make. Neither there nor
in the silent depths of the organic life of the tissues are its
commands heard. Other reflex movements, those of
breathing, for instance, it can control partially; we can
breathe quietly or slowly as we please, or even stop breathing
for a time, though not for long, since no one can kill himself
by simply holding his breath. The will has in that business
a strictly limited authority — the authority to intervene and
modify, but not the authority to govern absolutely. In
order to form a conception of its probable mode of operation
when it thus intervenes with effect, it is desirable to appre-
ciate the nature of pure physiological inhibition as we
observe it work to check or stop action that is entirely reflex.
Take, for instance, the beating of the heart : the experi-
menter can easily quicken or slacken the pulsation of an
animal's heart by manipulating the proper nerves ; for by stimu-
lating the vagus nerve he retards them, and by stimulating
the sympathetic nerve he quickens them ; thus he demon-
strates that the function of one nerve can be exerted directly
to inhibit the function of another nerve. But besides this
direct effect he can produce the inhibition in an indirect
way : for example, when he suspends a frog by its legs and
then taps sharply on its belly, or when he exposes its in-
testines for a short time to the air so as to render them very
sensitive, and then simply touches them — breathing the
while perhaps, if he bethink himself, a passing prayer that
the gain to him will one day be proved to be worth the pain
to it — ^he instantly stops its heart for a time. What pre-
sumably happens is that the stimulus of the tap or touch is
carried by the affected nerve to a nerve-centre in the brain
near that centre from which a nerve to the heart proceeds,
and so acts upon it in the result as to inhibit its pulsations.
In fact, the experiment teaches that the physiological sym-
pathy of nerve-centres in their intimate confederation in
the nervous system is such that one centre, when stimulated
to action, has the power to inhibit physically the function of
another centre ; not much otherwise apparently than as an
act of will inhibits the movements of breathing.

This comparison of the temporary arrest of the heart's

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. Ill

beat by an intercurrent stimulus into its reflex arc with the
temporary arrest of respiration by an intercurrent stimulus
into its reflex arc, will, without doubt, be repudiated by those
who cannot conceive the action of will, even when it wears
its most physical aspect, to have the least affinity to, or
suffer the least comparison with, the action of a physiological
stimulus. Between them they see a great gulf fixed. How-
ever, if we look calmly and frankly at the facts, with a
sincere desire to see them as they are, we perceive the gulf,
though impassable directly, to be less formidable than it
appears at first sight ; for we discover functions that, occu-
pying an intermediate position between a pliysiological
stimulus and will, certainly lessen much the gap between it
and reflex function.

Take, as first instance, the molecular commotion of a
cerebral centre which in its subjective aspect we call an
emotion : its explosion or discharge of energy notably affects
violently the movements of the heart and of respiration, in
a way the will cannot do. Does it in that case act by the
unsearchable path of a metaphysical volition, or by the
known physical paths of physiological inhibition? Does
the molecular commotion go by one path and the parallel
emotion by another ? If it be supposed that the rage of
an Australian savage whose fish has been stolen from him,
or of a speechless idiot that goes into uncouth convulsions
of fury because another idiot has a piece of sugar given to
it, is of too exalted a nature to be mentioned in the same
breath with a purely physiological energy, it will be proper
to go a step lower and to take for illustration a sensation.
A sharp pain affects suddenly the movements of the heart
and of respiration, independently of the will, which may
be not only not consentient but actively dissentient ; and
it is probable that the prick of a pin at the right moment
would inhibit the most intense and eager complex reflex
movements that a human being is capable of, though a snail
or frog notoriously shows itself insensible to pricking or
cutting when engaged in the physiological act entailing
similar movements. Here we may fairly ask again whether
we have not to do with reflex inhibition by physical paths

112 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

and by physical agencies ; nor can we doubt wbat the reply
ought to be, since there are physiological experiments to
show that a stimulus that would cause pain to an animal,
were it conscious of it, will still produce its particular effect
upon movement when the removal of the creature's brain or
the severance of its spinal cord has abolished sensation of
the parts of the body concerned. The physical event then
takes place, though no consciousness goes along with it.

Without multiplying, as might easily.be dbne, striking
instances of inhibitive function, by selecting them from th«
operations of the body both in health and in disease, it will
be well to set down and emphasise the broad conclusions
that are thus far warranted. They are these: first, that
the nervous system has the power to execute through the
proper muscular mechanism purposive acts, without any
intervention of consciousness or will, and, secondly, that one
nervous centre, when stimulated to activity, may so act upon
another of the confederated centres as either to help, or to
hinder, or to suspend its function by purely physiological
mechanism — may, if it reach a certain pitch of ecstatic
activity, so far inhibit other centres as to paralyse their
functions for a time ; as we see in the examples of the pro-
creating frog, of the religious ecstatic, of the soldier who
feels not at the time the wound received in the transport of
battle, and in many like instances. Behold then two purely
bodily functions that run closely parallel to the rudiments of
volition, and may well be their physiological equivalents — to
wit, power to command execution of a purpose and power to
stay execution.

Having ^ot these firm physiological bases, let us now
proceed to examine the simplest instances of volition, as we
meet with them in the animal and in the infant. For the
right method is to start from the observation of its small and
simple beginnings, and not to confuse and perplex oneself
by peering introspectively into its highest displays in a much
cultivated self-consciousness, where the difficulties of a suc-
cessful analysis are insuperable. To build up a theory of
will by leaving out of account the facts of its genesis and
development, and the manifold varieties of particular wills in

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 113

individual cases, is to construct an artificial philosophy that
may serve well for intellectual gymnastics in scholastic
exercises, hut which has no bearing upon the concerns and
doings of real life — upon the daily incomings and outgoings
of men. That wiU is a power of better quality and higher
dignity in man than in animal or infant admits of no
question ; but that is an excellent reason why we ought to
study the successive stages of its evolution from the lower to
the higher level of being. When a young dog, in. obedience
to its natural impulse, seizes a piece of meat that lies near
it and is whipped for the theft, or starts off in eager pursuit
of a hare that jumps up in front of it and is sharply
punished for its conduct, the memory of what it was made
to suffer for yielding to instant desire intervenes on the next
similar occasion between the impression on sight and the
ensuing impulse, and checks or inhibits it. In like manner,
when an infant, obeying its natural impulse to apprehend
objects by grasping them, seizes hold of some bright object
that attracts its gaze, and is burnt for its pains, it remembers
its painful experience ; and the memory of the pain that it
suffered intervenes to check or inhibit a like hasty movement
on another occasion. Here, then, are two simple instances
that are just as instructive as a thousand similar instances
would be : the animal and infant has each voluntarily re-
strained itself from doing what its first impulse was to do ;
of two courses it has chosen the best— the path of enlightened
prudence or duty in preference to the path of natural pro-
clivity. Tou may complicate the business as much as you
please by multiplying the experiences and reflections, till
the outcoming will is the resultant of manifold, intricate,
delicate, and circuitous interactions, but that alters not the
fundamental character of the process; in the simple instances
adduced we have the typical scheme of volition, the elemental
units of the most complex willing.

Let us now proceed to consider the physical side of the
process. What has happened there? In the first case,
where the dog on seeing the meat seized it instantly, a
particular impression on the sense of sight, the conduction
of the molecular motion caused thereby to a special nerve-

114 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

centre, and the consequent excitation of a special perception,
as the ingoing process ; then, as the outgoing process, the
transmission of liberated energy along motor nerve to muscle,
and a consequent adaptive act : what we call a reflex process
in the mental plane. In the second event, when the punish-
ment was instantly inflicted upon the dog for yielding to its
natural proclivity, there was the painful stimulation of
another nerve-centre by the blows, with the appropriate
motor outcome in writhings and howls, whence followed the
association of the pain with the immediately preceding event.
This close functional association of nerve-centres correspond-
ing to the close contiguity of the events being effected — a
subjective necessity reflecting the objective sequence — thence-
forth the excitation of the first reflex process entails the
excitation of the second. Accordingly, in the third case,
where the dog withstood the impulse to snatch the meat,
there was along with the special perception the immediate
stimulation of the associated nerve-centre that had suffered
and registered the memory of the suffering; and the conse-
quence was the resistance to or inhibition of the instant
impulse and the prevention of the movement. In other
words, one of two catenated nerve-centres has been excited
to inhibit the other.

It is not difi&cult to conceive the multiplication of this
simple scheme of associated centres — these physiological units
of composition — and a corresponding increase in the number
and intricacy of their connections ; for it is easy to conceive
such a dynamically associated group of centres to become, in
turn, the unit of further more complex groupings, and so on
in multiplying complications ; and if we do that, we shall
have a pretty fair general conception of the constitution of
the brain, which contains actually a countless multitude
of inter-connected nerve-centres, of high and low dignity,
arranged in the same layer and in superimposed layers,
functionally differentiated, and ready to be stirred into action
by suitable stimulation to increase, to combine, to restrain,
to neutralise, to modify in unknown ways one another's
function. We might perhaps assist conception by thinking
of it as a sort of ' Bradshaw's Railway Guide,' the many thin

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 115

and closely printed leaves of which, covered with a multitude
of seemingly unintelligible figures and hieroglyphics, might
well appear to be without significance, or to have significance
lost in an overwhelming complexity ; nevertheless, when they
are understood, these figures, not one of which has not its
proper place and meaning, tell the times of starting, the
stoppages,' the junctions, the destination, and the times of
arrival of every train on every line in the country ; they tell
us, in fact, almost the exact place of every train on every
line at a given moment, and so exhibit the clearest order in
what, could we compass the whole, spread out like a map,
in a'bird's-eye view, would seem an intricate mass of confused
movements beginning nowhere and ending nowhere. So is it
with the brain and its multitudinous stations, tracks, junctions
and branch lines, its quick trains and slow trains of thought.
For as counterpart, on the mental side, of the exceeding com-
plexity of physical structure we have always more or less
complex deliberation going before the formation of will ;
which comes out at last from the intricate and circuitous
interactions of so many hopes, fears, inclinations, desires,
promptings, reflections — of so many constituent elements of
the individual character — that we are utterly unable to
analyse them successfully, and so to specify accurately the
exact factors in the complex composition of forces which
the particular will is the resultant of. It seems a perfectly
legitimate conclusion, then, that in the inhibitory action of
one nerve-centre upon another, as known by physiological
observation and experiment, and in the simplest instances of
volition, as known by self-consciousness, we have two pro-
cesses that run parallel — parallel in simplicity when they
are simple, parallel in ascending complexity and intricacy
when they are complex.

Eeverse the conception of a complex nervous system
built up step by step by ascending multiplication and com-
binations of simple factors, and imagine the successive re-
movals, in a descending scale, of the more complex superim-
posed parts : each more simple type, as its level was reached
in the process of denudation, would find its normal repre-
sentative in the descending orders or genera of the animal

116 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAl ASPECT.

kingdom, until we reacted in the descent our basal ele-
mental type or unit of composition, whicli we find realised
in the lowest creatures that possess a nervous tissue, and in
the lowest examples of nerve-function in the higher animals.
And assuredly we should find functions less and less complex
running parallel to the more and more simple structure:
complex will giving place to less complex, and this in turn
to simpler volition still ; simple volitions replaced by obscure
desires and instincts ; instincts by simple reflex acts, and
reflex acts in the end by simple irritability of tissue. The
unravelling of the complicated web of structure would be the
progressive simplification of function and the gradual wan-
ing of consciousness. It would be a plain demonstration of
the exact parallelism of structure and function.

Throughout the foregoing exposition there has been
assumed on the part of a nerve-centre, once stimulated to
function, the capacity to retain something of the effects of
that stimulation, whereby it puts into after-action that
which it has gained by reason of its first action. This capa-
city of retention, which is the foundation of the mental
faculties called acquisition, retention, recollection, is a purely
physiological property, essentially independent of conscious-
ness, and operative whether memory goes along with it or
not ; and it is by virtue of it that, as previously pointed out,
structure is moulded along the lines of function and that
the ease of performance which we call habit is acquired.
We have to take notice and to bear well in mind that this
registration takes effect in the organic grouping of centres
that have acted together, as well as in the modification of
the particular centre; and that in such capacity it is the
foundation — first, of the association of centres and their cor-
responding ideas, and, afterwards, when that has been made
very close and firm, of the integration of ideas, so that simple
ideas unite to form complex ones and in the result several
come to act almost as one. A statical grouping of centres
is the foundation of a dynamical association of functions;
and this process of primary groupings into secondary more
complex groupings, and of these in turn into still more com-
plex groupings, goes on through all the manifold plexuses of

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 117

thouglit; a complex mechanism of thought being thus
formed step by step — a true mental organisation — ^that may
be in function or at rest, in part or whole. No wonder that
we are unable at any moment to recollect more than an
infinitesimal part of that which is stored in the so-called
chambers of memory, and are not even conscious that it is
there. We have collected it and laid it by, duly classified —
that is to say, arranged and fixed it in its proper organic
groupings ; but we cannot re-collect it and use it in cogita-
tion unless it is stirred into activity through established
links of associations, or by the stroke of some chance-impres-
sion in its close neighbourhood. Note here an apt example
how the derivation of words helps to elucidate the origin and
the growth of their meanings ; for the word cogo, to collect,
becomes the basis of the words recollect and cogitation, and
these words in turn have been the foundations of the meta-
physical faculties of cogitation and recollection.

If we could imagine human beings to have been con-
structed just as they are, with the one exception that they
were without consciousness, and to have been placed in ex-
actly similar circumstances to those in which they have been
placed, we may be sure, I think, that their doings would
have exhibited a logical connection ; that in the synthesis of
impressions made upon them, and in the deductions of con-
formable action, there would have been implicit that which,
when illuminated by consciousness, we call reason. No or-
ganic being could live and thrive without having some sort
of synthesis, though an entirely unconscious one, of the world;
it is implicit in every purposive reflex act, which is itseK vir-
tually an unconscious judgment and the basis of conscious
judgments. It is from this solid standpoint that the ways
and doings of animals and savages ought to be studied.
They are examples of reason latent or implicit in adaptive
organic function, and they do not necessarily postulate the
bright consciousness with which we illuminate them when
reflecting on them. The reason is rooted in the mechanism,
not in the light by which consciousness reveals its operations :
the conscious theory is the transcript, not the original. It
is because of the erroneous method of reading into the minds

118 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOaiCAI, ASPECT.

of low savages the information of a tigUy developed self-
consciousness that the elaborate expositions of the original
beliefs of mankind, or of the primitive data of their beliefs,
■which some philosophers have undertaken, are so easy, so
empty often, and sometimes positively ludicrous ; they are
applications of the acquired beliefs of evolution to explain
the genesis of themselves ; deductions of the primitive states
of human thought, feeling and conduct from the much-im-
portuned consciousness of a philosopher, who imagines how
he would have felt and thought and done had he been a
primitive specimen of the race instead of its crown and con-
summation. If his philosophy has not been learnt practi-
cally and consolidated by living and working among men in
the affairs of common life, but has been pumped out of him-
self in the arm-chair of his library, he will propound you
thin theories suited to all difficulties ; and the final explan-
ation of all things by him shall be so lucid and complete
that the only wonder is God required so many as six days
in order to create the heavens and the earth and all that
therein is.

All life, including the highest thought-life of the brain,
has two sides that necessarily co-exist, namely, a plastic or
nutritive side, and a disruptive or functional side ; and these
correspond respectively to composition and decomposition of
substance, to analysis and synthesis. The synthesis is again
of two sorts : a chemical manufacturing of the material
whereby it is made suitable substance; and a morphological
distribution of it in structure, a building of it into definite
and special forms. In like manner, the analysis is of two
sorts : the liberation of energy from chemical decomposition
of substance; and the definite character of the liberated
energy, its unity of special function, according to the par-
ticular structural /orOT which undergoes disruption or reso-
lution, so to speak. The dualistic doctrine of a separate
mind is therefore based upon an artificial and impossible
separation of the two necessarily co-existent sides of thought-
life, namely, the plastic and the functional. That is what
physiology says ; and it says, moreover, as a plain matter of
experience, that there is not a single bodily phenomenon

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 119

that has not its sufficient determining conditions in an
antecedent state of the body. Where has free choice or will
a place in these events ?

Those who admit that physical and mental events go
along together as exactly parallel phenomena, so that in
describing them, were they both thoroughly known, we
might very well be describing one in terms of the other, or
the same thing in different languages, and who nevertheless
bring the correspondences, so exact and constant up to an
unknown point, to an abrupt end by the arbitrary interven-
tion of freewill, should endeavour to go deeper than they do
into the inmost and most intimate physical facts, and to
imbue their minds with fitting conceptions of their necessary
order. They may well consider, among other things, that
the time-rate of a volition is a measurable process ; that it
varies in different persons, and in the same person at dif-
ferent times, according to varying bodily conditions ; and
that it may be experimentally lowered by lowering the
temperature of the centre in which it is generated. Wliat
room then for a metaphysical intervention, what need of it,
what result of it? From the physiological standpoint we
may say confidently that it is not wanted, that there is no
place for it, and that, if it be, it always lets the result go as
if it were not. To assert its intervention anywhere or at
any time before the physical antecedents of a volition, or
between them and the volitional outcome, certainly is not
psychology but psychogeny ; it is therefore doctrine which
may properly be relegated to the domain of cosmogony.

In two matters — ^those too matters in which the questions
admit of being put with exceptional exactness and might
claim therefore plain answers — we fail to get from the
philosophical upholders of freewill a frank, definite, and
consistent statement of their opinions. The first is the
exact moment or point of evolution in the animal or the
human series where the undetermined will makes its first
appearance, since it is not generally assumed by them to be
co-extensive with volition. Do they or do they not believe
that God, having created man in His own image, endowed
him with the ultra-physical power, so that all men — serfs.

120 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

sayages, philosophers, idiots and lunatics-^always possess it
and always have possessed it? Observe that it is not a
question of the widely different degrees of development of
the same kind of volition — if it were that, we could compre-
hend what was meant — but a question of the abrupt ir-
ruption somewhere, no one saying exactly where, of an
extraordinary ultra-physical factor. Are they thereupon
willing to maintain, in opposition to the overwhelming
evidence of facts, that animal volition is of essentially dif-
ferent kind from the lowest human volition, no animal pos-
sessing jot or tittle of ultra-physical essence ? Or did the
ass of Eden sin against freewill by eating forbidden thistles,
and so, sharing in man's fall, come to incur all the sufferings
that it has since patiently undergone from him ?

The second point respecting which it is hard to get a
definite and consistent answer is whether the freedom of
choice that is supposed to go before free action of will has,
as every other mental phenomenon confessedly has, a material
equivalent in a particular brain-action. If it has, where
is the ultra-physical freedom; if not, where is the ultra-
physical intervention? Apparently one is required to be
vaguely content to allow the antecedents and outcome of a
volition to take place practically as physical events, and to
admit that they take place in exact and even compulsory
correspondence with a series of motives and a resultant will,
so long as it is acknowledged theoretically that the ultra^
physical factor exists in the background, and is capable of
intervening in the rarely or never occurring event of its
being called upon to do so. An actual intervention is not
insisted upon in any particular case, if only it be granted
generally that it may take place if it wills or pleases : the
chain of events is practically compulsory, but theoretically
it may be broken and pieced again at any link. To refuse
compliance with so modest a request may appear ungracious,
when compliance seems to cost so little ; but none the less
would the acknowledgment be an implicit avowal that
causation does not reign in human events, and that a science
of human mind must always be metaphysical nescience.

It is remarkable how little the advocates of a meta-

lis PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 121

physical soul, though never so exacting in their critical
demands upon materialistic theories, ever think of the many
difficulties of their own theory, and how quietly they pass
them by as parts of the big mystery which they feel no
obligation to explain or even to consider. If a soul is to be
postulated, surely one is entitled to be told something about
it. Of what substance is it made, because substance of some
sort it must have if it is individual? If of spiritual
substance, what conception of spirit is possible other than a
conception of something that is more subtile than the most
subtUe matter kuown? Where was this spirit before it
entered into the body, and at what precise moment of
its development, when it was yet in the womb, did it take
possession of it? In what part of the body does it dwell?
Is it co-extensive with body, and yet itself without extension ?
Will it, when it takes leave of the body, be able to feel and
think and wiU in the same manner as it does now through
the body ? And if not, how will it keep consciousness of its
identity and have continuity of existence as the same being ?
How does it now act upon the body, and how is it acted
upon by it ? How many bodily functions are possible without
it, and what is its part and exact range in those functions
that are not possible without it? Do the animals that
approach nearest to man possess souls, especially those that
in some measure think with him, feel with him, and act with
him ; and if they do, whence came their souls before life, and
where will they go after death? Is the animal soul material,
and the human soul immaterial ? Are we called upon to make
three divisions of substances in nature corresponding to dif-
ferences of properties — ^the two last of them being sorts of
spiritualisations of matter — namely, (a) gross and palpable
material substance ; (6) animal and quasi-immaterial ; (c)
human immaterial ?

That other persons feel as I do, I know by their cries and
gestures when they are pained or pleased, and that they
think as I do, by their words which they have taught me to
understand; in both cases, that is, by certain movements
that are visible or, so to speak, audible to me. I know the
same of animals so far as gestures and cries inform me,
9

122 -WILL IN ITS PHYSIOlOGICAIi ASPECT.

whicli are, after all, more genuine indications of mental
affections than words; and certainly I feel quite as sure that
the crouching, fawning, gambolling dog is expressing emo-
tional states as I am that a gambolling child or any one who
tells me he feels them is. What then am I to think of their
respective origins ? That the same kind of sensation, senti-
ment, and reason proceeds from entirely unrelated sources in
the two cases — in the one betokening a soul, and in the other
being the outcome of matter divinely adapted to perform such
high functions ? And if matter be in any case sufficient by
itself to perform them, why call in the superfluous aid of a
soul to do the same kind of functions in men ? If it be
argued that the soul of man stands high on a quite special
platform, because it has the subjective certainty of an intui-
tion into its own states, still the objection may be made that
the revelations of my self-consciousness can only have indi-
vidual certainty, and that the intuitions of another person's
self-consciousness, however certain to him, and by whatever
outward means communicated from his within, who is to me
without, to my within, can only have the same sort of objec-
tive value to me as the revelations of an animal's conscious
states through its modes of communication with me. A
subjective psychology, in so far as it is subjective, cannot
transcend the personal range, or have more than personal
certainty.

These and many like questions and objections might
easily be propounded in order to provoke the metaphysicians
to a searching examination of the weak points of their own
doctrine, or at any rate in order to abate the elation with
which they denounce the weaknesses of materialism and
usurp for spiritualism an impregnability of position which it
has not. As life, however, offers much too much to do, and
only a short time to do it in, any one whose instincts are
practical will pass them by as matters of idle and endless
controversy. Accepting the exact parallelism which there is
the best reason to believe to exist between physiological
processes, made known by the senses, and mental processes,
made known by self-consciousness, he will make it his
scientific aim to trace out patiently the exact correspondences

ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS. 123

between the two, and so to arrive at sucli a precise and full
knowledge of both as to be able to say with certitude : This
physiological state of things being manifest to observation,
of necessity this psychological experience will be sensible to
consciousness ; and to say that of every mental function of
the brain and of every affection of consciousness. Those
who are alive when that day comes, may then rightly say,
after the manner of Spinoza, that the brain is visible mind
and the mind invisible brain. Meanwhile, as we of this day
and , generation are not likely to reach that fulness and
exactness of knowledge, it will be wise not to describe the
objective aspect of mental events in terms of the subjective,
nor the subjective in terms of "the objective indifferently, but
to keep their respective languages apart; aiming only to
bring about as close and exact a correspondence between the
descriptive languages as we discover between the external
facts of observation and the internal facts of consciousness.
This we may do without being such exacting pedants as to
be. offended with expressions like the wail of the winds, the
murmur of the water, the sighing of the breeze, the joy and
the melancholy of nature : expressions which, after all,
bespeak a truth of unity that is deeper than knowledge.

SECTION II.

CONCEKKIITG THE NOTIOK OF NECESSITY.

Before I proceed to further considerations of a physiolo-
gical kind respecting will, I pause by the way at this fitting
halting place in order to make a reflection about necessity.
As most people discuss the so-called freedom of will as SiU
abstraction, without being in good earnest to test their con-
clusions by a rigid application to the concrete case, and so
to get an exact apprehension of what they really mean,
satisfied to rest in the vague, and invariably falling back

124 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ^SPEOT.

upon the bare dogma whenever they are confronted with
practical difficulties ; so likewise do they transform necessity
into a sort of abstract despotic entity, and look upon it as a.
sternly binding tie, an inexorable fate, in all operations of
nature from which freewill is excluded. It seems to be an
invincible tendency of the human mind thus to make enti-
ties out of abstractions ; for materialists display it, equally
with metaphysicians, since they talk of matter (which
is purely an abstraction) and discuss its operations, as if it
were a real thing and had existence apart from its manifold
varieties. If a man's wUl be not free, we are supposed to
conclude that he is under the dominion of this irresistible
compulsion, this fateful necessity, and not a responsible
agent; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or
blame, since he could not will but as he must, and could not
have done otherwise than as he did, whatever he did. Cer-
tainly he could not have done otherwise than as he did on
that occasion, but he is not therefore fatebound to do the
same on another occasion.

Necessity has not objective existence any more than a
smell has objective existence ; it is merely the general ex-
pression or statement of aU human experience that definite
antecedents are invariably followed by definite consequences :
a declaration of invariable uniformity, the opposite concep-
tion to which is not freedom but contingency. It is a law
of nature, and therefore a necessity, that the sun rises day
after day ; but time was when the sun did not rise on human
doings, nor at all, and there will be a time happily when it
wiU not rise on them any more, nor rise at all. General
laws are not outward realities, but our notional relations to
outward realities. Change the antecedents of a choice of
will, as a person does when he profits by experience, and
where is the necessity? He is now under the necessity
that his past acts have made for him to follow the changed
antecedents. The man who walks to the cUff one day in
order to commit suicide and does not do it, and walks to
the cliff another day and does do it — other things being the
same — ^would not have done it the second time had it been
the first, and would have done it the first time had it been

COKCEENING THE NOTION OF NECESSITY. 125

the second. The dog which, obeying its instinct, starts
in chase of the hare, is under the necessity to do as it
does on the first occasion ; it is under the necessity to do
differently on the second occasion, if it suffered pain for
what it did on the first and does differently in consequence.
According to the existing order of nature, a stone dropped
from a height into space must fall to the ground : it is under
that necessity. But it is not an absolute and variable neces-
sity ; it is a necessary law only so long as it is not interfered
with by the operation of some intervening law ; and when
we say that the stone is compelled to fall downwards by the
law of gravitation, all we do really is to make a general
statement of universal experience that heavy bodies do fall
to the earth at a certain rate, unless they are prevented.
Accordingly, when we observe that a piece of iron does not
drop to the ground if a strong magnet be suspended just
above it, but is drawn upwards to the magnet and held fast
by it in opposition to the pull of gravitation, we are not in
dismay because a fatal necessity has been outraged and de-
posed, and the world is likely to fall into universal anarchy ;
but we set to work forthwith to collect and collate our expe-
riences of the operations of the intervening power, and to find
out and formulate the most general statement that we can
concerning them — ^that is, to formulate the so-called law of
its action. Not so, says perhaps the necessitarian, that is not
quite all, there is something more than the mere statement
of a uniformity of experience ; for it certainly is a necessity
that all bodies tend towards earth if they do not actually
reach it ; they have no choice, no alternative in the matter ;
and if they are prevented, it is that they are suffering a
restraint of their natural tendency.' But the truth is that
the piec^ of iron, magnet-attracted, tends the other way ; it
makes another choice, doing what is most agreeable to its
nature in the circumstances ; it obeys the temporary attrac-

' In this use of the word tendency to connote a sort of spontaneity in a
body's gravity we remark a relic of the metaphysical interpretation of nature
which imbued it with sympathies and antipathies, loves, and abhorrenoes, &c.
We tnight as well talk of the chemical yewmmgi of one element for another,
or imitate the scientist who, lecturing before a royal personage, said : ' These
gases will now have the honour to combine before your Koyal Highness.'

126 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

tion of tke stronger motive. So an indmdualj if lie be free
from constraint, wills wliat he wislies, and wishes what is
most agreeable to his nature in the then circumstances, and
is most free in doing so.

Except in the far greater number and complexity of the
circumstances, is there any real difference between the
choice that a man makes between two courses of action
when he is in doubt and the choice that the piece of iron
makes between falling to the earth and rushing to the
magnet? It is possible to imagine it placed, though im-
possible to place it, so nicely between the attraction of the
earth and the counter-attraction of the ■ magnet that it
shall be held suspended in doubt, in an equilibrium of choice,
unable to resolve which way to go, like a man between two
evenly balanced motives, or like the legendary ass fixed
exactly half way between the two exactly similar bundles of
hay. If it be true, when the man decides, that his freewill
has put an end to the difficulty for him by giving the
requisite preponderance to the attraction of one of the
opposing and equal motives ; and if it be true that the ass
■may count on its freewill to prevent it from standing still
until it is starved to death, notwithstanding the exact
equipoise of motives ; why is it not true also that it is the
freewill of the piece of iron that determines it either to rush
to the magnet or to drop to the ground, since it is practi-
cally impossible to balance the counteractions so nicely as
to keep it in suspense between them? And if the least
change, a change so trifling that we cannot even fix and
appreciate it, was enough in that case to give the preponde-
rance in one direction, and to move it from the ideal centre
of indifference, is it any wonder that in a far more subtile
province of matter we cannot always apprehend and measure
the slight change that gives the preponderance to one or
another motive in the complex workings of human volition ?

In the objective necessity which it has created the
human miud has transformed its subjective experience into
objective being ; but the necessity so created is really, like
space or time, only a condition or form of thought, a sub-
jective necessity. Feeling necessity in itself, as it needs

CONCEENING- THE NOTION OF NECESSITY. 127

must, since it cannot help thinking two thoughts together
that have always occurred together, co-eiistent or sequent,
it has made it a despotic entity outside itself. Because it is
bound to think a co-existence or sequence, it objectifies the
necessity. So far as we can think of nature apart from man,
or of man apart from nature, and so far as we can touch a
real-in-itself in either of the two ideals — liberty and necessity,
we are well entitled to say that there is far more necessity
in man than in nature, and far more freedom in nature than
in man. Let it be acknowledged, then, that we know no
other necessity in nature than the necessity which we make
in formulating our experience, and that it will last just as
long as our experiences are as they are, and no longer.
Could these experiences become wider to-morrow and reach
a higher plane of being, any so-called law of nature might
be contravened and shattered ; and were our modes of re-
lation with external nature changed fundamentally — by the
acquisition of a quite new sense yielding quite new expe-
riences, or, better still, by the opening in us of half a
dozen new senses revealing new worlds of experience — then
our fundamental laws of thought would be changed also,
our universal categories revolutionised ; and our necessities
of to-day, the eternal verities we swear by now, would
show beside the eternal verities we should swear by then
like the painful gropinga of a bhnd man beside the quick,
apt and easy movements of one who has his perfect sight.
A race of men that was both blind and deaf would go very
quietly about its business without being disturbed in the
least by the crash of thunder or the flash of lightning ; but
it would not therefore follow that thunder and lightning
were not real things to another race more amply furnished
with senses. Are there no stars in heaven because the eye-
less polype cannot see them ? Is there no law of gravitation
because the brainless oyster does not apprehend it ? Is the
world without moral feeling because the octopus is insensible
to it ? Is there no music of the spheres because ' this muddy
vesture of decay doth grossly close us in ' that we cannot
hear it? An atom in immensity, a moment in eternity, a
single pulse, so to speak, in the flux of life upon earth, man

128 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

cannot transcend the narrow limits of his small capacities ;
can only reflect in knowledge more or less adequately the
minute spot of space, the brief moment of time, in which he
is *, can know little more in the end than how exceeding
little it is that he can ever know, how infinitely much he
can never know. ' Where wast thou when I laid the founda-
tions of the earth ? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of
Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion ? ' AU which by in-
terpretation is that man cannot go outside the vibrations of
matter to which he is constitutionally sensible, and tell us
anything of that which occasions no answering vibrations in
him.

SECTION III.

INVOLUTION AND EVOLITTION.

In pursuit of the purpose to get as close as possible to the
life of mind, that is to say, to its actual relations as a vital
phenomenon, let me now point out that no one's mind is an
individuality in the sense of independence and separateness
which we commonly attach to the conception of individuality.
The mind in truth is not an independent, perfectly distinct,
self-sufBcing being, any more than the body. It is continuous
and dependent ; for it is a becoming from the basis of all human
past through the means of an essential co-operation of
surroundings ; and it is for this reason that it can only be
adequately studied and thoroughly known (a) historically,
and (h) in relation to its surroundings. These are the
methods of a fruitful psychology; for it is in those two
relations that mind can, properly speaking, be said to have
being and to be capable of scientific investigation. It is
plain enough that the body cannot live and be without food
and air and warmth : to talk of a living body as an indivi-
duality apart from its external medium, is to talk of an
abstract conception, a notional existence, not of a real thing.

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 129

Every element of tissue requires -what Lamarck calls its
ambient medium, and could not be a living element of tissue,
or even a lasting element of non-living tissue, -witliout it.
Life is the expression of tbe fit relations of the organisation
and its environing conditions ; the result, that is to say, of
the interactions of a part of nature combined or organised
into a certain complex form and of the outside nature with
which it is in essential relation. The organism, acting on
nature to modify it, and in turn acted upon by nature and
modified — made by circumstances for circumstances — is
itself nature ; one of an infinite multitude of temporary in-
carnations of matter that in a little while will fall to
pieces and go back to the main body.

Many of those who talk with easy fluency of the organism
adapting itself to its environment, are apt to let the mouth-
filling words fill the mind too and so hinder an exact appli-
cation of thought to facts. In the first place, they are
dwelling too much on one aspect of the relation, and are
thus using language which, so far as it has meaning,
means only a partial truth, since it would perhaps be as
true to talk of the environment adapting itself to the organ-
ism; and in the second place, they easily demoralise
themselves by treating the vague doctrine as if it were
itself what is intended by it, instead of making it real
knowledge by patiently investigating and disclosing the
processes of the particular adaptations ; until, growing in in-
flation, they are content with such knowledge of life as is
implied in talking of it as adjustment of internal relations
to external relations. No doubt there is in the phenomena
of life the adjustment of internal to external relations, as
there is in them the relation of a somethingness to a some-
thing-elseness ; but it may be permitted to doubt whether
either proposition is a very valuable addition to knowledge,
and, if it were a question between the two, whether the latter
has not the more solid and substantial meaning.

As it is with the body so is it with mind, which is the
flower of its function, the supreme expression of its life. It
also is the outcome of the organism and its environment,
and could no more le without the ambient medium than it

130 WILL IS ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

could be without the organism. Certainly it has require-
ments beyond those of the body; it requires not only the
physical medium that the body requires, but it needs also
a social medium; deprived of this essential element of its
being, it could no more live than the body could live deprived
of air. That is what we mean when we define man as a
social being. He lives only as a unit of a social organisation,
in vital relations to it, acting upon it and acted upon by it,
inspiring and breathing its social spirit ; he could not live
and move and have his human being separate from it, any
more than he could live and move in a vacuum, or than a
nerve-cell could live detached from its plexus in the brain.
As the air is the breath of his body, which without it would
be dead, so the social medium is the life-breath of his mind,
which without it would not wake to consciousness. No one
can help assimilating unawares the moral atmosphere of the
medium in which he is ; he will feel and be as he lives ; and
so it comes to pass that persons who, like thieves, have
renounced all the obligations of common morality are still
imbued with a sort of ' honour-among-thieves'-morality, the
obligations of which they own, and that persons of an
average standard of general morality are sometimes no
better than criminals in respect of some special relations of
their particular sect, trade, or other social circle to the rest
of society. There is nothing that is thought natural which
may not be made to seem unnatural, nothing that is un-
natural which may not be made natural, by long usage and
custom.

In order to elucidate further the essential relations of
being that hold between the living element and its medium,
it will be well to glance at the transformations which matter
has undergone on earth — to endeavour to apprehend the
meaning of its successive transpeciations. Time was when
no life existed on earth; it is now filled with the most
complex forms of life, which have succeeded to more simple
and general forms ; the mutations of living matter having
been on a scale of increasing complexity, and new manifesta-
tions of energy having accompanied the successive complica-
tions. Going below life to non-living matter, we trace a

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 131

similar progressive complication as we pass upwards in
knowledge from simple chemical combinations of elements
to complex combinations, and from tbese again to more
complex combinations still, until we reach that exceeding
complexity of composition in a small compass which exists
in, and constitutes the basis of, living matter. Thereupon,
making this simplest living element the starting point of a
new ascent, we rise from it through successive complications
of organic matter — from the gelatinous and scarcely ani-
malised substance of such creatures as the polypes and the
infusoria — which, as Lamarck observes, has little more than
the consistence and colour of water, and is incapable of making
a soup that would be nourishing and strengthening to man
— to the more complex and highly animalised flesh of birds
and mammals.* And not in substance only, bat in structure
and form also, we note the same manner of progress through
multiplying complexities and specialisations from simple
forms of organism, seemingly homogeneous in substance, to
the most complex organisms with their varieties of elemental
tissues, their intricate combinations of tissues into organs,
and their intimate physiological uniou of organs. There
has been a progressive exaltation of matter, a more and
more complex involution of it, an ascending transpeciation,
so to speak, as the foundation and condition of that process
of a higher becoming of things which we call evolution : in
fact, it comes to this in the intimate and essential relations
of organic and inorganic nature, that there is not an organised
living creature that does not presuppose and, as it were,
involve the whole history of the earth antecedent to it.
Therefore, instead of being satisfied with one process of so-
called evolution, we ought perhaps rather to recognise,

' ' La chair et le sang des mammifSres et des oiseaux sont les mati^res les
plus composfies et les plus animalisfies que I'on puisse obtenir des parties
molles des animauz; aussi, apr^s les poissons, ces mati^res se d^gradent progres-
sirement an point que dans les radialies moUasses, dans les polypes, et surtout
dans les infusoires, le fluide esseutiel n'a plus que la consistance et la couleur
de I'eau et que les chairs de ces animaux n'offrent plus qu'une matiftre
gelatineuse, i, peine animalisee, Le bouillon que Ton ferait avec de pareilles
chairs ne serait, sans doute, gaftre nourrissant et f ortifiant pour rhomme qui en
ferait usage.' — Lamarck, FMlosopMe zoologigue, toI. i. p. 216.

132 WIIxL IK ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

investigate, and describe three processes — namely, (a) In-
volution, (6) Evolution, and (c) Dissolution; wHcL. processes,
though, three when viewed in relation to individual parts,
are not three, but three aspects of one process, when viewed
in relation to the embracing whole.'

Two leading facts, then, and for us ultimate facts, which
it behoves us to apprehend and firmly fix in mind, are — first,
that there has been what we may call a nisus of evolution in
nature, and, secondly, that progressive transpeciations of
matter have been events of it. Continuity of nature certainly,
but as certainly not of kind in nature ; for the continuity is
of different kinds, therefore in some sort a discontinuity, a
new kind springing from the basis of the old kind : not con-
tinuity by homogeneous but by heterogeneous generation.
A new chemical compound with new properties was a new
thing when it appeared first ; though it presupposed the ele-
ments that united to form it, and therefore had a continuity
of being with them, its new fimction was not the sum or
mechanical effect of the co-operation of their properties;
it was quite a special power that might properly be said
to have its autonomy or, so to speak, its spontaneity. It is
vain to ask why it is so ; we must observe what has taken
place, accept that as ultimate, and be satisfied to trace how
it is so. In like manner must we accept as ultimate facts
other steps in the transpeciation of matter and energy :
organic matter from that which is not organic, life from
not-life, reason and will from sensibilities that are not
reason and will, sensibility from simple irritability, con-
sciousness from that which is not conscious ; for everywhere
it is the same problem that meets us — namely, from the
lower to make the higher, from that which is not to obtain
that which is. It is no real inconsistency to accept two
views that are sometimes opposed to one another as contra-
dictory — namely, the opinion of the essential continuity of

' Lamarck emmciates the notion of involution as the complement of his
doctrine of the transformation of species. The more carefully one reads his
works, the more one realises with surprise what inadequate justice has yet
been done to this great pioneer, who for so long a time was hardly known
except by a ridiculous travesty of his doctrine.

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 133

existences and events in nature, in simple virtue of the agency
and properties of matter ; and the opinion that the so-called
continuity is really a succession of creations through new
involutions of matter. The process is not, properly speaking,
an evolution, unless evolution be complemented by a worked-
out theory of involution, but an epigenesis. Certainly the
most exact and complete mathematics of quantity will not
avail to explain gwaKfo'es.

At some vastly remote period of the world's history — a
period so remote that the distance can hardly take definite
form in a mental conception — non-living matter reached
such a complexity of intimate combinations and was in such
fitting external conditions that it underwent what was then
an extraordinary transformation into living matter. Theo-
logians wiU not care nowadays to dispute the transforma-
tion, if it be granted that the event was the immediate work
of divine interposition, a direct creative act; Once formed,
living matter has the property of perpetuating and increas-
ing itself by taking into itself non-living matter, converting
it into its kind — assimilating it, as it is said— and so
making it vital ; not otherwise than as a spark of fire, once
it has with great pains been obtained, grows into a flame
and continues to, spread when it meets with suitable aliment.
The ease and rapidity with which now is effected by living
matter a transformation that took place only in the first
instance by successive steps and, as it were, after long and
slow preparations, must be attributed to the fact that the
small vital particle contains in itself and supplies actually
in its function the essential conditions of the transmutation
which were then obtained only after many trials and chances,
and by favour perhaps of a happy coincidence. So in un-
known way it works a conversion to its nature by the infec-
tion of its presence and influence. I use the example of a
spark of fire not as an explanation, but as a comparison, in
order to assist the conception of what takes place; for as
the fire raises the matter near it to such a temperature that
it catches fire, or as an orator's enthusiasm so inflames the
enthusiasm of his audience that they flare up ; so the particle
of living matter contains, concentrated in its minute but

134 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

complex compass, and supplies in its living energy, the con-
currence of conditions necessary for the transformation of
non-living aliment into its own living nature. On the one
hand, then, those who see a miracle in the first appearance
of living matter on the earth are bound to see a miracle in
the history of each particle of dead matter which a living
thing converts into its own nature ; on the other hand, those
who see in the new event nothing more than an ordinary
operation of matter, ought not to delude themselves by a
misuse of the word ordinary to describe that which, when it
took place for the first time, was certainly a very esctrw-
ordinary operation of matter.

The elements of the universe being what they are, the
combination of them into a living molecule was inevitable at
some time or another in some place or another. For if the
number of these elements be finite and constant, and their
properties everywhere the same, as our experience of them
in suns and stars warrants us to believe they are, we have
the right to suppose that an infinite number of combinations
of them has taken place in the infinite time and space that
have been available for such operations; and therefore it
would follow that somewhere or other, at some time or other,
there has been a realisation of every possible combination
and development of matter. Not of chemical matter only,
be it understood, but of matter in its highest known form as
the substratum of sensation and thought ; for then, as now,
in the evolutional ascent sensation must have appeared with
the attainment of a certain complexity of the fitting organi-
sation, and thought of the same quality as exists now must
have followed organic combinations having the same quali-
ties as now. We do not discover the differential calculus in
the Amoeba — indeed, we are persuaded that there was a
time when the Amceba was and the differential calculus was
not; but we are perfectly sure that, the conditions of the
earth having been what they were, the discovery of the
differential calculus was inevitable some time in the chain
of organic events. For anything we know to the contrary,
nay conformably to the probabilities of all that we do
know, it may have been discovered thousands of times in

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 135

thousands of otlier planets ; in wliich in the course of an infi-
nite past every possible composition of matter and every pos-
sible conception of mind have very likely been realised over
and over again. There and then, as here and now, those
combinations of elements that were most stable would endure
and become the basis of still more complex combinations, and
so the whole series of events follow in inevitable order ; the
diBFerential calculus at the proper time, as certainly as the
coming into being of an organic molecule when the fulness
of its time was come. And seeing that organic matter, once
it has come into being, sustains and increases itself by prey-
ing upon other organic matter, there must needs ensue in
due course all the horrible consequences of the struggle for
existence on earth. What an overwhelming reflection!
That the same animal ferocity in pursuing, killing and
devouring through all the forms of animal life; the same
human vices, miseries, cruelties and crimes that have filled
the earth with groans and lamentations through untold
ages ; the same inadequate notions and abortive struggles ;
the same fruitless aspirations and prayers that have been
little more than cries of conscious impotence; — that all these
things have been many times in the infinite past of being, as
the result of the same organic combinations that prevail
on earth now, and prevail also perhaps at this moment in
more than one of the infinite multitudes of worlds that are
scattered through infinite space ! So may it be that when
the high-souled poetic being gazes into the blue deep of
heaven on a cloudless night, rapt away from things of earth
in a transport of ineffable ecstasy, and is thrilled with mys-
terious sympathies that bring him into sacred communion
of spirit with something that he sees not, apprehends not,
thinks not, but feels is there, he is experiencing the dim in-
timations of a nearer kinship than he suspects.

May we not discern a dim perception or vague adumbra-
tion of this eternally recurring evolution and dissolution of
worlds and beings in the old and widely spread doctrine of a
transmigration of souls ? It was one of the traditions of the
Rabbins that those who had been the guiltiest of the guilty,
and who had made themselves abominable in the sight of

136 "WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

heaven by their sins, were chased round the world by evil
spirits until the time decreed was accomplished. Then they
sank into dust and ashes, the lowest depth of existence.
Next, in another beginning of existence they became clay
and took the nature of stone and of minerals ; and from
thence they rose to become water, air and fire, floating in
the cloud, rushing in the whirlwind, rolling in the thunder.
After this they entered into vegetable existence, springing
to life in grass and flowers, trees and shrubs. Ages on ages
were consumed in these successive transformations ; for in
them units of time-reckoning might well be, not by revolu-
tions of planets, but by the births and deaths of solar sys-
tems. The next change was into animal life, in which as
beast, bird, reptile, fish and insect, in the waters, in the air,
on the ground and underground, they pursue and are pursued,
rend with tooth and claw and are rended, destroy and are
destroyed, through countless seons. At last they are suffered
to ascend into the rank of human beings once more. But
their ascent there is step by step : they are first slaves un-
dergoing unspeakable toils, privations and tortures, so that
their life is a long longing to die ; dying in. fall time, they
commence life again in a higher rank, being free, but it is
a hard life of toil, of poverty, of war, of dungeons, of bloody
superstitions, of worship of idols, in abasement and ignor-
ance. To them also in the end comes the release of death ;
then the final change ensues, and they enter the highest
rank of mankind, beco;ming Israelites, the chosen people to
whom has been given the promise of universal dominion.
The end is accomplished : the long cycle of the travail of
matter through eternity has reached its climax, having cul-
minated in the highest specimen of mankind — a good Jew.
See the grim irony of events ! When Jesas Christ came, a
Jew of the Jews, they rejected and crucified Him.

Let us turn back to the main line of our inquiry. It
has been shown that the lesson of material continuity with
progressive complication, which is taught by the ascent from
simple binary compounds to ternary compoimds, from tern-
ary compounds to still more complex compounds, and from
these to the exceeding complex composition of nerve-element.

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 137

is plainly taught also by the development of organic life.
An organism and its medium, when they have reached a
certain fitness of one to the other and hit upon the happy
concurrence of conditions, combine, so to speak, to make a
new start, the initial step of a more complex organism.
This initial variation which, profiting by what is called
natural selection, undergoes gradual development, is an
original fact that we cannot explain. Call it an internal
principle of evolution, if you will,thoughitis doubtful whether
matters are made any more clear thereby. To call it an
accidental variation is hardly well, since there is no such
event as accident, and in any case that is ill called an
accident which issues finally in such a definite and special
product as a new organism : it is almost equivalent to call-
ing man himself an accident. Natural selection affords us
an explanation of the survival of the variation once it has
been made, but no explanation of the organic start itself nor
of its progressive increase. It is in the inmost depths of
physiology, in the most intimate physico-chemical processes
that take place between the internal properties of the
organism and the external stimuli of the environment, that
we must search for the origin of the initial variation and of
its growth by exercise. All we know and understand at
present is that it is the observed tendency of organic
matter to break into varieties, thousands of which probably
occur and come to naught, in the absence of fit surroundings
to preserve them, for each one that survives and is fixed with
the lapse of time. Everywhere we observe evidence of such
variations : no two faces, no two voices, no two treads, no
two objects in living nature are ever exactly alike ; in the
phenomena of heredity the operation of a law of variation
is as manifest as the operation of the law of inheritance of
like qualities. What wonder that such variations occur
often in the unstable and extremely plastic substance of
nascent organic matter ?

The initial structure of the new variation is an embodi-
ment of the special conditions of the environment, an
organic involution of them, and is therefore prepared by its

nature to flourish in similar fitting conditions; for as the
10

138 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

living particle, once formed, contains in itself and supplies
the essential conditions of tlie transformation of suitable
non-living matter into its kind, so this new embodiment
contains in its structure and supplies in its function the
essential conditions of a further increase, and grows aptly
to the mode of its exercise. That is the real meaning of
Lamarck's doctrine that the want or need generates the
effort, and the effort or exercise the faculty. The first step
once made, the initial combination of organism and medium,
the increase wUl be comparatively easy, for here, as in
morals, it is the first step only that costs ; it will increase,
by reason of its embodied conditions, in external surround-
ings that would not have been sufiBcient to generate it,
although it will certainly perish in surroundings that are
not adequately adapted to it ; as a fire will go out when it
has not proper fuel, or as a gill-breathing animal will expire
in the air. Notwithstanding this advantage of intrinsic
structural conditions, however, it is extremely probable that
multitudes of variations are born only to fade timelessly, ' no
sooner blown than blasted,' just as the great majority of all
sorts of seeds come to naught ; just as many bright thoughts
not caught and fixed at the moment pass for ever ; just as
among thousands upon thousands of stars and planets one
only perhaps here and there comes to aught. To infinite
Power, with infinite time and infinite space at its disposal, it
is manifestly no greater matter to waste planets than to
waste seeds.

It is not a very profitable discussion whether function
developes structure or structure developes function, as it is
not a profitable discussion why the organism makes the first
start of a new development which the surroundings after-
wards nurse into completeness. Both questions seem to be
based upon the notion of a living organism as an indi-
viduality that has existence apart from its medium. In
reality it has nothing of the kind. We make the abstrac-
tion in thought, but there is no corresponding separation in
nature. A similar discussion has been raised as to whether
social morality is the basis of individual morality, or whether
individual morality has preceded social morality ; as if indi-

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 139

vidual morality could be at all except in relation to a social
environment, or a society be without individuals. Morality
would have no meaning to a man living alone on a planet
which he had all to himself: he could not be virtuous there
any more than a woman would be hysterical who was placed
in similar circumstances; or than a sole Supreme Being
who has the universe to Himself can be virtuous or vicious.

Let us endeavour to apprehend as closely as possible the
formation of a new organic start. A structural variation
appears, be it the most minutely initial imaginable. Certainly
it could not, before it was formed, function as part of the
organism, and must have preceded its function in the order of
development, since function is the definite energy of structure
of definite form ; that form being itself the result of the com-
bining propei-ties of the simple and complex compounds that
constitute the structure in their relations to the environment.
The unloosing of the energies of the compounds by their de-
composition and the unified action of the liberated energy,
as determined by the form of structure, will be the function.
On the other hand, it is a sure matter of daily observation
that structure grows to the mode of its exercise, and wastes
when it is not exercised — that is to say, that function de-
velopes structure in the line of its activity ; a plus replace-
ment of expended organic material being growth, a minus
replacement thereof waste. Here, then, we are brought to
a pretty pass, which looks very like an impasse. We may
be permitted to ask ourselves, however, whether at bottom
anything more wonderful has happened than happened
when a new chemical compound, or an organic molecule,
was formed for the first time, which has ever since in-
creased and multiplied.

Nutrition is a succession of generations, and generation
is fundamentally a continuance of nutrition. We need to
get rid of the artificial separation that we make between
organism and medium, and to cultivate the conception of an
essential interaction. The proper influences or fitting co-
incidences of the medium are as essential a part of the con-
stitution of the new structui-al start as are the intrinsic
conditions or properties of the organic structure from which

140 WILL Df ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL. ASPECT.

it proceeds; it is indeed the material embodiment, in the
most complex and concentrated form, of the intrinsic organic
conditions and of the extrinsic conditions, of the medium —
an involution, so to speak, of the two complex factors.
Always is it necessary to have envelopment before you can
have development, to fold in before you can itnfold. The
smallest particle of protoplasm that ever came into being,
came into being through the union of immanent and influent
conditions, and it grew afterwards by the continuance of a
similar process of combination under vastly more favourable
auspices ; but it was able to grow in that fashion from pre-
ceding protoplasm only because the latter carried incorporate
in its nature, as immanent properties, the antecedent influent
external conditions that were necessary to its first produc-
tion. The exercise of function being the giving out or un-
loosing of those combined internal and external conditions,
the unfolding from within, by a self-disintegration, of the
coincident conditions within and without that combined
in the first instance to form the new variation, these natu-
rally promote further material embodiments — that is to say,
further increase of structure. In regard of relative priority
of appearance of structure and function then, the proper
answer would perhaps be that the new function came first as
the function of concurrent organism and medium, being
more or less vague and tentative; and that the material
embodiment in the initial variation, surviving by its fitness
to the conditions, became the structural basis of definite,
purposive, and less dependent function of the organism.

It is easier to entertain the general notion of a process
of involution than it is to put forth an intelligible exposition
of it. Making use of every aid, in order, if possible, to make
the conception clear and definite, I would particularly point
out that in the formation of' the primitive organic particle,
and in each successive formation of more complex organic
matter, a process has taken place that at bottom is
identical with what we see going on and exemplified now
in every conscious mental acquisition. For what happens
in this case? Observation of the new conditions that
present themselves, and in due course adaptive reaction

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION, 141

to them ; sucli process, ingoing and outgoing, being at the
foundation of the faculties we call perception and judgment;
so we make a veritable assimilation of them, and therein a
gain to ourselves of mental faculty. The process is gradual
and tentative at first, but it becomes exact and perfect by-
practice. Now the underlying condition of such acquired
faculty or function certainly is an organic basis of gradually
formed structure, the specialty of which structure is deter-
mined by, embodies, and signifies the composite result of the
internally immanent and the special externally influent
conditions. Thus conscious function helps to throw light
upon the dark and hidden processes of purely organic
function, for it is with the increments and developments of
the simple organic particle as it is at bottom with our mental
increments and developments.

The reaction of the simplest living matter to the external
stimulus is simple and direct, but it is obvious that with each
of those above-mentioned increments of gain, they being
embodiments of simple reactions, the reaction becomes less
direct and simple ; and it is further obvious that with
successive additions, especially when the additions are deve-
lopments, the reaction becomes more and more circuitous
and complicated ; the determinants of action mainly within,
the occasions without. The organism has become a maga-
zine of embodied relations. In its structure are stored up
potentially the multitudinous simple actions and reactions
between organic substance and medium — ordered struc-
turalisations that make its increasing complexity; they
are there ready to unfold in energy on the occasion of a slight
and very indirect stimulus ; not otherwise than as the mind
of a man of the world contains the gains of the experience
by which he has profited on his way through life, and holds
them in store ready for use when the occasion demands. A
complex organism is the embodiment of such involutions
from the beginning of life on earth to the beginning of its
life. The spontaneities and autonomies, so-called, of organic
structures and beings have been thus fashioned. If traced back
to their genesis, if imdone, so to speak, in the reverse order
in which they were done, the research would bring us at last

142 -WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

to the simple fact of the primitive action and reaction. In
the least portion of an organic structure the immediate
relation is immanent ; it can only be directly and openly
dispensed with on any occasion of function, because it
is, so to speak, capitalised there; and it is by reason of
such funded stores that an external stimulus that otherwise
might seem slight and inadequate is adequate to produce
large effects.

The tendency at the present day is perhaps to lay undue
stress on the environment as cause of the variations that
take place in an organism, and in some respects the term
'natural selection' may have helped to enhance the
tendency ; for the common notion of natural selection is apt
to be that of an external active power which seizes on the
organism and compels it to adxiupt itself in special ways.
In reality, of course, natural selection merely expresses the
fact that the organism survives which has made the fitting
adaptation ; and it is exactly the adaptation that needs to be
explained. Indeed, the word adaptation itself is one which,
if used by theologians, would probably be condemned as
being of anthropomorphic taint, and implying the application
of conscious experience of human action to material events.
To search out and discover the exact physico-chemical con-
ditions and events of a particular process of adaptation — ^that
is the real problem ; and the solution of it would be of more
scientific value than volumes of vague disquisition concerning
adaptation. It is necessary, in this relation, to be on guard
against falling into the easy delusion that the application of
new terms to old facts is an addition to our knowledge of
the facts : evolution and environment, for example, are large
words of swelling sound that seem to be charged with big
meaning, but by themselves they really explain no more than
the old expressions of the hecoming of things amidst the
things around them. The question is what are the exact
facts that such general words signify; and here it must be
confessed that an aching void of meaning often appears.'

' Darwin established the doctrine of evolution on a scientific basis by
infinitely patient labour of observation and thought ; but it has been the fate
of his discovery, as it is the fate of most epoch-marking discoveries, to be

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 143

If a complex organism embodies in its nature the en-
vironments of all organism that come in the order of de-
velopment between it and the simplest form of organism — if
it be, so to say, a magazine of such involutions — so that in
dealing with its external relations and internal correlations
we are dealing with the historical incorporation of a multi-
tude of past environments, it is obvious that a general state-
ment of the action of the environment to produce a variation
is too vague to have the smallest scientific value. Suppose
some thousands of chemical compounds mixed together in
states of highly unstable equilibrium, but having the ex-
ternal formal equilibrium of an organism; then suppose
some impulse from without to upset the unstable equilibrium,
so that the compounds go instantly into a turmoil of decom-
pounding, recompounding and new compounding, some in
more, others in less stable combinations; what an empty
pretence of information it would be to say that the possible
multitude of ensuing new combinations and the consequent
modification of the external relations of the formal whole
were due, in any direct sense, to the influence of the en-
vironment! And yet we have made the supposition of a
state of things falling far short of that which prevails in a
complex organism ; for such organism is a formal equilibrium
of countless multitudes of internal molecular motions, that
are ever active, changing every moment, combioing and
separating, neutralising and reinforcing, as complex and
incalculable as the multitudinous npples of ocean. The im-
mediate relations of organism and environment may perhaps
be the least part of our difficulties, when we have made any-
thing of it in the way of exact Iniowledge; we shall have to
inquire into the complex and intimate correlations of its
several parts and functions, whereby variations of one part
entail important and far-reaching variations in other parts,
without any direct action of the environment. Moreover,

spun into many vain and vapid theories by speculative disciples, who, not
applying themselves to patient intercourse with facts, use a few ill-observed
and inadequately apprehended facts as the occasions of speculative applica-
tions of the doctrine; whereby it naturally does not fail to happen that
everything in the world is capable of being explained by it.

144 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

in this complicated business it is plain tliat the adaptation
of an organism to its present environment may be not a
useful adaptation of the organism as a whole, but the par-
ticular adaptation of a variation of it, the development
whereof may entail correlated inter-adjusting changes in it
that are not progressions but retrogressions ; not really
helpful to the whole, but positively hurtful to it as a whole,
and so calculated to arrest its higher development or to
promote its actual degeneration.

In this relation, we shall do well to reflect on the
different organic stages through which, in its course of
embryonic development, the ovum of one of the higher
animals passes from a seemingly homogeneous and scarcely
visible substance to the complex structure of its mature
form, the environment all the while being the same. Its
successive variations do not owe much apparently in those
circumstances to natural selection, rather would they appear
to make their own election. No doubt development in this
case repeats the different stages of descent when the en-
vironment was different, and the successive stages thereof
are so many evolutions of very complex involutions that
have been accomplished in the successions of the ages ; but
that does not alter the fact that the very remarkable evolu-
tion of the microscopic germ is not due to its environment,
but to occult qualities in itself, to its intrinsic essence. In
its nature is inscribed the architectural pZaw. or form of its
development.

The lesson which the example teaches is that always the
initial variation of an organism, which we call accidental
because its causes are unknown, and the form of develop-
ment of the variation, are in the main the direct inspira-
tion of the organism and essentially independent of its
present environment. "Without doubt the fitting external
conditions are necessary to its survival and growth, but they
are not determinant of its origin. The material of the
difference of mass between the acorn and the oak obviously
comes from without — from the soil and from the atmosphere ;
but it is the acorn that contains the determining conditions
by which this matter has been transmuted into living struc-

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 145

tiire, as well as the directing form after which it has been
constrained to fashion itself — not otherwise than as the form-
following repair of a crystal takes place in a suitable solution
— and by which always the tree is forbidden to grow up unto
heaven. And we have to note this : that not only has the
transmuting power been multiplied with the continual con-
versions of non-living \nto living matter, but that each new
element thus added ta vital has been literally informed, by
the pre-existing /orm, and so transformed as to become a
new store of form. In like manner, a variation occurring in
each of two differently constituted organisms placed in the
same surroundings, in which both were adapted to live, would
not be of the same kind and take the same course of develop-
ment in each case — would not, in fact, grow by minute incre-
ments into the same kind of new organ. Each variation
would be informed by the special antecedents in the organism
from which it proceeded, being the expression of the corre-
lation of its parts, and carrying in itself the formal plan
of its future development : would nowise be moulded help-
lessly by circumstances, but would mould circumstances
helpfully. Natural selection gives account only of the
quantitative increase, it gives no account whatever of the
qualitative nature of the new variation.

Thus much then by way of showing that in virtue of the
autonomy of an organism there is what we may call an
organic spontaneity manifesting itself in variations that
are certainly not due to the surroundings, but which must,
in order to survive, meet with fit surroundings. The bad
side of this tendency to variation is exemplified by the
appearance of morbid growths and other diseased products
in the organism, which, if the medium be fit, increase, but,
if unfit, dwindle and die ; and the important co-operation
of the medium is well shown further by the way in which
infectious germs are noxious or innocuous, according to its
states, and more especially by the way in which some such
germs may be cultivated artificially into virulence or into
innocence outside the body, according to the media in which
they are placed.

Nor is it to be overlooked in this connection that a like

146 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

process of variation is manifest in mental operations, and is
at the foundation of the development of new ideas. Given
the basis of good mental nutrition and respiration in a
suitable social atmosphere, and there take place from time
to time spontaneous variations testifying to the autonomy
of the organism. It is mental productivity as distinguished
from reproductivity ; and it naturally diminishes as age
advances, until it is entirely lost in old persons, because
vrith the increasing failure of their vital povj'ers there is no
superfluous nutrition and no exuberant energy to make a
variation. The most striking instance of productivity in
the organic sphere and in its intimately related mental
sphere is seen in the nature and operation of the repro-
ductive impulse, which in the individual is truly a sort of
organic spontaneity ; not certainly provoked by the sensual
pleasure that accompanies its gratification, for plants practise
sexual congress without having any sensation, and animals
and human beings accomplish it before they know the
pleasure it brings. Meanwhile the gratification that attends
its function is a signal justification of its strong and blind
impulse ; a proof also, since no two beings are exactly alike,
how deep in the heart of nature lies not only the propa-
gation of life but also the production of variations in its
propagation.

The tendency to variation in organic beings is most
manifest in man, who for the present marks the organic
culmination of nature, and most manifest in his highest
developments — that is, in the functions of his intellect and
imagination ; though it may be a question whether in his
physical characters the tendency be not rather to greater
uniformity, as the conditions of life on earth are becoming
more alike. Through the great changes which he has made
on its surface in order to adapt it to his wants, and through
the dominating and unquestioned ascendency which he has
long conquered for himself, all other branches of the animal
kingdom have had their development checked and the forms
thereof stereotyped in a sterile immobility. The energies of
organic becoming have been collected and absorbed into the
channel of human becoming. Any intellectual or moral

INVOLUTION AND EVOLUTION. 147

progress on the part of animals, or any advance on their
remarkable instincts — which in the ingenious adaptations of
means to end stand so strangely apart from the poor and
unprogressive character of their present intelligence, like
stereotyped survivals of a period of development when they
possessed higher adaptive powers than they do now — is
rendered impossible. Only in those animals that are used
by man to subserve his wants, and cultivated by him for
the purpose, is there any notable tendency to survival and
variation. There is no animal not domestic but flies
instantly from his presence : , ages of pursuit and persecution
have made that the urgent self-conservative instinct of
every creature that shares the earth with him. The wild
animals, like wild men, are indeed fast coming to find
themselves without a medium in which they can survive,
since it is impossible for them to accommodate themselves
to the medium that man is making of the earth, almost all
parts of which he now either cultivates for his use or
traverses for his needs or pleasure. They survive as antique
monuments of past climates, past soils, past conditions of
the earth at past geological epochs, of which in their day
and generation they were doubtless the best outcome ; nay,
perhaps, each the best and most beautiful product, if con-
sidered in relation to its proper medium, howbeit that in a
foreign medium and age some of them appear huge mon-
strosities and anachronisms. That they have thus lived on
into an epoch of the world which has long outgrown them,
and has no appreciation of their beauty and fitness, having a
quite special human standard of its own, is their misfortune.
Happily for them they are not disquieted with aspirations
for ideals beyond them ; each kind holds to its own standard ;
and the rhinoceros wisely prefers his ugly and unwieldy
consort to the beauty and the proportions of the Venus de
Medici.

It is not only that the dominating ascendency of man
prevents progress in the animals below him that are not
moulded by him for his uses, but it tends to produce retro-
gression in them. If one of two animals of the same kind
or of nearly allied kinds undergoes a variation that is useful

148 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT,

to it in the struggle for existence, and prospers by reason of
it, tlie advantage it lias gained does not count to the other
simply as the deprivation of an advantage, but it is a
positive disadvantage to it ; inasmuch as, having a rival that
takes and occupies the higher place, it is now driven to live
a lower life, to lose its organic aspirations, and by degrees to
undergo degradation. The conditions of its existence,
instead of being open and propitious to development on its
part, are now made unpropitious and positively antagonistic
by the repressive presence of its successful competitor. Let
us suppose, by way of illustration, the instances of man and
his monkey-like next-of-kin, at the time when, descended
from a common stem, their ways began to diverge. It is
evident that when the legs came to be used exclusively for
locomotion instead of the four limbs, and thereby the hands
were left free for grasping purposes, for contrivance, for
defence, for gestures of expression, and for other special
uses, there would not only be the positive gain of hands to
those who had taken this path of progress ; but those who
had not done so, but still continued to employ their hands
in climbing, would become more and more dependent upon
that use of them, in order to escape the competing hostility
of the superior animal now in possession of the best places,
and so to survive. Thus the locomotive uses of the arms
would be perpetuated and even augmented, and the higher
uses of them put a still greater distance away ; and thus
likewise in other respects each more in the special progress
of man would be a more in the special path of the monkey's
diverging progress. The same law reigns in the struggle
for existence among the races of men, leading to the de-
generation and extinction of the inferior races, and will
continue to do so till it come to pass, if it ever shall cone
to pass, that the struggle for existence is checked and con-
trolled by the growth and spread of the sentiment of uni-
versal brotherhood, and so the struggle become one not of
individual against individual, nor of race against race, but
one of the whole human race, compact in solidarity of feeling
and aim, against the obstacles that hinder its progress
towards higher and higher ideals.

SECTION IV.

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM.

In the social development of mankind we notice and mark
the same sort of nisus of evolution manifest in the same
kind of process of more and more complex becoming that has
gone on in inorganic nature and in the development of
organic life. It is indeed because of the necessity of
carrying the conception into the higher region of social
evolution, and of making use of it there, that I have lingered
upon it at length and laboured to make its natu^-e plain.
To realise the full meaning of physiological facts,- to get
clear and exact notions of them in their mental relations,
is a difficult business, and one which those who base
psychology on the method of introspection seem to be unable
to accomplish ; it is impossible for them so much as to grasp
adequately the conception of a living organism, because of
their want of physiological training. They persuade them-
selves they get it from text-books, when they only get there
much such a vague and inadequate conception as a blind
man would get of colours from a description of them ; and
in face of the fruitful facts and conceptions which present
themselves, but which they cannot assimilate vitally, they
go on repeating the empty phrases of their schools. Their
real relation to physiology is this : they demoralise by their
psychological spirit what they appropriate from it, and they
fail to impregnate their psychology with its spirit. Tell
them that the social feeliug operates in a civilised society
to make a person feel the obligation to do right, and they
protest against the statement as absurd, because they can
think of such influence only as deliberative, reasoned, pro-
spective, self-regarding ; they cannot conceive that it should
be, as it often is, immediate, urgent, self-denying, instinctive.
Were they to be at the pains to learn and grasp adequately
the physiological conception of an organism and of the vital
relations therein of the parts to the whole and of the whole
to the parts, whereby, aU being members of one body and

150 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

members one of another, the whole works in each living
element and each living element in the whole, they would
experience no such difficulty ; for they would then compre-
hend that an individual can no more help feeling the
constant presence and influence of the social medium in
which, for which, and by which he lives, and of responding
to it, than an organic element can help feeling the presence
and influence of the organism to which it belongs.

Reflecting on the admirable consensus of parts in the
physiological organism, whereby so many and diverse '
elements work together in the bonds of peace and in unity
of spirit for the good of the whole, may one not propound,
incidentally this hypothesis — namely, that each element
contains in itself, in some secret and incomprehensible way,
an abstract essence of the whole ?. For if a minute substance
like the sperm-cell or germ-cell contains in itself the essential,
characters of every organic element of the body from which
it proceeds, as it plainly does ; and if nutrition is at bottom
a continuous generation, as it virtually is ; why may not
each specific element of the body contain in abstract, in its
innermost nature, the essential characters of all the diverse
elements that are organically united to form the whole ? So
perhaps might we explain, among other things, the singular
occurrence, in morbid cysts in the breasts and other parts of
the body, of some of the embryonic structures that are
ordinarily met with only as products of normal embryonic
development in the womb. It is not in that case that a
nascent germ- or sperm-cell travels to these distant regions
and developes there, but that the elements of tissue in these
regions have had awakened in them the dormant properties
which they possess in common with the germ- and the sperm-
cell.

In the progress of social evolution new starts or varia-
tions occur, just as organic starts occur, and they are in like
manner the results of new combinations between the condi-
tions immanent in the individual and the coincident apt
conditions of the social medium — the intrinsic and the in-
fluent conditions. Already have we seen how an individual
developes a variation when he takes the tone of manner and

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 151

feeling and thought of a particular sect of society iu which
he lives. Not with deliberate method but almost insensibly :
he observes more or less consciously in order to act; by
acting habitually after a certain fashion, he becomes ; and
the result of such becoming is that he feels, thinks and is as
one of the sect. Thenceforth he is at home there, because
he responds congenially to the impressions of the circle, and
easily gives out in function what he has embodied in struc-
ture — that is to say, displays naturally in feeling, thought
and conduct that which he has made part of his character.
But when a new thought is struck out for the first time in
the course of human progress, obviously no such conscious or
semi-conscious imitation is possible, since there is nothing
to imitate; it is a new thing, an initial variation of the
social organism, which cannot have been learnt anywhere.
Whence comes it ? If one thing is shown plainly by obser-
vation of the course of development of human thought, it ia
that a new thought is in the air, so to speak, before it is ap-
prehended and expressed, and that the aptly constituted and
happily placed individual becomes the organ of it; he makes
explicit that which was implicit in the instinctive pulses of
thought and feeling around him, which was waiting in tension,
as it were, to burst into blossom, and which perhaps had
already made some obscure and abortive attempts to do so.
He is the first bud to blossom successfully on a branch
where others, moved by a common pulse of life, are ready to
blossom also. Hence it comes to pass that a new thought
is seldom, if ever, evolved without more persons than one
having had dim intimations or more or less distinct concep-
tions of it, and that endless wranglings concerning the
honour of priority take place among those who, ignoring
their intellectual parentage and social inspiration, flatter
themselves they have any special merit in the matter.

Good proof of the essential dependence upon the medium,
as well for its survival as for its origin, is afforded by the fate
which befalls a new idea that is put forth before its time — that ,
is to say, before the social medium is fitted to entertain it ;
when perhaps the very language in which it may express
itself is wanting, and a fit language for it has yet to be framed

152 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

and learnt ; for it produces no effect, comes into the world
almost stillborn, is neglected and soon forgotten, and has
to be rethought and proclaimed afresh years or generations
afterwards. Meanwhile the neglected author of the prema-
ture birth pays the penalty of being in advance of his age
by being thought a speculative visionary while he lives, and
afterwards, when his idea has gained acceptance on the
authority of some foster-parent, by being acknowledged to
have made a lucky guess, for which it would be absurd to
award him any credit; all the real merit of the discovery
being assigned to him who proclaimed it at a time when it met
with acceptance, or who so enforced attention to it by elabo-
rate demonstration and by much insistance that all persons
with any pretence to knowledge were forced to take sides
either for or against it. Seldom, if ever, has there been a
discovery made that has not been thus anticipated; in
fact it would be no exaggeration to say that a new thought
cannot be very original if it gets itself soon accepted ; and it
is not to be doubted that as with organic variations, so with
the organs of new ideas, many perish before the one survives
to bear fruit. A well-worn saying respecting a scientific
discovery is that it goes through three stages — the first
stage, when it is ridiculed as absurd ; the second, when it is
denounced as contrary to religion ; and the third, when it is
declared to have nothing new in it. Perhaps a truer
statement of the stages of its development would be — first,
that in which it is announced in vague outline and despised
as vain speculation ; the second, when it is proved and esta-
blished by elaborate observation and reasoning; and the
third, when it is appropriated by the speculative philosophers
and prostituted to their theoretical uses.

The wonder perhaps is that a new idea should ever be
born before its due time — that the social organism should
ever develope the initial organ before it has reached the
fitting stage of evolution to maintain it. Somehow, in the
continuous flux of events there has happened the favourable
coincidence of external conditions and of a happily consti-
tuted individual, the result of the concurrence being a new
birth of thought ; while it is only after many years that the

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 153

general level of knowledge has been so raised as to admit of
the promulgation of the discovery and of its simultaneous
verification. Time and chance happen in all things; where-
fore the ancients rightly built altars and dedicated temples to
Fortune. A great character in a mean sphere shall never
be heard of beyond his village, though he may be a notable
figure there, while the qualities of a poorer character on a
large stage shall cause his name to echo through human
history. The jealousies of Augustus Csesar and Mark
Antony were war throughout the then known world: the
jealousies of two men of equal natural capacities to those of
Augustus Csesar and Mark Antony may be a quarrel in a
country alehouse. The finest tree of the forest is the pro-
duct of a good seed falling on good ground in propitious sur-
roundings, but where are the thousand seeds that perished
the very year when it germinated, every one of which would
have produced as fine a tree as it, had the same good fortune
befallen them ? Has not many an inglorious potential
Newton gazed at the stars and only thought of them, if
he has thought of them at all, as a means of lighting him
home at night? Those who see not a miraculous but a
natural event in the birth and progress of Christianity will
acknowledge that, had its founder been born two hundred
years before he was born, at a time when his countrymen
were not waiting in earnest expectation of the coming of a
redeemer of Israel, and before the commencing dissolution
of the Eoman Empire yielded a soil excellently fit for its
growth, he would have lived and died in a mean obscurity.
Had there been no Trench revolution, and had Napoleon not
chanced to come in the slackening stream of it, he might
well have ended his days obscurely, a moody and discon-
tented captain of artillery, as men of equal capacity to his
have very likely often done. For my part, I have certainly
known in country villages men of more native power of
intellect, of larger humour, of more quietly heroic self-sup-
pression, of more silent grandeur of character, of more solid
human qualities, than any distinguished man that I have
ever met with ; he, for the most part, is actually a signally

self-conscious and attenuated person, the potential gold of
11

154 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

him beaten out to the finest possible display, and mucli de-
moralised, whether as politician, preacher, literary or scien-
tific man, by his constant appeals to public approbation.

Let it be supposed that by some singular chance an indi-
vidual of an extraordinary genius is born among a tribe of low
savages, it is pretty certain that he would not be a great
engineer, nor a great mathematician, nor a great moralist ;
the antecedent elements or conditions of such a product of
civilisation being entirely wanting in the low social organi-
sation, it could not be a product of it ; and he would apply
his superior powers in order to excel in those arts of oratory
in council, or in that skill and valour in battle, in which it
was the tribal ambition and the tribal glory to excel. Nor
would the moral approbation of conscience, individual and
tribal, fail to be measured by the number of scalps that he
brought home. Were a low savage transplanted to a civil-
ised country, it is no less certain that he would fail to take
root there ; though he might be well constituted after his
kind, he would hardly have more power of successful adjust-
ment to the complex conditions of his surroundings than a
natural imbecile would have; the product of a lower and
much simpler social organisation, he has neither acquired for
himself nor inherited from his ancestors the organic involu-
tion of the more complex social conditions which would
render him capable of feeling them and of adapting himself
to them. He would be sadly out of place — without habits, and
without the sensibilities and faculties to acquire them. The
Sermon on the Mount would not sensibly affect a native
Andaman islander, nor would Kant's categorical moral im-
perative, in spite of its a, priori character and innate sanction,
have much authority in the conscience of an Iroquois Indian.
We may, if we choose, suppose the opposite case of a civil-
ised youth transplanted into the midst of a tribe of low
savages and compelled to end his days among them, without
ever having intercourse with any beings higher than they :
how long would he preserve his civilised feelings and habits,
with nothing in his surroundings to elicit their exercise, to
foster their growth, to maintain their vitality ? He would
dwindle and die morally and intellectually, as a gardener's

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 155

slip will die when it is not planted in a suitable soil or
grafted in a suitable structure, though, like the slip, he
would grow on his native stem or if planted in a fitting
medium.

One hardly realises for the most part to what singular
fashions of thought and feeHng human character may be
bent by the training of special circumstances and habits:
not only how custom dominates in belief and practice, but
how it operates in a quasi-mechanical way to determine even
modes of sensibility. The horror felt by a savage at the
spectacle of a human sacrifice is less than that which would
be felt by a civilised person who was not a butcher at the
spectacle of the slaughter of an ox ; and I dare say that the
children of the village would dance with pleasure and imitate
the victim's cries, as in an English village they imitate with
delight the squeals of a pig that is being killed. "Would it
have been believed possible, if history had not authenticated
the fact, that there ever were nations which deemed it a
mark of piety and affection to kill and eat their aged fathers ?
See how the ignorant savage, taken prisoner by his enemy,
endures the menaces and tortures to which he is subjected,
without uttering a single sigh or cry for mercy, or making
the least sign of submission; with what an invincible
courage he braves his tormentors, railing at them and defy-
ing them to do their worst, reproaching them with their
impotence to extract one cry of pain, exulting and insulting
over them in boasts of the greater tortures which he has
made their people suffer. All this because the custom of
tribal belief, deeming it the glory of a death by torture to
triumph in such stoical endurance, has trained his nature
into such a development as, when stimulated to an ecstatic
transport, to vanquish its natural sensibilities.

It is difficult to repel an intruding suspicion or distrust of
the stability of anything based in human progress, when one
considers the grossly inconsistent belief and the signal moral
insensibilities in particular relations that exist, sometimes
without the least reprobation, and even without a perception
of their inconsistent character, in communities and individuals
that have reached a high state of general intelligence and

156 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

moral feeling. So impossible is it to say of any qualities,
however incompatible, that they may not coexist in the same
individual, that one might suppose a being compounded of
entirely opposite qualities and believe he would somehow
contrive to reconcile them. Certainly we shall find a man
sometimes to be one person in one set of circumstances, and
quite another person, displaying different habits of thought,
feeling and conduct, in another set of circumstances; it
is with him as jt is with a boy when he is at school, and
when he is home for the holidays, who, without knowing it,
falls under different habits of thought and feeling instantly
the change is made, and in one state can hardly realise
himself thinking and feeling as he does in the other. Reflect
on the gross examples among all nations of superstitious
credulity contradicting the earliest and most constant teach-
ings of daily experience and the plainest dictates of morality;
on the most devilish tortures that human ingenuity could
devise inflicted by devout Christians on their fellow-believers
of a minutely different shade of faith ; on the inculcation of
duelling as a high code of honour in the same breath with a
devout assent to the commandment, ' Thou shalt not kill ; ' on
slaveholdingand its attendant horrors sanctioned complacently
by pious men and kind-hearted fathers of families, with-
out the least suspicion of any wrong on their part ; on wars
and oppressions undertaken by Christian rulers and blessed
by the ministers of a gospel of peace and brotherly love ;
on the prayers and thanksgivings to Almighty God offered
up by these same ministers in gratitude for triumphant
slaughter; on hell and its everlasting torments proclaimed
the eternal portion of all but a select minority ,of the human
race, a^d by them contemplated with pious equanimity, if
not actually as a reflex augmentation, by contrast, of their
unspeakable felicity.' Every one is penetrated and intoned,

' Take a recent example furnished by one of the best known popular
preachers of the day, and a leading light among the Nonconformists. In a
letter to the hon. sec. of a branch of the Antivivisection Society, he says :
' I loathe the subject intensely, and I am unable to imagine the process
by which men of education, or men at all, bring themselves to perform such
cruelties.' In a sermon on the ' Eesurrection of the Dead,' an approval of
the torture breeds another kind of eloquence. • When thou diest thy soul

MENTAI, EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 157

SO to speak, by the social atmosphere of the particular
medium in which he lives, and in the end so assimilates it,
makes it so essential a part of himself, that he is insensible
to moral relations that are not embedded in it, and feels
no repugnance to immoral procedures which it sanctions.
Fortunate indeed is it that there is a gradual derelopment
of the social organism independent of the foresight and the
conscious efforts of individuals, a stream of tendency out-
side their premeditations and predeterminations; that
nourished by a silent process of evolution the travailing
organism displays the deep impulse of its being by putting
forth of its own motion, at the proper stage of its growth,
the initial germ of the fitting organ to carry it to a higher
stage of evolution. ' Know thyself,' says the moralist : to
do that, says philosophy, is to know humanity, past and
present, working in, for, and by thee.

That the social medium has been created for man by
humanity, as the blood is formed by the tissues for the
organism, is a fact which we cannot keep too clearly in mind
when we are considering its character and influence. As
soon as he enters it, he finds himself surrounded with the
fruits of the long travail of humanity in the most easily
assimilable forms : a language that embodies its social evolu-
tion ; aU the various appliances of the arts and sciences that
have been tediously acquired in the succession of ages;
commerce and its complicated monetary means for the inter-
change of commodities; the surface of the earth as it has
been laboriously adapted to his uses by countless generations
of mankind ; human beings of his own kind, each of whom
has implicit in his nature the experiences of the race from
its beginning, and so appeals, as well by the silent eloquence
of look and gesture as by the articulate word, to the like
implicit contents of his nature. With man there is a cow-
will be tormented alone, that will be a hell for it ; but at the Day of Judg-
ment thy body will join thy soul, and then thou wilt have twin hells — ^thy soul
sweating drops of blood, and thy body suffused with agony. In fire, exactly
like that which we have on earth, thy body will lie, asbestos-like, for ever nn-
consumed — all thy veins roads for the feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a
string on which the devil shall for ever play his diabolical tune of heU's
unutterable lament.'

158 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

timdty, with animals a succession only, through, the ages;
and so while the human infant inherits the gains of the
race's experience, the rhinoceros has profited little or nothing
hy the experiences of its race for the last three thousand
years. In order to have a scientific conception of the origin
and development of human society, however, we ought to
observe the simplest social facts as they present themselves
in nature, and to reflect upon them in their objective aspects,
not as they present themselves in the light of the subjective
experience of a high social development; being well on
guard not to bias observation, or to prejudge them in any
way, by the assumption of a supernatural inspiration or
other mysterious initial principle. Now the facts are that
social union exists in creatures far below man in the scale of
animal life — notably, for example, in the bees and in the
ants. The ants have their slaves, their workers, their
warriors, their milch-cows, or rather milch-lice ; their store-
houses of winter grain, and, as some observers imagine, their
places of burial and their planted fields ; their disciplined
industry, their methodical wars, their admirable inter- com-
munications and co-operations in difficulties and dangers.
Indeed, we might well ask, as Celsus asked long ago, 'if any
one looked down from heaven upon earth, what difference
would he perceive between the works of men and those of
bees ? ' This he would perceive, that neither politician, nor
philosopher, nor human labourer of any sort, be he the busiest
imaginable, pursues his work with the persevering industry
and intense singleness of purpose displayed by one of these
little creatures ; which, moreover, does not make any claim on
the admiration of its kind while it is doing its work, nor look
for any memorial of itself after its life-work is done. In
this connection let this pregnant reflection not escape notice
— that the architectural works of the ant and the bee, like
the wonderful webs of the spider, are constructive or creative
works, no less so than a lace woven or than a palace built
by human hands ; they are as truly works of art as a poem
or a picture ; and if they had been done by man, we should
consider them the products of a creative imagination, and
admire them as excellent works of that noblest faculty.

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCIAL MEDIUM. 159

But in the ant they are not works of imagination in the
human sense of the term ; they are the work of organic
matter of a certain complexity of nature in a certain
structural form ; and what they prove is that an organic
body by itself, without help of mind, is capable, in its
degree, of doing that for which we think it necessary in
human doings to invoke the conscious function of mind. In
like manne]', the conclusion we ought to draw from the
social life of ants and bees is not that human society, con-
sciously pre-ordained or divinely inspired, is the natural
thing, and that these communities of ants and bees are an
extraordinary and unaccountable freak of nature or caprice
of Deity, but simply that there has been a natural tendency
to the formation of social aggregations by organic beings of
a certain complexity under certain conditions of existence ;
that the disposition to co-operation in social union is an ulti-
mate and essential fact of organic development of certain
kinds — just as much so as any complex chemical combination
or the formation of a complex organic molecule. If that be
so, the right course is to apprehend the fact distinctly, and
to use it in our examination of the beginnings of human
society, not to apply to the social phenomena of ants and
bees conceptions derived from the workings of man's in-
telligence in the events of his social state.

As a matter of fact, human beings do habitually construct
imaginatively, without consciously pre-ordaining what they
will construct, for imagination works independently of con-
sciousness and will, its results only being so illumined ;
indeed, there is not a faculty of mind which, though they
began by using it consciously, they do not, after habitual
practice, exercise unconsciously. By continual repetitions
a sensation becomes less conscious, till, having become part
of our habitual relations, it is hardly sensation at all : we do
not, for example, ordinarily feel the presence of an artificial
tooth which we have long had, nor the friction of the clothes
which we daily wear. But the impression which has lost its
distinctly conscious character as a sensation has then become
a want or need, so that the absence of it is felt as the dis-
comfort of something wanting ; it has been so incorporate

160 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

in our nature tliat its removal leaves a sort of rent or
wound in our mental being. In like manner, custom duUs
perceptive consciousness, tUl perception becomes almost or
quite automatic; we practise it habitually in regard to
familiar objects, without consciousness of what we are
doing, and experience the greatest difficulty in the world to
go outside the path of habit ; wherefore it is that, bound to
the tracks of habit, we fail to perceive new facts that lie
close at hand, and miss for years the most obvious discoveries
which they suggest. In these habitual perceptions men are
scarcely less automatic than are ants and bees in their per-
ceptions and acts. Desire again, intense as it is in the first
instance, becomes automatic by habitual repetition ; whence
it notably happens that the end desired is lost sight of in
the means adopted to attain it, that which was means coming
to be desired as end ; and afterwards, when prolonged repe-
tition has made this pursuit the habit of a life, even the
consciousness of the secondary end disappears, being trans-
formed into the need or necessity of an habitual activity.
Thus we see man brought, in all the relations of his
habitual mental activity, to automatic states very like those
of the ants and bees, and find it, if we attempt the task,
almost as difficult a business to move him out of them as it
is for these creatures to go outside the range of their
machine-like doings : the moral of the whole matter being
that most men eventually are little more than machines,
whose sayings and doings from day to day may be predicted
with as much certainty as the cries and doings of a parrot.
Organisation proves itself capable of doing in them that
which it does by itself in the ant or bee.

Perhaps it will be asked how it is, if organisation by
itself can do these wonderful things, and if there is a natural
tendency in certain kinds of organic beings to form social
aggregations, that many more societies like those of bees
and ants have not been formed. The answer is that it was
impossible they should be formed, or, if formed, should
survive, when all the social tendencies of organic matter
had been concentrated in man. Once he had formed society,
be checked by his dominating ascendency that social evolu-

MENTAL EVOLUTION AND THE SOCLU!. MEDIUM. 161

tion in olJier directions -which, but for his appearance on
earth, might have gone on to results we cannot imagine,
and for aught we know may be going on now in some other
planet. In all directions the lower animals found themselves
checked and pursued, their societies disintegrated, and them-
selves destroyed by the higher animal who, strong in social
union, modified the whole surface of the earth to his tises,
and sacrificed to his services, to his clothing, to his orna-
ments, to his appetites, to his destructive propensities, every
kind of creature over which he had been given dominion.
Had one or two of the larger species of animals, such as the
lion and the elephant, formed societies, like bees, it might
have gone hard with man's dominion and even his existence
on earth. Why they did not, and why bluebottles have not
formed societies, like bees, are questions that ambitious
sociologists might perhaps usefully apply themselves to
answer.

Meanwhile, we may suppose that the societies of ants
have survived as lessons of what might have taken place
in other animals under more favourable auspices, and that
their social union became an actuality of organic deve-
lopment, instead of being arrested as a possibility only, by
reason of their burrowing habits in the construction of their
habitations, of the smallness of their ingeniously constructed
bodies, of their tenacious industry, of their prolific natures,
of their numbers, and of the strength of their social union.
And if we take leave to indulge still more fanciful notions,
we may suppose again that the superiority of ants over bees
in social evolution is owing to the fact that, being for the
most part without wings, and so constrained to a closer and
more sternly earnest converse with their more limited and
less varied surroundings, they acquired a serious, patient,
persevering, and diligent character, rather than a light and
volatile disposition; not otherwise than as the inhabitants
of northern and temperate climes, forced to gain their means
of subsistence and comfort by stern struggles with nature,
and so to develope understanding by intending their minds
to its laws, have been made more earnest, industrious,
practical, and inventive than the inhabitants of tropical

162 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

regions, where the luxuriance of nature favours indolence
and frivolity. The advantage of wings has not been an
intellectual advantage to the beings that possess them.

Whatever its cause, the existence of a strong social sense
in ants cannot well be disputed. Moreover, they have
attained to a pretty complex society without, so far as we
know, the events that have been necessary to bring human
beings to their social state — without a fall from happiness
because of eating a forbidden grain, without the necessity of
an atonement, without supernatural intervention of any sort.
Have they perhaps some vague religious sentiment? At
the first blush it is a question that appears grossly absurd ;
and yet it is not inconceivable that creatures which possess
such a good foundation of moral sense as they manifestly do,
have some dim glimmering or quivering in them of that
which passes in human beings as religious sentiment. A
vague awe they may have of a vast and overwhelming en-
vironment which, in the to them inapprehensible form of
an elephant's foot or other such huge, unknown, irresistible
body, can crush them into instant nothingness ; and perhaps
it was a vague awe of that kind which, by a steady repression
o^ the egoistic and by a fostering of the altruistic element,
served to constrain them into social union. The minutely
and marvellously organised matter of their little bodies
might display a sort of religious instinct without a religious
consciousness, as it displays productive imagination vnthout
imagining, and social feeling without consciousness of
citizenship ; for the ant's State is not, any more than the
human State, founded on explicit theory and held together
by consciously elaborated principles.

SECTION V.

THE SOCIAL FUSION OP EGOISMS.

It is certainly impossible to account for tlie social sense in
man, in the sense of explaining why it is what it is: we
might as well ask why sexual sensibility is what it is, or
why any other special sense is special. The example of
the ants shows us that we need not look for its origin in
the deliberate operations of a pre-ordaining conscious in-
telligence of man, or in any special divine interposition
on his behalf. That man is a social being is a funda-
mental, ultimate fact of observation ; we perceive it in the
social tendency which he has shown, independently, in
different parts of the earth in all ages ; a tendency which
has forced him into simple social union in the first instance,
and afterwards in succession into higher and more complex
unions, against his strong resistance and in spite of his
efforts to remain separate. It is the all-mightiness of the
whole dominating the particular desires and wills of the
part. Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which
he has been made social in spite of himself, by the re-
pression of egoistic passions opposing themselves violently to
the union of individuals, of tribal egoisms and antipathies
opposing themselves to the consolidation of tribes into a
nation, of national egoisms and antipathies opposing them-
selves to the confederation of mankind. By blood and iron
has the welding work been done, in obedience to a stronger
impulse than human passions could counteract.

So soon, however, as men had united to form a society, so
soon would a social sense inevitably be generated ; its occur-
rence in the circumstances of such co-operation is a simple
and ultimate fact of nature. A society without social feeling
would be a contradiction in essence. This reflection we may
not inaptly make here : that just as simpler chemical com-
pounds are combined into a more complex compound, losing
by such combination -their own special properties, nay rather
having these suppressed properties constrained to minister

164 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

to its maintenance and transformed into the properties which
it displays ; so the egoistic passions and desires of the indi-
vidual are combined and fused and utilised in the social
state to generate the common life and to minister to the
common weal of the community, losing their specific qualities
in the operations by which their social transformation is
effected. Egoism comprises the sum of inclinations that
aim at purely personal gratification, each of these inclina-
tions having its particular gratification ; and the further we
go back in civilisation the greater is the predominance
which these egoistic impulses have. If we could conceive
an individual isolated and entirely alone in the world he
would be a perfect egoist. But when the egoisms of two
individuals who must live together meet, then the necessity
to bear and forbear is instantly made evident.

Let us imagine various chemical bodies with their specific
energies to be brought together and thereupon immensely
compressed or constrained into a certain material mould or
form ; it is obvious that unless the energies entirely paralyse
one another — which, since energy is indestructible, cannot
be — they must produce, in consequence of their interactions
of af&nity and repulsion, a resulting energy that is not in
the least like any of them. So likewise is it with the social
combinations of individual egoistic desires and energies.
Their antagonisms entail modifications and neutralisations
in the forms of tolerances, compromised, forbearances, do-
as-you-would be-done-by obligations, and the like ; and the
union of suspended antagonisms, in order to the defensive or
offensive action of the two persons against other persons,
generates agreement in aim and means, and sympathy of
thought and feeling. If they are not to be mutually anni-
hilatory, individual aggregates of egoistic energies must so
combine — first into families, and then into tribes ; thereupon
families or tribes are pressed or welded into larger unions
by the antagonisms of similar complex aggregates in hostile
face of them ; and so it comes socially to pass that atoms
unite to become molecules, as it were, and these again to
become m.ore complex molecules, by the concentrating
pressure of surrounding antagonisms forcing repulsions into

THE SOCIAI, FUSION OF EGOISMS. 165

affinities. So solves itself tlie problem how out of seemingly
irreconcileable egoisms to make altruism. Abstract virtue
is virtue without contents ; the contents of actual virtue are
that which is not virtue ; the word signifies nothing except
by implication of its opposite — vice. For that reason we
rightly do not call God virtuous. Everywhere we see the
difference of the properties of the whole from the properties
of the organic factors : the social community is something
more than a juxtaposition or aggregation of individuals ;
the State quite another thing than an aggregation of local
communities ; the national character or consciousness some-
thing dififerent from the aggregation of many assemblies of
individuals in many towns. Tor the most part science can
tell the nature and number of the elements that form a
complex chemical molecule and the exact proportions in
which they combine ; but it will plainly be a long, long time
before it is able to define exactly the constituent factors of
a social organisation, and to set forth their relations to one
another in the product.

Meanwhile it is obvious enough how in the social state
the egoistic passions of men — their antagonistic rivalries,
jealousies, emulations, ambitions, avarices, and the like,
being constrained and utilised in spite of themselves to
serve the common good — are really the conditions of social
progress : how, for example, avarice operates usefully to
incite commercial zeal and activity, self-interest to establish
rights of property, ambition to stir men to political and
other public work, envy to spur them to make themselves
equal to the object of envy, vanity to inspire them so to
please as to gain the appiobation of their fellows ; so that
in the result, as Vico remarked, ' vices capable of destroying
the human race produce public happiness.' It is not that
private vices become public virtues, as Mandeville ingeniously
maintained, but it is that the neutralisations, fusions and
other complicated reactions of these personal forces, when
brought together in the social crucible, are constrained to
issue in results contributive to the welfare of the whole.

To seek private good in the fullest gratification of his
passions the individual must recognise social interde-

166 WrtL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

pendences and adapt his conduct to the conditions in which
he is a social element. Self-love is not despicable, but
laudable, since duties to self, if self-perfecting — as true
duties to self are — must needs be duties to others. Just as
he may gratify a particular passion that is strong in him to
the injury of himself as a whole, in defiance of what a large
and true self-love would prescribe, so as a social element he
may gratify his egoistic impulses in an extreme way and to
the hurt of society as a whole, ^^ut just as he cannot get
the fullest gratifi.cation, counting duration as well as in-
tensity, out of a particular passion except by subordinating
it to the larger welfare of the whole, losing in the end if he
over-indulges it ; so he cannot get the fuUest and best grati-
fication of all his egoistic impulses in a complex society,
except through a restraining respect to the interests of
society as a whole ; he gains not, but loses, in the end, if he
gives way to inconsiderate excess. As member of a social
body he cannot live except by living in it, by it and for it,
any more than an organ of his own body can live separate
from the whole. Indeed, it is an incontrovertible truth that
if a man were deliberately to set himself by careful calcula-
tion to obtain the greatest happiness possible for himself in
this world — which he could do only by getting the utmost
gratification, not of a particular appetite or passion, but of
every passion, appetite, sentiment or emotion which he was
capable of being affected by — the experiment would in-
fallibly force him to a vital realisation of the truth that he
and others in the social body are truly members of one body,
in which no one can suffer or rejoice apart, and, as such,
fellow-workers to an end which, though not pre-conceived
by them, actually controls and directs their energies. He
would feel vitally the solidarity of mankind, and perceive
that in it he lives and has his being ; by it, witting or un-
witting, is governed ; and from it derives obligations of duty.
For it is not merely that his passions work in spite of him
to a higher and wider end than he foresees, but, inde-
pendently of reflection, he is himself insensibly permeated
and inspired with the social spirit in which he is born and
lives : the consequence of which is that his own nature

THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 167

undergoes a gradual social transformation with the advance
of social development, and so the desire of what seems to
him good becomes little by little less self-regarding and has
more and more regard to the good of the community. As
a socially constituted being, he does social acts naturally
and, so to speab, instinctively, without considering exactly
whether they will bring him pleasure or pain ; he feels his
own weal in the common weal, and it is his pleasure to
exercise the function of which he is capable ; in fact it may
come to be his egoistic impulse to act altruistically, his
selfish impulse to act unselfishly. How vain and empty
then the vague discussions concerning the hedonistic or
altruistic jprimum mobile of individual conduct !

It is very evident that the diflferent appetites, passions,
and affections of individuals in social combination tend
really to promote both public and private good, though
some of them have more immediate respect to private,
others of them to public good. The sexual passion is as
strong an instance as can be adduced of a purely egoistic
passion, for its impulse is blind self -gratification — in its
most brutal aspects, a veritable rape of pleasure ; but when
we reflect on its wide-reaching results in the foundation of
the family, which is the constituent element of society, we
perceive how vast a social signification it has. It is not by
eradication but by wise direction of egoistic passions, not
by annihilation but by utilisation of them, that progress in
social culture takes place ; and one can only wonder at the
absurdly unpractical way in which theologians have de-
claimed against them, contemning and condemning them,
as though it were a good man's first duty to root them clean
out of his nature, and as though it were their earnest aim to
have a chastity of impotence, a morality of emasculation.

What wonder that Christian morality has failed, and must
fail, to govern the practical conduct of life in the struggle
for existence, and that the individual perforce accommodates
his morality to his life, instead of adjusting his life strictly
to his morality ! Could there be a more unhappy spectacle
than that of the poor wretch who should take its moral
maxims in literal earnest and make them the strict rules of

.168 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

his life ? The plain effects of them are to make beggars and
impostors by profusion of charity ; to invite affronts by easy
forgiveness of injuries ; to render it the interest of no one
either to befriend or to forbear injuring another, because of
its rigid inculcation of the same loving attitude towards
friend and enemy ; to put the innocence of the dove at the
mercy of the guile of the serpent ; to make the good man
the easy prey of the scoundrel ; to suffer crime to go un-
punished because it must alvrays be that there is no one
who has the sinless right to punish ; to cultivate sorrow and
self-abasement as the creed of life ; to take no thought for
tomorrow, because the lilies of the field toil not ; in fine, to
do all those things that would render a State impossible.
An eminent Catholic writer has surmised that men would
have falsified geometry as they have corrupted Christianity,
had it been their interest to do so ; but the truth is that
the corrupted Christianity is an example of the survival of
the fittest, a proof of the necessity of the corruption ; and
that Christianity could not have survived at all had it not
been corrupted into practicality. The grand and lofty ideal
which it presents goes far to leave human nature out of the
reckoning ; and therefore human nature, when it ought to
reduce it to practice, goes far to leave it out of the reckoning.
And as in time past, so in time to come ; for it is not likely
that men will ever be brought to a sheep-like uniformity of
character, when they shall be gentle, peaceable, free from
disturbing desires of progress, having all, wanting nothing,
happy in a placid immobility of being. Such an extinction
of originality in what would be evolutional closure will
always be prevented by the feverish activity of the un-
quenchable passions of human nature, for it is by them that
nature pursues its aim, in spite of man's ideal desire of
peace, concord, ease ; they are the ministers of its work, and
through them he is made to fulfil its purpose. All the
horrible and heartrending things that have ever been in the
world — wars, slaughters, tyrannies, tortures ; frauds, guile,
intrigues and lies ; lusts, rapes, revelries, debaucheries,
thefts, murders and other crimes ; — all the offsprings, great
and small, open or secret, immediate or remote, of human

THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 169

passions have been strictly necessary events in the becoming
of what is — not to be deplored as accidents, but viewed in
tranquil spirit as fulfilments, of progress— and will continue
to be necessary events thereof, so long as the order of pro-
gress continues to be human. Not, perhaps, always in the
gross and violent manifestations of the past: wars, for
example, may cease in their crude military forms of open
violence, but they will still continue in subtler forms of
commercial and industrial competitions ; and the passions
which they breed in these circumstances may perhaps be
more insidious and demoralising than those of open war,
which, as an incomparable school of heroism, devotion,
self-sacrifice, has actually been the mightiest instrument of
human progress.'

Co-operation to a common end has been at the foundation
of all society, and it is easy to perceive how it may have
been a main basis of the formation of language, which is so
essentially bound up with social development. For my part,
I hold that the working of men together for a definite pur-
pose has preceded their feeling together ; that synergy goes
before sympathy ; and that the latter is developed as a con-
sequence of the former. The order of the process in fact is
— first, synergy, then sympathy, and afterwards synthesis —
that is to say, in their order, action together, feeling together,
and thinking together. The consensus of action becomes a
sense-in-common or social sense, and the latter by a still
higher evolution a conscience or moral sense, which is the
affective outcome of knowing or thinking together, the feeling
bred of a common intellectual synthesis. Always is it the effect
of co-operative activity to engender a common feeling as the

' Open robbery by violence on the highway is pretty well extinct, and we
pride ourselves on our progress in consequence. But was that open robbery of
the person really so immoral and so widely harmful as the more subtle and
far-reaching robbery of those who start fraudulent commercial companies and
ruin thousands ? And was the moral state of the community worse then, when
the highwayman was hanged for his crime, than it is now when the successful
company-monger who lives by robbery is not hanged, not even scouted as a
scoundrel, but is received into society because of his riches, and becomes per-
haps a member of the legislature, where it would be thought very ill manners
to make the least reference to his criminal career ?
13

170 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

expression of it; and as intellectual activity represents
complex reflex processes of activity at successively higher
removes, the corresponding feelings are respectively also of a
higher and more refined character ; whence it comes to pass
that conscience or moral sense rises higher and higher, in its
different degrees of refinement, by development out of social
feeling. But to say so is not, as some persons hastily and
indignantly imagine, to say that moral sense is no more
than a primitive social sense : the parts of a flower are
transformed leaves, but the flower is not a leaf, nor is it
identified with a leaf by having its parts traced back to a
primitive leaf. In like manner, to trace the roots of the
moral sense down into social feeling, and even deeper still into
the instinct of propagation, as one might do, is not an identi-
fi.cation of two things that are different, but an exposition of
a particular case of continuity of development in nature.

The recognition of an inflexible order of nature does
not strip phenomena of their moral meaning, as many
persons ignorantly fear; on the contrary, the growth of
morality through the ages, which they are happy to believe
takes place, is only possible, outside metaphysical regions,
by virtue of such order. Is there any good reason why the
doctrine of evolution and the doctrine of epigenesis should be
opposed to one another as irreconcileable doctrines ? More
correctly perhaps, epigenesis is an event of evolution, and
evolution impossible without epigenesis ; for evolution,
strictly speaking, is the unfolding of that which lies as a
preformation in germ, which a new product with new
properties manifestly does not, any more than the differen-
tial calculus lies in a primeval atom; while epigenesis
signifies a state that is the basis of, and the causative impulse
to, a new and more complex state. There is a leap ; and it
is not good philosophy to blindfold ourselves with a big word
when taking the leap, as some evolutionists will have us do,
and then to protest that we have not taken it. At the same
time it is equally bad philosophy, on the other side, to
ignore the continuity between the new and old, and to find
a reason for the present anywhere else than in the basis and
impulse of the past.

THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 171

Given beings each of -whom is moved individually by an
instinct of self-preservation and its congenial passions, how
to obtain a social and altruistic feeling ? The answer is, bv
the same process that we see in daily operation to increase
it now in an individual — namely, by the social transforma-
tion of egoistic impulses. Without carbon, hydrogen,
oxygen, and nitrogen there could be no organic molecule ;
without the animals that preceded him on earth in the line
of ascent to him man could not have been, for he, as animal,
sums up in himself the characters of the different species of
animals below him and might therefore be described as the
collective or general animal ; without the egoistic passions
there could be no social sense. Perhaps it is because the
moral sense has been developed out of the egoistic passions
that it is capable of controlling them, for such control will
be a development of energy at their expense by absorbing
and transforming their energies. There is no loss of energy,
no creation of energy, only a conversion thereof ; what con-
science gains passion loses; and how could conscience
restrain or otherwise affect passion, any more than it can
restrain or otherwise affect gravitation, if it had no affinity
of nature with it? An organic molecule could not maintain
and increase itself by taking atoms of carbon and nitrogen
into its structure, were not atoms of carbon and nitrogen
natural constituents of its structure. The aim of moral
development is to increase the higher quality which has
been obtained by the social transformation of tbe lower
qualities ; and that can be done only at the cost and by the
consumption, as it were, of the lower qualities — by the social
fusion of egoisms. In the strength of a man's egoistic
passions lie the promise and the guarantee of the strength
of his moral iiature, if so be he succeeds in coercing them
into entire furtherance of its best development. It is a
huge absurdity then to place the egoistic and the altruistic
feelings over against one another in absolute opposition and
contrast, as if they were contradictory and entirely unrelated
qualities, engaged in an eternal internecine conflict, and
separated by the impassable barrier of a different order of
existence; widely as they appear to contrast in their

172 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

functions, altruistic feeling rests at bottom on the basis of an
equilibrium of the passions. It may well be that the mode
of evolution of moral feeling out of social feeling, and of social
feeling out of egoistic feeling, are not easily discerned in the
individual, whose consolidated heritages of aptitudes and facul-
ties prevent us from tracing things back to their beginnings
and so giving a genetic exposition of them, but an examination
of the development of the race v/ill leave no doubt of it.

It is not within my purpose to meddle with the disputes
concerning the nature and development of the moral sense,
except so far as to point out how empty and unreal they are
apt for the most part to be, owing to the common habit of
abstracting it from all its contents. Instead of dilating on
an inborn moral sentiment or intuition of right and wrong
in the individual, would it not be wiser to observe accurately
and to consider well moral instances as they are actually
presented to us in nature ? What moral feeling, and of what
kind, is there in children, in savages, and in an animal like the
dog? And would children without education and without a
suitable intellectual and moral medium develop it, any more
than they would develop language under similar unpropitious
conditions of existence ? In the nervous substrata that
represent the results of ancestral action in moral relations
they possess the proper instruments so to speak, which may
be trained to action, but which will not act without fit
training; the actual process of events being not inaptly
comparable perhaps with that which takes place in the train-
ing of the eye-muscles for the exceeding fine and complex
movements of educated vision. If that be so, the intuition
of an abstract right and wrong before experience is as much
an absurdity as the innate perception of a cathedral, or as
the intuition of a complete European moral code. But
immediately that the proper stimuli bring them into action
there will be a certain pleasure from the moral exercise, as
there is from the exercise of other functions; and that
pleasure is naturally folt as moral sentiment.

It is not in all children that these substrata exist in
equal perfection of development : a savage child could no
more learn high morality in favourable circumstances than

THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 173

it could learn high geometry; and amongst children of
civilised persons there are great differences, some being
born with manifestly better moral aptitudes than others,
just as some are born with good geometrical aptitudes and
others not. From the moment they are put into exercise
in a civilised child they are subject to continual training,
conscious or unconscious, through imitation and education ;
for always around it and pressing on it are those strong
social forces which are connoted by such names as sym-
pathy, most powerful and far-reaching in its most signal
example of love; imitation, which, resting on a basis of
sympathy, is a function of the nervous system that we see
in continual operation, conscious and unconscious; custom,
the power of which to determine modes of thinking and
feeling, as well as doing, it is impossible to exaggerate;
and opinion, operating not only well in inspiring individuals
with the desire to obtain the good opinion of those who are
rightly respected and esteemed by them, but oftentimes ill
in inculcating bad habits of thought and feeling, and giving
an authoritative sanction to false and pernicious beliefs.
These forces act so steadily and continually through gene-
rations that they might well end by making all men alike,
as uniform in look and dispositions as a flock of sheep, were
it not that the ever active passions of human nature — envies,
emulations, ambitions, and the like — prevent such a peaceful
consummation, Necessarily, however, the effects of special
social media are to fashion special types of social or moral
feeling, according to the particular types that prevail in them
respectively ; wherefore a history of morals is the story of a
great many types that have been among different peoples and
at different epochs, and eternal principles have not had a longer
eternity than the space of an epoch or the life of a nation.

What we have to learn from these considerations is, once
more, that there is no such reality as an abstract moral feel-
ing or conscience ; that conscience is not being but notion ;
that there are as many particular moral feelings as there are
particular cases ; a great variety of them, differing in quality
in different persons and in different peoples according to
their intellectual and social developments and to the moral

174 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

ideals which they cherish and preach. Morality therefore
may contain a very weak or a very strong tincture of moral
essence ; and it is with the particular feeling not with the
abstraction that discussion must concern itself in order to be
fruitful. To this end it should not be lost sight of for a
moment that morality is practical — its basis conformity to an
end outside self, the end of the whole as distinguished from
a purely personal end ; and in that particular aspect what we
have to investigate and consider are the special and complex
functions of the adapted nervous substrata in response to the
special and complex social impressions. A grand ethical
principle is a blaze of light in the sky far overhead, but it
does not lighten the particular path along which we have to
painfully pick our way; for it is the application of the prin-
ciple to the special case that is the trouble. Not to think
and feel only, but to do, is the end of being — to act one's
part in the becoming of things and to affect for good or ill the
common weal by such action; were pure contemplation the
business of life, were it enough to think and feel about things,
the logical end of it would be a self-annihilating ecstasy.

Here, then, with the highest moral feeling, as was the
case with abstract thought, we are brought to a living
contact with realities ; home we come in the end to the pri-
mitive basis of a concrete reflex act, if we are resolved to un-
derstand its exact meaning or contents. To dispute about
pains and pleasures in the general, egoism and altruism in
the abstract, as motives of action, is to begin anywhere and
end anywhere, but to arrive nowhere. Pure internal feelings
of pleasure and pain, of moral approbation and disapproba-
tion, undoubtedly exist, but in the order of existence they are
rooted in action and developed out of experience, and must
in the last resort receive their interpretation there. In the
first instance, external considerations of good or ill determine
suitable and useful acts, and perhaps the very same kind of
acts that the highest moral feeling would determine ; at a
later and higher stage of development, the feeling which has
been developed out of action exists independently of the ex-
ternal considerations that were effectiv.e in the first instance;
and then the feeling by itself, which is purely internal, deter-

THE SOCIAL FUSION OF EGOISMS. 175

mines action, its pains and pleasures therein being actually-
greater than those which sprang from purely intellectual con-
siderations of self-interest. But if we would test the value of
the feeling we must always look to the social quality of the
action ; for there is not a vice nor crime of which human
nature is capable that has not received the strongest appro-
bation of conscience in one nation or another, at one period
or another of human history.

SECTION YI.

THE COERCING FORCES OP SOCIAL UNION.

To coerce the egoistic impulses into the combination or
fusion necessary to produce the most primitive social feeling,
it is plain that tremendous pressure from without must have
been exerted upon the individual through the medium ; for
only by such compression of their energies could the
conditions of transformation, the white heat of fusion, so to
speak, be generated. We may compare the operation to
that by which the formless and sooty matter of carbon has
been converted into the pure and sparkling crystal of the
diamond. At a very early period of his martyrdom on earth,
the conflict with the powers of nature and the animals
around him must have forced man into some sort of co-opera-
tion in order to survive — to conquer by obedience and to
increase by conquest ; and it is plain that those individuals
who did unite, and more especially those who united into
the more compact organisation, having therein great ad-
vantages in the struggle for existence over those who did
not, would survive by natural selection.

Mark well now the tremendous agencies that were invented
in the shape of supernatural powers, social rites, sacred
customs, superstitious ordinances, and the like — oftentimes
horribly cruel and oppressive — and used in the most unsparing
way in order to enforce conformity. The heavenS above and
the earth beneath and the regions under the earth were

176 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

peopled with terrors of the most awful kind, with the aim
and effect of compelling obedience and establishing a com-
pulsory co-operation: such the terrible syntheses made in
order to enforce synergy. We observe a similar process in
operation now in the social fears and pressures brought to
bear upon classes of men for the purpose of making them act
together — in trade-unionism, Irish land-leagueism, and the
like. Is there any tyranny anywhere equal to that which a
savage ruler exercises upon his subjects, with abject submis-
sion on their part, in enforcing the sacred ' customs ' of the
tribe ? What would be the fate in Dahomey now, or in any
similar barbarous country, of a reformer who should venture
to call in question the bloody and barbarous ' customs ' of the
nation ? But indeed it is almost as hard to conceive the
occurrence of that sceptical disposition of mind in such a
social medium, as it is to conceive the occurrence of an ant or
other insect that should suddenly go outside its instincts and
adopt a useful modification of conduct which, though it
misses it, seems so close at hand and palpably evident to our
higher contemplative intelligence ; or to suppose a complex
reflex act that subserves a particular function to modify its
character suddenly in order to supersede its old by a new
and better suited function ; or to imagine a narrow, intense,
evangelical mind that had never by any chance gone outside
the shibboleth of the particular creed and phraseology in
which it was born and bred, to develope suddenly extreme
cosmopolitarian notions of human salvation and damnation ;
or to conceive ninety-nine persons out of a hundred getting
out of their habitual routine of thought, feeling, and conduct
into a new path of higher thought which runs close at hand.
See how well the automatic and necessary nature of
habitual lines of thought and reasoning is shown by the
fact that calculation and reasoning can be done by
machinery, and that calculating and logical machines
actually approach nearer in function to human thought
than any animal can, superior as the animal is in the
possession of feeling and will. The custom of the tribe is a
sufficient explanation to the savage of any ceremonial or
observance, however oppressive, and he cannot conceive that
any other reason for it should be necessary ; it is that which

THE COEECING FOECES OF SOCIAL UNION. 177

always has been, and h.e cannot conceive it as not being.
In like manner, the automatism of a particular mental
function wbicli he calls a belief is the sufficient justification
of it, its sure guarantee, to the person who has never brought
his mind into other relations of experience : he will undergo
martyrdom for conscience's sake rather than suffer himself
to be made conscious of possible error. To have another
belief not consistent with it presented to him, though it be
one for which another person would undergo martyrdom
for his conscience's sake, occasions him much the same
shock of horror and dismay as would the appearance for the
first time in a tribe of savages of a stranger who did not
conform to their customs; or as would the intrusion into a
nest of ants of a strange ant which exhibited other instincts
than theirs. In both cases we may be pretty sure that the
offended community, so soon as they rallied from the shock
of surprise, would make short work of the intruder and his
novelties.

For an individual to be cast out of his special society, to
be excommunicated from his community, has always been
regarded as a terrible punishment by those who inflicted
it, and an awful fate by him whom it befell ; for a long time,
indeed, it was equivalent to putting him out of all human
society, and to the condemnation of him to a lingering death.
So great, too, was the imaginative horror of it, apart from
the physical sufferings which it entailed, that he might well
have thought it a less terrible thing to be put to death
by his tribe than to be put out of it. One sees in the
histories of savages how any marked deviation from bodily
uniformity — a deformity or other infirmity — which, rendering
the individual much different from others, put him out of
social uniformity, was a sufficient reason for abandoning or
destroying him; and one sees the persistence, until quite
lately, of a similar feeling with regard to lunatics in civilised
countries, whose treatment in consequence was extremely
barbarous and cruel ; for it was long after infirmities of body
had ceased to excite aught but compassion that infirmities
of mind continued to excite derision. Indeed, they do so
still in some measure; for the term lunatic provokes laught«r

178 WILL IK ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

wlieiiever it is uttered in tlie senate or on the stage, and the
malady is commonly concealed as a shame by the family in
which it occurs. Note again in this connection the tendency
which savages and children show to laugh and jeer at bodily
deformities, at the infliction of sufferings, and the like.
Laughter, if we consider the meaning of it, is essentially a
social feature, and no one likes to be put out of society, as it
were, by being laughed at, even though he may have small
respect for those who laugh at him. It is the instinctive
fear of social extinction that constitutes half the agony of
dying: the one anxiety that a dying person shows, when
he shows any, is to be not left alone, but to have friendly
faces around him ; for he feels vaguely that he is slipping
away from his social surroundings and his hold on being,
vanishing into the void and unknown, and he desires the re-
assurance and stay of the familiar presence of friend or rela-
tive to cling to, as the supports of life sink under him.
Hence also it is that he commonly finds huge comfort
in the attendance and services of those who are brought
about him to administer spiritual consolations and to per-
form the last offices of religion; they are the means of
making for him a special and fitting social support, and of
so helping him in the passage from the social environment
that is slipping from his failing grasp, to another environ-
ment dimly anticipated but looming mysterious and unde-
fined ; and he leans with eagerness on the support at that
juncture when life has so far waned in him as to occasion a
tremulous forefeeling of its early extinction, but not yet so
far as to blunt his apprehensions or to render him indifferent
or unconscious.

The creeds, superstitions, customs, ceremonials, laws,
deities, demons, and the like, by which the social compres-
sion and transformation of egoism have been effected, were
not of course invented by the individual ; but certainly
humanity invented them. Out of itself has it developed
them, under the pressure of its environment, as the fitting
agencies to determine its progress in the direction which
that progress has taken. They were rude syntheses framed
to give it some unity of action in its unequal conflict with

THE COEECING FOECES OF SOCIAL UNION. 179

the vast and unknown powers of nature which it found
itself face to face with. Eude as they were, they have done
their work in the guidance of conduct, and, having done it,
they have faded away in the light of the progress which
they have helped to make ; until now, when the knowledge
of nature by civilised peoples has become so wide and search-
ing as to leave them no nook to lurk in, we are left with the
categorical imperative of the moral law as sole and supreme
sanction. The progress has been from the graven image to
what we may call the graven-image-idea of a personal God
made after the fashion of man and issuing his code of com-
mandments to him, and from that again to the abstract con-
ception of a moral imperative. In its imperative rule which,
whether innate in the individual or not, humanity has
created, we see man once more make for himself the neces-
sity which it is his freedom to obey.

In noting the successive steps of a process of evolution
in nature that does not stop short at man, but continues on-
wards through his thinkings and doings, our proper office is
to observe the successive facts and to trace the order of the
becoming; we cannot in the least explain why the becoming
should be as it is. How indeed is it conceivable that we,
parts of the process, beings of an hour, atomic units of an
incomprehensible whole, could ever explain that which
reaches from an infinite past and presses forward to an in-
finite future, and of the pulse of which any attempted expla-
nation is but a moment? "We are not bound, however, by
this admission to conclude, as some do, that no step of the
process could have been better than it was ; that all organs
and organisms are most perfect in their kind, and could not
in any respect have conceivably been more fit for their pur-
poses than they are ; and that all the horrors, crimes, out-
rages, sins, and sufferings of human doings from the
beginning, being necessary steps, were the best possible
events of a best possible process of human evolution. It
were as legitimate to admit that every tree of a kind is
perfect, which it manifestly is not, though as good as it
could be in the chances and circumstances of its position ;
or that the twisted horn of a ram which sometimes grows

180 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

steadily through its eye into its brain, blinding it first and in
the end killing it, unless the shepherd come to the resctie, is
a very perfect thing of its kind. There are few creatures in
which it would not be easy for a competent anatomist to
suggest some improvements of construction to enable them
to fulfil better the purposes they do fulfil ; and certainly it
is not impossible to ' conceive that the human kind might
have reached its present plane of development without
some of the waste of life and agony that has been so marked
a feature of the blood-stained course.* Considering the
manifold gradations and modifications and degenerations of
organic development, and the tedious transformations through
which in the successions of the ages each organ and
organism has reached its present form, it would appear that
nature itself was profoundly dissatisfied with its work before
it was able, by attaining to consciousness in its stage of
human evolution, to know that it was so ; for instead of pro-
nouncing a thing good of its kind after having produced it,
its habit has been to set to work immediately to modify it
into another kind, and not always for the better. The inter-
mediate gradations which geological researches make known
between the various groups of organic beings that now
stand apart, what were they but so many transitional steps in
construction abandoned soon after they were made, as if
they had been proofs or essays ? And the same may be said
of the successive races of men that, like leaves on trees,
have come and gone through the measureless past.

The facts of organic and human nature, when observed
frankly and judged without bias, do not warrant the argument
of a supreme and beneficent artificer working after methods
of human intelligence, but perfect in all his works ; rather
would they warrant, if viewed from the human standpoint,
the conception of an almighty malignant power that was
working out some far off end of its own, with the serenest

' To speak of a course as blood-stained seems from the human standpoint
to convey something of a reproach. But from the standpoint of the whole
the flow of blood may be as natural, as little repulsive, as the flow of water.
Blood is instinctively revolting to man, because it is associated with the
destruction of individuality, on which he naturally sets mighty store.

THE COEECINa FORCES OF SOCIAL UNION, 181

disregard of the suffering, expenditure, and waste whicli
were entailed in the process. Is it impious and unlawful
for the feeble and imperfect understanding of a finite
creature to presume to measure the perfection of the works
of an incomprehensible and infinite Being, whose ways are
past finding out, and in whose sight the highest human
wisdom is foolishness? Be it so; but let it not then be
overlooked that the argument for the existence of such a
supreme artificer, drawn from a contemplation of his won-
derful works or from any other revelation of him in human
consciousness, is itseK essentially and entirely anthropomor-
phic ; that is to say, it is the transplantation into external
nature of human notions of working to an end on certaia
lines which man, from his finite basis, agrees to think in-
telligent, but which may after all be very stupid. If we
cannot from the basis of our own capacities justly make the
smaller inference of imperfect workmanship, what right
have we from the same defective basis to make the larger
inference of a conscious personal worker conceived in the
image of ourselves and acting, like us, to accomplish ends
which he, all-perfect Being, desires? For what does the
theory postulate ? The Omnipotent and All-perfect in a state
of desire and of accomplishment !

Speculations of this sort, however, are really void of any
meaning. Ideas derived from conditional existence cannot
apply to that which by the very nature of the case transcends
the conditions of origin of the ideas. No human thought
can extend itself beyond the relative; necessary truths are
truths that are necessary within human experience ; absolute
truths are truths that are absolutely true within the limits
of human relations ; the categorical imperative is the impera-
tive which rules within the category of human being ; they
are all modes of finite thought and feeling, and no less rela-
tive than are sounds or smells. No straining of metaphy-
sical speculation wDl ever get us beyond ourselves — ever
make the contents more than the continent, the grasp bigger
than the hand. Infinite is a merely negative word, it is the
negation of bounds, moi-finite ; and it is really to dupe our-
selves with a vain imagination to make it something positive

182 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

by naming it the infinite, and to use it thereafter as thongh
it were the something. To us, measuring things by human
intelligence, the seemingly prodigal waste of material, the
multitudes of germs and seeds that perish timelessly, the
numberless abortive failures of function and development,
the slow and bungling methods of work ; a whole creation
groaniag and travailing through countless ages of pain and
death in order at the end to issue in such a being as pri-
meval man ; then, after his coming, countless ages more of
human savagery and infinite waste of life, marked by suffer-
ings so great that it might fairly be questioned whether all
those that had gone before would fill up their measure ; until
at length the time was come — not yet two thousand years
ago — for the appearance of the Saviour who was to make
atonement for the sin of which these were the consequences,
and to proclaim for the first time the right law of life ; — all
this must needs appear wasteful and bad workmanship.
Have all these things been exactly necessary to produce a being
who, for the first time, could suffer the pain of knowing and
feeling them, and who then might make the self-crucifixion
of the divine element in him the initiation of a higher pro-
gress ? Given infinite power, however, and infinite time, and
infinite material, what right have we to speak of the trans-
cendent business in terms of our notions ? Quicken percep-
tion so that a thousand years is as the twinkling of an eye
to it, and what becomes of the waste and bungling ; retard
it so that a moment is as a thousand years, and what waste
and bungling might we not think to find in the now imper-
ceptibly rapid stroke of a gnat's wing ? View from a proper
distance a cataract of water tumbling headlong from a moun-
tain height, it appears a solid and motionless mass, ' frozen
by distance:' imagine oneself inside a molecule of seemingly
inert matter, with senses fine and acute enough to perceive
what goes on there, the complicated motions and harmonies
of the solar system might seem simple by comparison with
its intestine motions. Under different conditions of percep-
tion the most nice, quick and exact adaptation of means to
end which we know in nature might appear to be the very
play of chance, and the success of it a mere accident.

THE COEECING PORCES OF SOCIAL UNION. 183

While perceiving a process of organic evolution going
steadily on, howbeit in wliat appears to us a very wasteful
fashion, we ought not to overlook the fact that side by side
with it everywhere there is, as Lamarck did not fail to point
out, a process of degeneracy. All the changes that take
place are not ascending steps of evolution, some of them are
descending steps of degeneration ; not all of them events of
a becoming, many of them events of an unbecoming ; not all
of them the products of doing, many of them the products of
an undoing ; organisms undergoing degenerative modifica-
tions that render them less fit for their purposes, and retro-
grade organic products being formed that act to produce dis-
solution. There is, so to speak, a broad and easy way lead-
ing to degeneration, decay and death, which is the opposite
of the steep and narrow path that leads to evolution and
fuller life. The principle of good and the principle of evil
in the world, which have been recognised by all peoples in
all ages under one form or another by way of explanations
of positive facts of observation, may be taken to be primitive
intuitions of these opposite laws of evolution and degeneracy.
Nay, one may perhaps venture to go furLher and say that
the theory of a fall f I'om a state of perfection and happiness,
whereby sin and suffering gained entrance into the world,
was a one-sided generalisation from facts, made instinctively
to account for phenomena which are the outcome of the law
of degeneracy in nature. Having made this generalisation,
it became necessary, first, to account for such a downward
tendency, and afterwards to reconcile with it the evidence
of an opposite progressive tendency, which also could not
escape observation: hence two theories — the theory of an
expulsion from bliss in consequence of disobedience inspired
by the evil principle, whereby things went wrong ; and the
complementary theory of an atonement for the sin by the
goodprinciple, whereby things became capable of amendment
and mended. At present we fix attention too much perhaps
on the process of evolution, to the overlooking of the corre-
lative process of degeneration that is going on, not only
in low but in high organisms; not only in the low but in the
high functions of the higher organisms ; not only in body

184 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

but in mind ; not only in cliaracters but in beliefs ; not only
in individuals but in societies ; not only in societies but in
nations.

That the supreme artificer produces these degenerations
and all the sufferings, sharp and lingering, which the
working out of them in so wide and various domains of
nature means, or permits them. for his own wise and inscru-
table purposes — a wisdom safely predicated that in the same
breath is declared to be inscrutable — is a satisfactory theory
to the theologian, who acknowledges that there cannot be
' evil in the city and the Lord hath not done it,' and a theory
which has been the most powerful of all agencies in promot-
ing the social evolution of mankind ; but it will not equally
satisfy always those who fail to see sufficient reason why
man should put a magnified personality of his own fashion
and fashioning into and over nature, making it co-extensive
with infinity of time and space : a being of anthropomorphic
construction who from a human basis is yet built up of the
negations of all positive human conceptions, being mfinite,
incomprehensible, weffable, mvisible, mscrutable, inconceiv-
able, iwcorporeal, MJimortal. The sum of a multitude of
negations making one, and that The One I

SECTION VII.

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUOTS OP EVOLUTION.

I PEOCEED now to examine the nisus of evolution in its
highest expressions in the great organism of humanity, pur-
posing to find in it the foundation and inspiration of certain
feelings, aspirations, and beliefs which, being widely spread
amongst mankind and not easy to account for, have been
thought to be intuitions of supernatural origin. The fact is
notable that men have often believed that they possessed
another and higher source of knowledge than the senses,
whether called supernatural inspiration, mystical intuition,
divine reminiscence, or by whatever other name; even so

CEETAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 185

decided an advocate of the transformation of sensation into
knowledge as Condillac allowed that they did possess supra-
sensual intuition when they were in the garden of Eden,
maintaining only that they lost it on the occasion of their
expulsion therefrom. Now whence have sprung the notions
of a past golden age when all was peace and happiness, and
of a life to come after death when sorrow and death shall be
no more ? Whence that fair fable of the morning and that
fond vision of the evening? Was it perhaps that the
pageant of radiant glory in the heavens which oftentimes
heralds the rising, and follows in the train of the setting
sun, was applied by a natural transference to the rising and
setting of human life? If the different refractions of the
vibrations of light by intervening vapours were the true cause
of the glorious myth, as of the glorious spectacle, well may
Kant be said to have drunk confusion to Newton who, by the
discovery of the spectrum, had destroyed the poetry of the
rainbow. However that be, the belief of a future state of
immortality is so widespread and firmly fixed, so instinc-
tively urgent apparently, that the existence of it is often ad-
duced as an irrefutable argument of its truth. Is it then
actually a prophetic forefeeling which mankind has had
more or less dimly from the beginning and will have more
and more clearly to the end; or is it the survival of an
ancient superstition that is gradually undergoing extinction,
with no higher authority for its alleged universality than its
natural prevalence as a belief proper to a certain immature
stage of the development of human thought? For it is
certainly true of beliefs, as of organisms, that they sur-
vive in the world in retrograde or degenerate states for a
long time after changes in the medium have rendered
their former functions obsolete and them unfit to perform
them.

Whence again do men obtain their eager aspirations
after a higher ideal of understanding, feeling, and conduct
than earth has ever known? Here is a human ideal, an
ideal made by nature through man, which, however, nature
has never realised, and is always as far as ever from realis-
ing, because as practice improves the ideal rises in proper-

186 WILL US ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

tion. Moreover, the ideal, in order to be realised, must have
its ideal social conditions, which it is impossible it should
ever have ; for it is the initial variation of a higher develop-
ment, which has to adapt itself in the best way it can, that
is, with the least prejudice to its own higher nature, to ex-
isting social conditions, and in so doing to improve them.
No little ridicule has at different times been thrown on
Lamarck's notion that it is the want or need which creates
the organ by minute increments of growth, and it is a notion
which easily lends itself to ridicule ; but what have we in
the ideal but a sense of want in the highest mental organ-
isation, a yearning or striving to satisfy itself and an
impulse to development in consequence ? Why may not the
impulse that manifests itself in consciousness as a want be
displayed essentially by developing organic matter, albeit
without consciousness? What Lamarck may be said to
have done was to describe the nisus in terms of conscious-
ness instead of discovering the organic nisus beneath the
conscious want. Be that as it may, however, it is plainly
necessary for mankind to have its ideal, if it is to make
progress ; when it has lost the imagination of a state of per-
fection which never is but always is to be, it will have lost
the impulse of evolution and have entered on the path of its
decline. Does not instinct, if we consider it well, signify a
desire or want of something which is not actually appre-
hended, a dumb craving for the unknown ? The analysis of
will, when we make it, brings us to desire enlightened and
guided by reason, that is, to the want of a known and ap-
proved object ; but if we carry the analysis deeper down from
complex desire to the most simple desire and thence to ap-
petite, we come at last to the question — Why a desire or
appetite for something before that which is desired is known ?
Consciousness does not make the desire ; it is that which lies
beneath consciousness in the desire that stirs the conscious-
ness, the unconscious appetite that makes the conscious
desire. We must plant ourselves at the last on the funda-
mental property of life to maintain and increase itself, and
we then find ourselves resting on the eternal nisus of evolu-
tion. So that by this way of proceeding we perceive again

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 187

that our highest mental aspirations to the ideal are truly
the highest evolutional manifestations as they take place in
human consciousness. It is curious to note by the way here
how man's two fundamental instincts, the self-conservative
and the propagative, may be discovered at the foundations
respectively of the two great doctrines of materialism and
idealism ; the former, coarse and common, so to speak, having
immediate respect to the present, and the latter, more refined
and glowing with the glamour of love, having a large
respect to the future.

Whence the categorical imperative of the moral sense ?
Whence the instinctive feeling of a self -determining will,
in defiance of all arguments demonstrating its inclusion
within the law of conservation of energy — a feeling that
inspires the conviction of something different from any other
sort of determination within human experience and sub-
stantially warrants the persistence of the disputes concerning
freedom ? We are to inquire now whether the answers to
these questions, so far as they can be answered, are not to
be sought in the fathomable operations of the unfathom-
able impulse of evolution ; of which it may truly be said that
it cometh from afar, was before man was, works in his
progress, prophesies in his instincts and aspirations, inspires
his faiths, is interpreted lamely in his creeds, and its end is
not yet.

The doctrine of evolution substitutes a continuous
creation for a creation by separate shocks, and thereby
nowise lessens the mystery of the universe. To say that
nature produces an organ or a species, or that it is produced
by evolution, or that it comes by a process of becoming, is
to say exactly the same thing in different words ; there is
not a jot more light in one statement, as a general state-
ment, than ill another. Certainly there is not creation in
the sense of the making of something out of nothing ; no
addition takes place to the whole sum of matter and energy
in the universe ; the new thing which is the product of the
old, but riot the old, having its own properties or functions,
is obtained by the transformation of lower kinds of force
and matter, and is capable of equivalent resolution into them

188 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

again.' A new organism is the product of precedent
organisms and of the external conditions of the medium,
but it is neither the precedent organism nor the external
conditions; nor is it merely the arithmetical sum or me-
chanical compound of them; it is a new product with
properties of its own, distinctly autonomous. But to endow
it with autonomy of function is not to ascribe to it spontaneity
either of being or function ; it has not been built up out of
the void, nor does it lire but in relation to a medium ; and
always an external stimulus, direct or indirect, is required
to act upon the stored energies of its structures, and so to
liberate what seem at first sight remote and disproportionate
effects.

Let this conception be applied to the highest functions
of the most complex nervous organisation as they are
manifest in the operations of miad ; and in particular to
that purposive determination of energy that follows de-
liberation — namely, to will. Motives are necessary antece-
dents of will, but assuredly will is not motive, nor is it
simply the sum of the foregoing motives; it is a new
product, the outcome of antecedents certainly, but autono-
mous. Here then may be the ground of a sort of recon-
ciliation between those who advocate freewill and those who
advocate determinism. On the one hand is the absolute
certitude that will is not the mechanical consequence nor
the arithmetical sum of the antecedent motives, that it
possesses and exhibits more than can be discerned in them ;
on the other hand is the equal certitude that motives, secret
and open, near and remote, explicit in consciousness and
incorporate in faculty, always do go before an act of will
and are pre-essential to it. On either side there is a grasp
of that part of the truth which is overlooked by the other

' Is the intellect of a Shakspeare or a Newton capable then of being ac-
counted for by any transformation of natural forces, or of being resolved into
any imaginable equivalence of forces ? Those who put such a question with
scorn as one that is utterly ridiculous, should first inquire and explain why a
Shakspeare or Newton could not possibly appear among a tribe of savages,'
and why, if the impossible events did take place, the productions of their
mighty intellects would be nil. After that exposition the discussion might
begin.

CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 189

side : may not the two sides then unite in the conclusion
that precedent motives are necessary constituents of will,
but that the qualities of the product are special, its functions
autonomous ? It needs no disquisition to make it probable,
after what has gone before, that this autonomy of will,
which we recognise as a scientific conclusion, according to
the apprehension of sense and in conformity with our ex-
perience of other natural phenomena, will declare itself to
the internal apprehension of consciousness as a strong senti-
ment of freewill : that which is autonomy objectively will be
self-determination subjectively. There is not an inde-
pendence of every influence, but a more or less exclusive de-
pendence on internal influences.

When we perceive in a department of natural laws the
appearance of a phenomenon that is not governed by those
laws, but witnesses to the intervention of laws from another
and higher domain of nature, it is not sound philosophy to
seek for the source of these in spiritual abstractions or in
supernatural inspirations ; our duty is to ascend into the
higher and unknown domain, and to study its natural laws
by the same methods which we have used successfully in the
lower domains where we have made ourselves at home. The
intrusions from on high should not be wondered at as super-
natural, but studied as the events of a higher natural
domain. On the other hand, it is not sound science to
apply the known laws of the phenomena of the lower
domain to an entire explanation of the phenomena of the
higher domain; still less to beguUe oneself into the belief
of an explanation by the vague misapplication of the special
terms of the former, which have definite meanings in their
proper use and place, to the more complex phenomena of
the latter, where they not only do not cover and fit the facts,
but have their own exact significations blurred and de-
faced by the misuse. In the knowledge of organic functions,
how full soever it may be, we shall not find the adequate
explanation of social phenomena. Physiology analyses and
decomposes and recomposes man as an organic being into a
variety of structures and a multitude of reactions, and dis-
plays their relations in the organic whole ; but it is sociology

190 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

■which must then take up the tale and investigate his functions
as a man amongst men united in a society, discerning and
displaying his nature and functions as a social and moral
being. The social organism is not a mere physiological
organism ; it is that and a great deal more, being essentially
of historical significance, and requiring, in order to be under-
stood, the study of antecedent social states ; and it will
demand in the end a new and more complex conception of
organism than anything that physiology alone can furnish.
In its domain we get beyond physical, chemical and physio-
logical laws, as we know those laws, just as in the domain of
physiology we get beyond physical and chemical laws, as we
know physical and chemical laws ; we meet with higher
autonomies, but in no case, not even in the highest, is it an
inspiration from heaven which giveth the autonomy ; it is
always the inspiration that is on earth and is manifested in
every pulse of evolution.

The will of man being the outcome of supreme reason is
the highest and latest evolved energy in nature ; it is in
fact the power by which nature developing through man
accomplishes the progressing path of its destiny, the nature-
made mean by which nature is made better. Acted upon
continually by his environment, physical and social, and
reacting upon it, man incorporates by involution in the
structure and constitution of his nervous system the essential
abstractions of these adaptive interactions, co-ordinates in
complex reasoning their manifold relations, and exhibits the
outcome of energy in a well-informed will; and it, in its
highest expression, is the initiation of a new step in evolution.
Past and present experiences are its constituent factors, but
it is itself more than experience, for it is productive, creative,
thus pushing forth prophetically into the unknown. Like
instinct, in the realisation of its energy it seeks for what it
has not and knows not ; indeed, in its true creative, which is
its least conscious, expression we might describe it as the
highest instinct of development. In that supreme function
it is not attended with any consciousness of freedom, because
man is then one with nature, his relations with it not broken
into conscious incompletenesses, but consciousness absorbed

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 191

and extinguislied in their full harmony. It may be the senti-
ment of freedom that he has is not really the sentiment of
his own freedom, as he supposes, but the sentiment of the
freedom of nature working in him, he being a poor channel
of it ; for as he by his nature as individual is part only of a
whole, he cannot in that relation be free. But the whole
which, encompassing him, yet works in him, may seem to
his self-consciousness free, and so produce the illusion of his
freedom ; its part in him having a dimly conscious intimation
of its share in the being and freedom of that which transcends
him. In any case, however, it is not so much a definite
consciousness as an indefinite thrill of sentiment, which we
translate into a too definite consciousness. Now the right
aim of will must plainly be to escape from the limitation of
self and to gain the full freedom of nature by becoming one
with it — to surmount self by losing the consciousness of self.
Freewill then is not the relic of a higher faculty which man
once had in the past, it is rather an aim or ideal of the
future ; a creation of the imagination which inflames the
notion of duty and fortifies the ought through the desire
that it inspires to realise the ideal.

The path of moral law in social evolution is without
doubt the present aim of the highest will ; and it is in the
inspiration of this aim, and in the autonomy of the function,
that we discover the origin and the authority of the cate-
gorical moral imperative. Thou shalt go the right way of
development, thou shalt not go the wrong way of degenera^-
tion : such the explicit declaration of its instinctive beat in
the heart, such the reason of the understanding confirming
the deeper reason of the heart. Believing ourselves the best
in nature we are bound to believe the moral aspirations of
the best specimens of us to represent the highest point of
the evolution of will, and to mark the direction of its future
development. The basis and sanction of morality, whatever
its subjective value, has its clear objective value and warrant
in the welfare and progress of the social organism which it
promotes. Were the internal sanction abolished the external
authority would still be imperative.' That is a consideration
' Should it tnm out in the end that morality has this inner authority in

192 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

which may emholden us to dispense with the niTiltitudinous
theoretical discussions concerning the supernatural source
and authority of the internal sanction ; and the more easily so
since such disquisitions for the most part are reweavings
of the same quantity of old substance into more or less new
patterns according to the predilections of the performers,
laborious attempts to get explicit in the inference more than
is implicit in the premiss. Now a real addition to knowledge
can take place only by a positive addition to the substance ;
and that must come not from subjective exploration but from
objective observation. The rule of morality is implicit in
practice before it is explicit in thought — must be acquired by
involution before it can be unfolded in evolution ; and the
basis of it must be sought where the substance of all thought
has to be sought — in conduct. It is not from consciousness
but from life that the obligation comes primarily. A logical
machine might conceivably draw the inference which is
implicit in the premiss ; the acutest understanding will not
elicit and unfold the theory that is not latent in the practice.
Notwithstanding the many differences in the qualities and
quantity of the moral contents among different nations and
in different ages, there is everywhere discoverable this com-
mon positive basis — namely, the obligation to follow a line
of conduct sanctioned as good, and to avoid a line of conduct
prohibited as bad, by the social body ; the bad actions being
such as were believed to be hurtful, and the good actions
such as were believed to be useful to it. By no means was
it thereby hindered from happening, as it did indeed happen,
that the prohibitions and sanctions esteemed moral in a
rude society were such as would be deemed actually immoral
in a higher society. The whole business is relative: the
individual member of a community must have a regard
beyond self in the larger regard which he owes to the
welfare of the whole ; the particular community again must
have regard to a larger whole than itself, and that whole, even
if national, to the larger whole of humanity ; so that it may

intuition, this practical imperative of pure consciousness, then it will have
the good fortune to enjoy a double certitude, because of the agreement in it
of the two independent methods by which it is established.

CERTAIK MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 193

•well happen that an act that is moral in its immediate
relations is immoral in its relations to the larger whole — •
for example, self-sacrificing devotion to an individual a sin
against society, a patriotic sacrifice of self to the nation a
crime against humanity. The inspiration of the larger
whole imparts the ideal to which the aspiration is. See
what happens now when a person of lofty virtue does not
get the approbation which he feels that his conduct deserves,
but instead thereof is misunderstood and misinterpreted.
He appeals in his heart to an ideal moral sentiment — to one,
as it were, within him with whom he is in intuitive moral
communion, and reconciles himself to suffer wrong patiently
in the sure conviction that his conscience is the approving
voice of that power within him : in other words, he appeals
to the ideal moral feeling of humanity immanent in him, the
ideal, that is, which humanity pursues, enjoining it in his
conscience, and which he, personifying it in his own image,
as his habit is, interprets as ' God spake these words and
said.' And here one cannot help being somewhat disturbed
by the question — To what larger whole than itself shall
humanity have regard ? Will it discover for itself a saving
ideal in aspirations to do the service of a cosmical whole ?
Or will it be left finally without an ideal ? When it comes
to pass that humanity, fully constituted, is sensible of no
vital relation to anything higher and larger than itself, and
longs for no fuller life in the aim to attain a higher life
outside itself, it will then have reached the term of its de-
velopment and the beginning of the end. The impulse of
evolution will have been exhausted in it.

We think habitually of will as individual and conscious
activity, a witting energy, the conscious outcome of careful
deliberation looking before and after; but when we think of
its operation in the evolution of mankind, it is necessary to
think of it rather as unconscious, blind, instinctive, preg-
nant with a future which, hidden in its aspirations, it brings
to pass : it is a mighty tide of becoming that is broken into
so many ripples of individual and conscious energies, a deep
tranquil stream which, flowing beneath the tumultuous
waves and angry surges of the surface, makes aspirations

194 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

prophecies, and man in his progress ever wiser than his
creeds. One might compare it in this respect to the instinct
of the insect which, having never seen its parents, lays up a
store of food for a progeny that it will never see; or might
perhaps describe it in St. Paul's words as the earnest expec-
tation of creation that waiteth for a fulfilment, which, how-
ever, when it has come, becomes the immediate basis of a
new expectation. Each mortal, eager in busy energy, does
his little piece of work in his particular sphere, consciously
or unconsciously aiding or hindering the development of the
social organism of which he is a part ; but it is not any part
but the whole, not a unit but the organism in its integral
form, which gives the destined direction to the sum of the
functions of its many and various units — that is to say,
which creates the ideal to which the individual aspires.
The sum of the multitudinous units of consciousness is a
moving whole which, though vaguely consensible perhaps, is
not conscious. For the great organism of humanity does not
foresee where it is going as it progresses, nor deliberately
foreordain its path of evolution; it has no common senso-
riwm, so to speak — as it may one day have, should the
vaguely consensible become the definitely conscious — whereby
to attain unity of feeling and to direct consciously its
course ; it moves forward in developmenb slowly, irregularly,
intermittently or remittently, blindly, answering in its move-
ment no doubt to the sum of the energies of its constituents
in relation to its environment, but at the same time inform-
ing and determining the units of the future by imparting to
them their idealism. Mighty busy beings for a little while
are the units, but infinitesimally minute aids or hindrances
to the great movement of evolution whose end they know
not.

To speak of the will of man as a mode of a universal will
in nature, tempting though it be, ought not to be allowed to
pass as if it were not a piece of pure anthropomorphism.
We have no actual right to conclude from the character of
the conditioned conscious energy in us as to the character
of the unconditioned energy outside us ; for it is the mark of
our limitation, not the warrant of objective truth, that we

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 195

cannot do otherwise than represent the power outside our-
selves in terms of ourselves. We please ourselves to in-
terpret it in the language of experience, but it is actually
uninterpretable in that language. A chemical molecule,
were it capable of it, might just as well conclude that the one
prevailing energy of which its particular energy was a mode
was chemical energy. Himself a moment between those im-
potences of thought which he calls infinities, man's will is
necessarily the poor reflex of his limitations; what is true of
it cannot possibly be true of that which has not his nor any
limitations ; and to describe it at all in words which, being
human, are meaningless in such application — even so much as
to name it — is only a little less anthropomorphic than to speak
of it as the Will of a Personal God made in the image of man.
For assuredly, when we think well of it, it was not God who
made man in his image, it is man who has always made God
in his image ; in the image of man has he made Him.

How far has Kant really advanced matters by his great
doctrine of practical reason? In proclaiming the freedom
of will and the moral imperative to be not, like the know-
ledge acquired by the understanding, relative and pheno-
menal, but the thing-in-itself, absolute, incomprehensible —
feelable in some strange fashion, though not knowable, by a
self— he has done little more than translate into his philo-
sophical language, and into language which, being relative,
will not anyhow carry the absolute thing-in-itself, the com-
mon opinion of a Divine inspiration ; for what he has done
is to ascribe to incomprehensible freewill the place of that
incomprehensible which men call God, and to put the cate-
gorical moral imperative in the stead of ' God spake these
words and said.' With this disadvantage too: that whereas
what God spake and said was clear, certain, precise, and
absolutely authoritative, we are left by Kant without any
certain criterion of what the moral imperative categorically
ordains in the particular case ; are referred in our troubles
of conscience to the common-place utilitarian standard of
the good of society. Moreover, what is to be said of the
consistency of a philosophy which, pronouncing all know-
ledge to be phenomenal and relative, in the same breath

196 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

declares any affection of an individual self, let it be the senti-
ment or intuition of liberty or duty, to be more than rela-
tive?

It is the fashion nowadays among metaphysical psycho-
logists to assume that we owe to Kant's critical acumen the
modern doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, and they
almost imply, from the great credit which they award him,
that but for him modern science could not have existed.
But the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge was not his
discovery ; we owe it really to the discoveries of the physio-
logists who made known the true functions of the senses ;
and it might be argued with some show of reason that if
Kant were dropped clean out between Hume and modern
science its positive gains would be very much what they are
now. Whenever a good stream of positive scientific thought
begins to emerge from its brooding latency into explicit
light it easily runs into two different courses : the one an
easy, vague, dispersive expression in theoretical and more or
less ingenious disquisitions, by which it is soon dissipated
in wasteful inanities of bog and marsh ; the other, a slow,
tedious, sober, and fruitful progress through patient scientific
observations and verifications. The actual filiation was not
from Kant to modern science, as his disciples assume, but
from the stream of tendency of which Kant was a meta-
physical offshoot. Hegel supplies an example of a similar
metaphysical deviation from the quiet stream of positive
science. The modern doctrine of organic evolution, or pro-
gressive development, as it used to be called, is much the
same as Hegel's fundamental doctrine of the immanent
spontaneous evolution of the absolute ; indeed it is the same
doctrine set forth in terms of matter instead of terms of
metaphysics. Self-evolution of the absolute, progressing
from differ enca to difference, these differences, themselves
mere moments within it, being combined into higher and
higher unity: the absolute impelled by the principle of
progress within itself to higher and higher differences, and
through them to higher and higher unity : — what is that but
the progress from the simple and general to the complex
and special which in Hegel's time was recognised as the

CEETAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 197

order of organic deTelopment, and wliicli since kis time
has become known as the law of evolution through
differences to more complex unities. To conclude, however,
that the scientific conception of evolution, whose true
modern parentage lies mainly with Von Baer and Lamarck,
owes its origin in any degree to Hegel, would be grossly
absurd. Indeed, it is pretty certain that if Hegel and all
his works had been thrown into the sea, and no mention
more heard of him and them, the scientific conception of
evolution would not have been delayed an hour. Another
striking example of the speculative deviation of positive
thought from its true path of sober progress is in process of
display at the present day. Since Darwin brought the
doctrine of evolution into the fuU current of scientific
thought, and aroused the eager attention of all the world to
it, by his admirable exposition of natural selection as the
main means of its accomplishment, there has been a large
development of purely theoretical philosophy in which evo-
lution has been tracked with overstrained ingenuity into all
holes and corners of nature, and a word meaning the un-
folding or becoming of things has been proved triumphantly
to explain how all things have become. In the meantime
the quiet stream of positive scientific inquiry into the par-
ticular problems of evolution, along which the real fruit wOl
have to be gathered at the last, makes slow way and obtains
little notice.

To return to the course of our inquiry. Having found
the basis of freewill and of the moral sanction in the evolu-
tional nisus in its social sphere, I go on now to inquire
whether some other fundamental beliefs are not similarly
rooted in it. Without doubt there have prevailed very
widely, though not universally, among mankind the sad
tradition of a lost or forfeited life of perfection and happi-
ness and a dim expectation or the firm assurance of a future
life of perfection and happiness. Now if we know anything
certain of the beginnings of human life it is that man has
risen in estate, not fallen from a higher estate — at any rate
on earth, whatever may have been the case on the moon or
on Mars when they were theatres of life ; that there never

198 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

was such, a golden age of peace and happiness as he has
fabled ; that he has never been greater and nobler than he
is now. Moreover, if we can predict anything safely in this
business from the basis of our existing natural knowledge,
we can predict that though he may well rise higher than he
is now, he will not have any such life after death as he has
consoled and beguiled himself by imagining. Where then
has be obtained his tradition of a glorious past? Whence
have come to him those immortal longings that make him
feel

Through all his fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness i

Theologians naturally declare them to be the intuitions of
a special religious sense, since they are sure the systematised
knowledge of sense and reason cannot give a satisfactory ac-
count of them. Whencesoever derived, they must have their
sufficient reason ; their influence in human events has been
unspeakably momentous ; and no science of human nature
can be complete which fails to take adequate account of
them and their effects, and to tell us how they have come,
if they have a natural origin. Are we not entitled to look
upon them as the imaginative interpretations of an instinct
springing into consciousness from the upward striving im-
pulse which, immanent in man as part and crown of organic
nature, ever throbs in his heart as the inspiration of hope,
of aspiration, of faith in things unseen? Imagination, as
its manner is, constructs modes or forms of satisfaction of
the instinct in conformity with the co-existing state of
mental development; and accordingly the schemes of future
fulfilment invented by different peoples in different epochs
do not fail to present a considerable variety, and to differ
too in character according to the different characters of the
peoples of the same epoch ; not otherwise than as the ' bon
Dieu' of France differs from the 'God ' of a Scotch Calvinist.
Certainly it was not difficult for man at any time to picture
to himself a much happier life than he was living, since he
could easily imagine it without its most urgent present suf-
ferings, just as he could imagine men who were giants or

CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 199

who lived for a thousand years ; it was not surprising there-
fore that he should conclude the feeling of a happier possi-
bility to be either the consequence, the faint reminiscence, of
a better life which had been actually lived before historical
time, or the dim forefeeling, the prophetic instinct, of a
better life to come — either a Paradise of the past or a Para-
dise of the future. We conclude then that these inventions,
adapted, like poetical justice, to give the mind satisfaction
in that wherein the nature of things denies it, have sprung
from the instinctive forefeeling of a higher human destiny
with which the nisus of evolution working in and through
man inspires his imagination. Given the instinct, which is
indisputable, it is easy to understand how all the rest must
follow, when we reflect upon the way imagination has worked
to people the unknown with extraordinary beings constructed
after the fashion of its ordinary experience, but on a much
larger scale of goodness and grandeur, or of badness and
terror — gods, that is, of the earth and the air, of unseen
upper and unseen under regions, anthropomorphic personifi-
cations of the unknown powers of nature that awed man
into abasement and adoration.

The psychologist who discovers an adequate philosophy of
mind by peering into his own mind, thus making his con-
sciousness the measure of the universe of thought and things,
is content to think he has explained something when he has
pronounced it to be the work of the imagination or the ima-
ginative faculty : by invoking diligently his own conscious-
ness he has had this pregnant oracle uttered to him — to wit,
that mind working in that mode which it is agreed to call
imagination has done it. Meanwhile he reveals mighty little
by the discovery to any one who has not the Brahmin-like
faculty of obtaining intuition by gazing intently at his own
navel. What we really want to know is not whether Imagi-
nation, <f>avTaa-la, Einbildung, or any other descriptive term
has done it,_but what is the foundation of this productive or
creative function of mind which is so named, and what are
its material correlates iu bodily structure and function ? It
is obvious that experience and reason can only acquaint us
with the actual and its relations, taking us along the beaten

200 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

tracks of things as they are, and instructing us how to move
from one to another ; they never can, as imagination does,
inspire and urge us to strike out the new patlis of things as
they are not ; to combine and arrange the actual of experi-
ence into new forms of thought, so ' bodying forth the forms
of things unknown,' and giving ' to aery nothings a local habi-
tation and a name ; ' to frame theories that shall fit experi-
ences never had, and to foresee ahd foretell what those
experiences will be ; to fashion ideals, ' creating every bad a
perfect best.' These operations are the effects and evidence
of the evolutional nisus working in the nature of man, in
mind as the highest outcome of it, and in imagination as
the highest function of mind ; wherefore the best products
of imagination are the last events of the evolution of nature,
they represent the highest becoming thereof through man.
Here indeed it is that we catch nature putting forth the
shoots of its latest development, many of them certainly
vain and abortive, like the countless multitudes of seeds and
germs that come to naught, but others of them that live and
thrive, and so do their part to carry on the evolution of the
great organism of humanity.

In this relation let it be borne well in mind always,
that imagination cannot work in its best productive way
except it be fed and sustained and informed by an under-
standing that is of large capacity and good culture, is in
wide and exact and intimate sympathy with nature, social
and physical, and thus gathers up what is behind and
around, combines it in true forms of thought, and lays a
sound and solid basis for the forward-reaching work of ima-
ginative creation. Not voluntary nor even conscious are its
workings ; they are mobile, spontaneous, capricious, and un-
certain, not subiect to direct mental control and not to be
explained by logic. The voluntary aim should be to lay up in
a well-trained understanding a good store of co-ordinated
material and of sound notional relations by which it may be
fitly fed and informed. Goethe said of himself, 'What I
have not loved I have never translated into verse or prose.
I have never made love-poems when I was not in love ; ' nor
did he write poems about nature without being informed

CEETAIN HENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 201

wifcK facts gathered from every source, whicli he allowed to
sink deep into his mind and to brood there until they came
forth animate in fit imaginatire forms of truth and beauty.
Divorced from a good understanding, imagination strays into
all sorts of fanciful vagaries — into reckless generalisations
and ill-grounded hypotheses in science, into wild theories in
politics, into extravagant inanities in poetry, into ill-con-
ceived and ridiculous productions of art, into thin evolutions
of all sorts wanting the substantial basis of previous involu-
tions ; but these abortive vagaries are so many proofs of the
inexhaustible strength of its ever-budding life : countless vari-
ations that perish if so be that one live and thrive. Seldom
indeed, not more than once in a century perhaps, is it in-
spired by the highest reason, and its work clothed in the
forms thereof. To look back upon the incalculable amount
and the inexhaustible variety of work which, ill nourished
by observation, and ill informed by reason, it has done in the
past, on the vast waste of energy which its records show, is
to lay a solid basis of hope of the progress it will make in
time to come when it shall be well nourished by sound obser-
vation and well informed by enlightened reason.

It is evident that true imagination is vastly different from
fancy ; far from being merely a playful outcome of mental
activity, a thing of joy and beauty only, it performs the ini-
tial and essential functions in every branch of human deve-
lopment. And has always done so, even though its products,
after having discharged their temporary functions, have
dwindled and disappeared; for always it has peopled that
realm of the ideal which has countervailed the oppression
and gloom of the real. How could men ever have faced suc-
cessfully in the first instance the unknown, vast and over-
whelming forces of nature, how welded themselves under
their pressure into the unity, confidence, and strength of
social growth, if they had not created for themselves gods of
the airj of the earth, and of the sea, of the hearth, of the
city, and of the nation, whose anger they might hope to pro-
pitiate, and whose favour they might hope to win ? Could
the Israelites, though pliant, patient and tenacious then as

now, have made their painful way through the wilderness
14

202 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

from the bondage of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan
■without their strong faith in the special and jealous God of
Israel, greater than the gods of the heathen, who divided for
them the waters of the sea, sent them food from heaven,
caused water to gush out of the stony rock, set his interpos-
ing fiat between the dead and the living, and stayed the
plague by which they were devastated? 'And the Lord
prospered him in everything that he did, because he did
that which was right in the sight of the Lord,' would be the
approving comment that a Jewish historian would make
upon the character and doings of a ruler who, outside the
tribal or national bounds, had been a monster of savage ini-
quity, and who, had he lived now, would be thought to have
earned eternal infamy. But the Jehovah of Jewish worship,
though nominally accepted still, is virtually a conception of
the past, like Jove, Vishnu, and Baal, and other extinct gods,
having been practically superseded by a higher conception of
Deity. For imagination is nowise disheartened because its
offspring perish one after another ; with never failing pro-
ductive energy it goes on to create anew, taking refuge in
heaven when driven from earth, throwing the soft glamour
of the ideal over the sadness of the real, infusing the faith
and hope that inspire the strife of life and console its close.

Let me take notice here how admirably the evolutional
nisus in its two aspects of the objective in nature and of the
subjective in imagination is identified, becoming one, as it
were, in the passion and fruition of love ; how the sensual
need and impulse works intimately with the imagination, in-
spiring it and clothing itself with tlie colours and forms
thereof, so as to make the union the complete and ecstatic
exercise of the energies of the whole being ; a rapture of
delight blending the individual and nature for the moment
in an act which the most highly rational beings hasten to
hide as a shame, and than which, objectively regarded,
there is not anything more ridiculous in all the world.
The supreme joy in nature is plainly production or creation,
subjective or objective, and the supremest joy that pro-
ductive activity in which they are identified. Behold how
specially bride and bridegroom are adorned for the function,

CERTAIN MENTAX PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 203

and with what hymeneal joy and festivities their union is
solemnised, as well in the bright homes of civilisation as in
the cruelty-full habitations of the dark places of the earth ;
how vegetable and animal nature is aiTayed in its most
glorious apparel, and the irrepressible joy thereof bursts
forth in multitudinous ecstasies and harmonies of odours,
colours and songs; how man is transported with similar
pleasure, not in the lower sphere of his sensual nature only,
but in the ideal regions of art, poetry, and religion ! For it
is the privilege of his high and complex mental organisation
to absorb and mentally transform the physical impulse and
to expend its energy in ideal creations of the imagination —
in spiritual generation.

If the imagination has so important and essential a
function in the development of mankind as I have indicated,
the question may well be asked whether, after all, the
understanding is the only mint from which truth issues;
whether in fact the imagination is not perhaps an organ of
truths that are not truths of the understanding. Why
should the last word be the thinker's P Or why should he
think that in any matter he has spoken the last word i* The
understanding reveals a phenomenal world standing forth
from a background of the unperceivable ; for assuredly
beyond all forms or modes of man's apprehension there is
that which has not undergone, and cannot imdergo, form or
mode in his consciousness. Indeed, is it not the fact that
every definite idea, every class of notions that we form,
every piece of positive knowledge that we gain, is an arbitrary
limitation and separation, and therefore in some sort a falsi-
fication ? To separate in thought the particular part from
the whole with which it is in essential continuity of living
being, as we do when we bring it under our conditions of
perception and conception, is to make it a dead fragment
rather than a living continuity, in so far as we know it.
However positive, definite, and true then knowledge is in
relation to us, as relative, there is nothing more superficial
and artificial in relation to the universal and absolute. In
this vague and vast region of unlimited and unrelational,
which the very recognition of a relative and limited world

204 "WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

of knowledge compels us to postulate, and which we may
please ourselves to talk of as 'the thing-in-itself ' or the ab-
solute, though both expressions are meaningless,' there is
manifestly room enough for an unlimited play of the imagi-
nation. Is it then perchance that in this function of
imagination there beats the illuminating pulse of higher
being than sense can apprehend? Perhaps it is that the
infinite past thrills in us, making a tone of vague feeling
that we cannot apprehend in thought or express in words,
and giving us, as the connecting present between two
eternities, the dim forefeeling of an endless continuity in
the future ; that it is this formless thrill of unity with the
whole and of continuity without end, to which no adequate
reaction on our part is possible in thought or deed, which is
the inspiration of imagination and the basis of morality and
religion ; and that we have here a case in which doubt in-
spired by the understanding overthrows beliefs to which a
larger doubt of the range of the understanding brings us
back under the authority of imagination. What truths of
religion then, that are not truths of the understanding, may
not imagination properly Construct on the basis of this un-
fathomable moral or religious consciousness ?

Assuredly it may construct a great deal in that sphere,
since its energy is inexhaustible, its exercise a pleasure, and
it has ample scope enough ; but the real question is whether
it is qualified to construct truly there, when it does so in
defiance and even in direct contradiction of understanding.
In the progressive becoming of knowledge imagination antici-

' Not to go back to what has been previously said about this matter, I may
simply note here that, inasmuch as all meaning cannot be other than relative,
the only absolute, if any, is that which we get in the relative, the only ' thing-
in-itself ' that which we get in the phenomenon : that is to say, we know
nothing of the absolute until it is no longer absolute, of the thing-in-itself
until it is the thing-out-of -itself. Hardly less imbecile is the assertion that
the absolute, though not a conception, is yet a state of consciousness. As if
every state of consciousness were not just as relative as any conception. The
vague feeling or dim notion that we think we have of the absolute is really
the relative with as many of its relations as possible got rid of — the most
general and abstract relative, in fact, that we can arrive at. Obviously any
particular absolute, such as absolute truth, absolute good, must be a greater
absurdity still.

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 205

pates understanding, foretelling tlie immediate to he before
it definitely is ; in the common use of it in scientific inquiry,
for example, the theory which it constructs precedes the
demonstration by which, after being tested and proved by
the understanding, it is made knowledge ; and so it does
actually go beyond the range of understanding, stretching
forth into the future. But only from the basis of under-
standing to come back to the test of understanding, if it is
of sterling value. What sort of theory is that which is not
based upon a competent appreciation of well observed facts
and their relations? And what sort of imagination that
which is not based upon good, well trained, and well informed
understanding, and can in turn appeal to the test of it ?

Those who think to find a source of revelation in
imagination should consider that, constructing for us things
that are not, and sometimes things that could not be con-
sistently with the fundamental laws of mental evolution —
for a truly based creation of the imagination, such as a
character of Shakspeare's, is more true than the particular
real, since it contains the essence of all the particular reals
of that kind, as perceived by a man of genius, and by him
embodied and exhibited to us in it — it has been the cause of
most of our errors. They would not do amiss to reflect on
the great multitude of false constructions that have been
made by it since the beginning of its work upon earth, and
to examine whether the plain effects of some of them have
not been, as the larger use of them may be in the future, to
promote not evolution but degeneration of the human kind.
For it is not unlikely that natural selection will act to lead
mankind downhill at the last to their extinction as effectively
as it now acts to lead them uphill. However that be, these
things we ought to make clear to ourselves in the matter —
namely, what we can aflSrm positively, what we can deny
positively, what we must be content to leave unaffirmed and
undenied: we are sure and can affirm that a fundamental
impulse of evolution is felt in the higher functions of mind ;
we are sure and can affirm that the impulse comes from afar
and is more than personal in any proper sense of the word ;
we are entirely in doubt what it is essentially, whence it

206 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

comes, and whither it tends, and are sure that any positive
and definite answers that we make to such questions' must
be fables of the imagination.

Here we might properly take notice how much the
operation of the imagination in defective and deranged
states of the nervous system, has had to do with the genera-
tion and sustenance of supernatural beliefs and pretensions.
Many erroneous beliefs of that character have their origin
in a defective development of the understanding, such as is
natural to savages and children. Witness, for example, the
superstitions of ill omens which have so strong a hold on
barbarous peoples, and indeed are not extinct in the most en-
lightened countries. Two events occur near together, where-
upon they are connected in the mind as cause and effect,
though they have no causal relation whatever, their concur-
rence or sequence being quite accidental. Causality being a
form of thought under which we perceive events, it is the
fundamental and universal apprehension of the understanding,
and an easy error of it is that sequent events are conse-
quent ; for mankind perceived causality long before they
perceived true causes, and so hastened always to find causes
where there were only coincidences, and to imaginatively
invent them when there were none discernible. The search
for causes, the instinctive need to find out some antecedent
or connection for a phenomenon, I take to be the consequence
of a deep practical intuition that we and all we see are
related parts of an embracing whole, whereby we cannot
bear to leave an event suspended in the void, as it were,
but are driven always to endeavour to attach it somewhere.
It would be impossible to estimate the number of erroneous
inferences and beliefs and superstitions that have sprung
from the operation of that instinct — from the glad and
exuberant exercise of the imagination to supplement the
defects of inadequate understanding.

But besides these products of an imperfect basis of
knowledge, a great many supernatural manifestations and
revelations have been the manifest progeny of a brooding
imagination operating from the unsound basis of a dis-
ordered reason. A strange and grotesque progeny sometimes

CERTAIN MENTAL PKODUCTS OP EVOLUTION. 207

those products, but not without extraordinary influence on
the events of human history. We may read there, if we
will, how hallucinations of hearing have been accepted as
voices from heaven and hallucinations of vision as divine
apparitions, and how whole sections of communities have
been infected with a fanatical admiration and a devout
worship of the delusions of a monomaniac. It is certainly a
very remarkable thing, when we consider it well, that dis-
orders of the nervous system have played so great a part
in those beliefs which, being deemed to be of a spiritual
order, are esteemed man's best possessions. What then shall
we say ? Briefly no more than this at present — that some
of these disordered ideas were the accidental concomitants
of a genuine stream of tendency, incidental offsets of its
progress, so to speak, and of little more essential signifi-
cance than the foam in the steamer's track; and that
others of them were the accompaniments of a process of
degeneration that is going on constantly side by side with
a process of evolution. Not all peoples survive and advance,
nor all sections of a people, nor all families of a section, nor
all individuals of a family ; it is only a chosen part, and
that a small minority of the whole, which carries forward
the progress of humanity; the huge majority is at best
stationary and for the most part actually occupied in de-
generating. In such case false beliefs, though accepted
devoutly as of supernatural origin, are the expressions of a
defect or degeneration which they in turn help to increase.
The gods or other ideals which a people of a barbarous a,nd
brutal nature creates for itself and worships, being in their
characters the reflex of its character and development,
become causes that contribute to perpetuate and increase
the degradation of the people ; and among civilised people
in like manner, both in the general and in the particular,
the worship of false ideals is a powerful cause of degenera-
tion. The language is in want of a convenient word to
denote the opposite of a true ideal — a word such as anti-
ideal — that might fitly express the aim of tendency which
went opposite to, or was a positive deviation from, the path
of progress of humanity in any direction.

208 "WIIX IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAI, ASPECT.

EnoTigli concerning a matter whicli, never yet treated
systematically as its importance deserves, would require very
detailed treatment to have justice done to it : suffice it here
to say that however it be that supernatural revelation comes,
whether from defective development or from derangement
of understanding, this much is certain, that in no case can
it come to us othei'wise than through man and conditioned
by the limitations of his nature ; he is the channel of its
flow to us inevitably, whatever be the source, and therefore
he may be, for anything we can tell, the perverter or the
actual creator of the message. In this matter, as always,
the direct testimony of the witness is liable to two serious
fallacies — first, that he may be deceiving us, and, secondly,
that he may be deceived himself ; and accordingly we cannot
be sure we are not the victims of imposture or of hallucina-
tion, or, as not seldom happens perhaps, of a mixture of both.
For certainly the monomaniacal enthusiast is apt to advance
through self-deception into more or less conscious imposture;
his expanding course being commonly to be deceived himself,
then to deceive himself, and in the end to deceive others.

In this relation it is most necessary to bear distinctly in
mind that forms and ceremonies, stereotyped propositions,
articles of faith and dogmas of theology do not constitute the
essence of religion but its vesture, and that, apart from all
such forms and modes of interpretation, it responds to an
eternal need of human sentiment. Tor it is inspired by the
moral sentiments of humanity and rests on the deep founda-
tions of sacrifice of self, devotion to the tind, the heroism of
duty, pity for the poor and suffering, faith in the triumph of
good. It appeals to, and is the outcome of, the heart not
of the understanding, and so goes down into lower depths
than the fathom-line of the understanding can sound; for the
intellect is aristocratic and the heart democratic, knowledge
puffing up but love uniting and building up, and the true
social problem is to democratise the intellect through the
heart. It is the deep fusing feeling of human solidarity, in
whatsoever interpretative doctrines and ceremonies it may be
organised for the time, that is religion in its truest sense ;
for it is in the social organism what the heart is in the bodily

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 209

organism, and when it ceases to beat in conscience, death and
corruption ensue. The pity of religious formulas is that they
so often carry men's thoughts away from the abiding and
essential reality to an exaggerated appreciation of the passing
forms and representations thereof. As his enemies put a
false robe of royalty on Jesus when they led him to death, so
have his followers since that time put a false robe of divinity
on him, and so done much to lead religion to death. Those
who criticise a particular religion, were they wise, would
leave the sentiment untouched and do their work sympathe-
tically, not in hostile antipathy. To pour indignation, scorn,
ridicule, satire, and invective upon its extravagances and
inconsistencies is not the whole method of criticism, nor
indeed the best method in the end to accomplish the de-
structive work aimed at.

Another large reflection springs naturally here from the
foregoing one — namely, the reflection that the great evolu-
tional impulses that move society and effect great social revo-
lutions do not spring from science or philosophy or know-
ledge in any shape, but from obscure popular fermentation ;
not from the clear understanding, which killeth, but from
the troubled heart of mankind, which keepeth alive. It was
not in the academy nor in the Lyceum, but in the manger of
a stable, that Christianity was born, and its earliest adherents
were illiterate and ignorant people gathered from the dregs
of the populace. The masses of oppressed toilers for a bare
sustenance, sunk in poverty and worn down with labour,
what care they, or can they ever care, for the scientific dis-
coveries that are the chief glory of the age ? If it takes a
man all the labour of his life, doing nothing else, to know
one special science, it is evident that the great majority of
mankind can have but a very small portion in any science.
Moreover, knowledge by itself is not necessarily good; it is
power certainly, but power for ill as much as for good. The
result of its increase is to make the few, who cultivate and
possess it more powerful, and the many who do not less
powerful ; to raise those who are high and to degrade those
who are low ; to make the rich richer and the poor poorer ;
to increase inequality without yielding anything to fill the

210 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT,

intervening gap. Now increase of inequality means in the
end revolution and a new social fusion, in any people that
has not fallen altogether out of the line of progress. Great
social revolutions are the antecedents of new evolutions ;
from the terrible fusion which they make of widely separated
classes and interests there is the birth of new social forces ;
they prevent the disintegration of humanity by preserving its
solidarity. A fraternity based upon knowledge alone would
want a consolidating cement and could not hold together.
It is worthy of notice in this relation that the great mono-
theistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism — have
shown themselves hostile to science, moved thereto perhaps
by a deep and just instinct; for they represent and bear
witness to the prodigious labour and pains, the tears and toil
and blood, that were needed and have been spent to bring
man into complex social union; they may well therefore show
an apprehension of social disruption and an instinctive re-
pugnance to that which in any wise threatens so great a cala-
mity. We are taught by the Jewish fable which has become
the creed of Christendom that it was through an unwise am-
bition of power that the angels fell, and through an unwise
ambition of knowledge that man fell ; and these traditions
betray the deep intuition that it is not on knowledge, which
separates, nor on power, which tyrannises, but on sympathy
of feeling, which unites, that society is founded and built up.
Those who are enthusiasts enough to believe in the re-
generation of society by the direct action of science, and
who think it an unmixed good that the most earnest intellects
of the day should be absorbed in working out some of the
smallest details of a special science, would not do amiss
perhaps to set to work to prove to the world that it is more
moral to travel at the rate of fifty miles an hour behind a
locomotive than at the rate of ten miles an hour in a stage-
coach. One effect of the great modern progress in the in-
dustries, arts, and various modes of material well-being has
certainly been to generate many new desires of a selfish kind,
the eager and incontinent gratification of which is corrupt-
ing. Has it done much yet, or indeed anything, to compen-
sate for these egoistic developments ? Nay, has it not rather

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 211

weakened the great controlling force of religion which
formerly kept egoism in check, without putting any altru-
istic force in its place? ' It would not be easy to prove that
it is an advantage to accumulate riches if men decay, to
wear fine clothes and to lose fine manners, to replace quiet
country villages by miles upon miles of dreary town-suburbs.
Are the people who inhabit these monotonous suburbs really
nobler, better, happier than the more simple villagers whom
they have displaced? They read their daily newspapers as
they travel rapidly by railway to gloomy offices of business,
into which the direct light of day can hardly penetrate, and
perhaps a journal of scandal or a sensational novel in the
evening when they have returned from their monotonous
labours to their dull domesticities ; but are they really better
cultivated, or even so well cultivated morally, as their fore-
fathers who walked on foot to their work, had no newspapers,
and read no more books than the Bible and two or three
others of a religious character? After all, an act of heroic
self-sacrifice is a nobler thing, and more civilising, than to
send a message instantly from London to Hongkong.

It appears then at the best doubtful, when we consider
the matter frankly, whether there is in the progress of
scientific knowledge and of the arts, industries, and material
comforts founded on it the promise of a real advance in true
social development ; whether in fact knowledge is not in this
respect pretty nigh impotent. The experience of the ancients
would seem to indicate as much, who were certainly equal,
if not superior, to us in architecture, in sculpture, in poetry,
in eloquence, in philosophy, in literature, since they failed

' Any one who looks forward with a light heart to the overthrow of
Ohriatianity might do well to consider what can ever adequately replace it
merely as a social and humanising force. Let him ponder seriously what its
organisation means, and reflect what sort of organisation will be necessary to
take the place of the Church which, standing in almost every village through-
out the land, the visible token and the sacred home of man's highest aspira-
tions, its pavements worn by the reverent tread of generations that now rest
in hallowed ground around it, solemnly initiates the individual into the social
union, calls him to regular acknowledgment of his social duties, admonishes
him of the vanity of life and of the eternal consequences of the deeds done in
it, sanctions with its blessings his nuptial unions, and speaks solemn words of
comfort and hope at the hour of death.

212 WILL m ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT,

to develope out of these the forces of a higher social evolu-
tion. For what happened ? With all the intellectual acqui-
sitions of Rome coming on the top of those of Greece
society went steadily towards destruction, and all that
philosophy could do was to proclaim and lament it. Then
was born of low parentage in a most mean way in a dis-
tant corner of the empire a person who passed in entire
obscurity thirty years of a life which ended at thirty-three
years. For the three remaining years that he appeared in
public he was scouted as a miserable impostor, rejected by
the priests and rulers of his own nation, hardly thought
worthy a few words of contemptuous mention by the
historians of the day, followed only by a few of the lowest
persons of the lowest classes of society. At the end of his
brief public career he died an ignominious death on the
cross, betrayed by one of his own disciples, denied by
another, abandoned by all.' And yet in him was the birth of
the greatest social force which, so far as we know, has ever
arisen to modify human evolution. To have predicted it
beforehand, nay, even so much as to have formed the dimnest
anticipation of its coming and nature, would have been
as impossible to all the intellectual insight of the time as it
would have been impossible to predict, before experience,
the organic molecules which carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen,
and oxygen are capable of forming. The momentous fact
may well abate the pretensions of philosophy to forecast the
future of humanity : suffice it to know that if it is to progress,
it will, as heretofore, draw from a source within itself, deeper
than knowledge, the inspiration to direct and urge it on the
path of its destiny.

Continuing the inquiry into the foundations of wide-
spread traditional beliefs which are not derived from obser-
vation and reasoning, since some of them blankly contradict
observation and reasoning, let us consider the doctrine of a
personal immortality. It was a natural product of primitive
imagination; so much so, considering how imagination
works, that it would have been a wonder if it had not been

■ Enfin il meurt d'une moit honteuse, trahi pax tm des siens, reni^ par
nu autre, et abandonnfi de tons. — Pascal.

CEKTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 213

constructed by it out of observation, and is perhaps a wonder
that the belief is not universal. Nothing perishes absolutely
in the universe ; matter is neither created nor destroyed ; it
is in a continual flux of becoming and unbecoming, dis-
appearing in one mode to reappear in another ; there is no
death in the sense of annihilation. Here then may have
been the foundation of a vague notion that man will not all
die. His body might return to the dust of which it was
compounded, going through a corruption in the process that
was well fitted to stir an active repulsion to the notion of
death, but it was not easy to believe that all his high aspira-
tions, warm affections, noble sentiments, lofty thoughts,
should lose their individuality and vanish into nothingness
with the loss of the bodily individuality. For although time
was when they were not, the difficulty is much greater to
conceive them not being after his death than it is to conceive
them not being before he was born.

It will be objected perhaps that a vague observation of
the indestructibility of matter, if made — and assuredly it
was made — could never suffice to found a belief of personal
immortality in face of the positive experience that all living
things die and undergo decomposition, going down to the
earth and returning not from it. Bear in mind, however, in
relation to this objection, that many living things seem to
die, and were thought to die, and yet do not die, but put on
life again after a season of death-like repose. Of the seed
put into the ground, which he ignorantly calls dead, the
Apostle Paul, addressing his imagined opponent in his usual
energetic fashion, says, * Thou fool, that which thou sowest
is not quietened except it die:' an observation incontestably
adequate to generate the notion of a resurrection, seeing
that the Apostle actually bases upon it his argument of the
certainty of a bodily resurrection. It has been a common
comparison of the race of man on earth to leaves on trees,
now green in youth, now withering on the ground: what
more obvious and natural than to see in the periodically
awakened life of recurring springs the probability of a
human resurrection to life after a period of apparent death?
True it may be that the comparison ought rightly to be a

214 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

contrast : that, as the Greek poet wails moumfullj, although
the mallow and the green parsley and the full-thriving anise
come to life again and blossom afresh in the next summer,
we, whether great or strong or wise men, once we are buried
in the earth, sleep a long, long eternal sleep, from which
there is no awaking ; but if it be so, it is stiU certain that
the natural tendency and desire would be, as I have pointed
out, to figure things otherwise.

Is it alleged that these kinds of aifalogies are too subtile
to have ever been perceived by the rude mind of a savage
who yet has some dim notion of a life after his body's death ?
Be it so : it will hardly be denied then that the vivid appari-
tion of a dead person in dreams would be enough to suggest
to the lowest savage, nay to compel him to the belief of, the
persistence of some sort of shadowy life after bodily death.
At a very early stage of human development such apparitions
of the dead, in their forms and habits as they lived, could not
fail to produce a conviction that although their bodies had
perished, the forms or phantoms of them survived, lingering
disconsolate in the neighbourhood of their old habitations
and interests. And that is very much the savage's vague
notion of a soul, if he has any notion at all; an image rather
than an idea, something more thin, faint and fine, less tangible,
than the body ; a shadowy apparition of the pale, wan form
of the dead person, which was probably supposed also to
leave the body during sleep and to return to it at awaking.
Naturally too he believed that his dogs and horses had simi-
lar souls ; for which reason it was right to bury them with the
dead chief, along with his bow and arrows and the slaves
perhaps who were killed to attend upon him, in order that
his ghost might be fitly furnished and attended in his new
sphere of existence. It is impossible seriously to compare
this kind of notion of spiritual life with the modern notion
of soul, or rightly to call it by the same name, so little have
they in common; it is only comparable with the vulgar
notion of a ghost that prevailed generally at one time, and
still prevails among the ignorant, in civilised countries, or
with the spirit-forms that are evoked and exhibited at so-
called spiritual seances. To discover the notions of soul and

CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 215

God in the mind of a low savage is very mucli like an
ingenious discovery of the steam -hammer in the stone which
the monkey uses to crack a nut.

It is not in dreams only, however, that a vision of the
dead may be seen, for a waking person shall see sometimes
a similar apparition ; and it is a long time before a people
reaches that height of critical culture which enables it to
know that the ghost so seen is a trick of the nerves, a hal-
lucination of sense. Now in respect of such a vision it is
plain that a savage would be under a twofold inevitable
drawback : in the first place, he could not have the least sus-
picion that what he saw was a coinage of his brain, not an
objective reality, and must therefore theorise about it as a
real thing of its kind, though not of his kind : in the second
place, in his undeveloped mind with its few and child-like
ideas of the concrete and their few and simple associations ;
with that tremulous fear too of the unknown common to him
with children ; and with the activity of an imagination
unballasted by reason, and prone, as in children, as in dream-
ing and in madness, to make the concrete notion a reality ; —
the vivid idea of the spirit or ghost of a dead man would
far more easily dominate waking sense and so give rise to
hallucination, than it would in a mind amply stored with
abstract notions of the relations of the concrete, and in other
respects fully developed. , Thus he is at the same time more
susceptible to hallucinations and less capable of correcting
them. If he cannot distrust the vivid apparition of a dream,
how can he distrust the vivid and more startling apparition
of waking life ? We may feel the less averse to accept this
theory of the origin of a belief in ghost -like apparitions of
the dead among savages, if we consider well how large a part
beliefs in invisible spirits that sometimes become visible
have had in the beliefs of civilised nations, and how much the
hallucinations of fanatical enthusiasm have helped in the
propagation of religious creeds.

Another important fact which we ought clearly to appre-
hend and fully to comprehend : that although the man dies
humanity does not die, the death of the individual being a
necessary event of the life of the race. He, though dead, is

216 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

still a part of living humanity, a coefficient ia its movements,
in so far as what he has done contributes to its weal or to
its woe : in the influence which he has exerted through his
deeds and through the children whom he has perhaps brought
into being, the good or ill that he has done lives after him.
The deadest of deaths is never a complete death. As he
cannot stand alone in life, separate and self-sufficing, but as
one in a company, a unit of society, must needs give and
take, becoming debtor and creditor before he is aware of it,
so death does not isolate and end him ; for as none liveth to
himself so none dieth to himself, and those who follow him
suffer or gain inevitably by what he has done to help or to
hinder the progress of his kind. Those especially with
whom he has lived iu intimate intercourse, who have been
witnesses of his struggles and shared in his interests, who
have sympathised with him in his failures and rejoiced with
him in his successes, in whose thoughts and feelings he has
filled a large place and of whose being he has been a great
part, cannot be entirely rid of him when he dies ; for he has
entered as an element into their mental nature and habits,
and he lives on there after his death, it may be in a con-
tinuing and even multiplying increase from generation to
generation. Is it not soberly true of a great benefactor of
mankind that he has a larger and fuller human life after
death than he had when he actually lived? Putting off
mortality he puts on immortality. If then your dead
mother, or sister, or lover, or child has such a continuing life
in you, it may well be for you a hard and repugnant, perhaps
an impossible, thing to conceive him or her as having under-
gone the death of annihilation. Tor how can he be annihi-
lated who, being a part of your happiest memories, is still
living ia you ? He is not annihilated for you until you are
annihilated ; and indeed not then so long as your influence
lives on in those who come after you. Naturally it is a much
easier matter, indeed a matter nowise difficult, for you to
suppose that a rickety Chinese baby which drew only a
few gasps of breath some three thousand years ago is not
now enjoying eternal life, or to imagine the eternal death of
a Choctaw Indian's worn-out squaw who died a thousand

CERTAIN MENTAIi PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 217

years before Columbus discoTered America. It is not bere
alleged, be it understood, tbat the belief in a personal im-
mortality sprang from a clear conception of this contiuuing
life in others : all tbat is supposed is that the strong instinct
thereof which experience could not fail to infix would stimu-
late the imagination to clothe it in some ideal form. Rather
would it seem that the clear conception belongs to the
future, being that into which the prevailing belief of a
spiritual individuality after death is likely with the advance
of knowledge to merge : a life in very truth spiritual since
it is in the spirits of them that bear witness to it that it
lives.

Lastly, consider this : that when the drama of life ends
prematurely by a tragical close — that is, when the individual
is cut off suddenly in the budding spring or full summer of
his energy, before his desire to do and be is waniag or
extinct, there is an earnest longing to do more, a fearful
aversion to realise that it is the end, an instinctive craving
for the continuance of a life not yet fuUy spent, which trans-
lates itself easily into the belief of a life to come. Hence it
is that the desire and belief of a future life are stronger
and more manifest in those who die young or in middle age,
especially if from accident or from sudden disease, than in
old persons who die of wasting disease or by the slow process
of natural decay ; for in these the waning of vital energy is
the waning of the desire to live ; and though they may hold
to and repeat the formulas of their creed, they do it in a
quiet, formal, automatic way, very much as they continue
methodically the habits of their lives or perform their
customary slow and measured movements. Worn out at last
by the infirmities of age, the one thing they heartily desire
is freedom from disturbance — rest. Not only by the indi-
vidual who perishes timelessly, but by those near and dear
to him, is the natural unwillingness felt to believe that so
premature an end can be the end; for when death has
snatched suddenly away one who had just begun to love and
be loved, whose wisdom was but half blossomed, his work
not yet half done, it seems to them impossible to acknow-
ledge that he was created only for such an abortive result ;
15

218 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

they are constrained to hope that the fair promise of de-
velopment, blasted here, will have fnlfilment elsevrhere.

Is the longing for immortality then essentially the sub-
lime utterance of human egoism, and the expression of it
perhaps the statement in terms of extension — that is, as
eternal, of the intensity of the feeling of life-love which is
not otherwise adequately expressible ? 'Tis much, in fact, as,
according to Coleridge's apt remark, two ardent lovers try
to express the intensity of their love by describing themselves
as ' Yours for ever.' How indeed can the sense of being feel,
or the notion of being adequately conceive, the sense or
notion of not-being 9 From the subjective basis alone it
would seem impossible that I, being, can conceive myself as
not being ; to do so would be to be and not to be at the same
moment; wherefore from that standpoint the intensity of
the feeling of life becomes naturally the extensive hope or
belief of an eternal life after a seeming death. But the
matter has quite another look when one has recourse to
objective observation; for there is no great difficulty, as I
have said before, in conceiving the eternal death of a baby
that lived only a few minutes in an Indian wigwam ten
thousand years ago. In like manner one may attend in
imagination at the destruction of one's own body as it
undergoes corruption in the grave, organ after organ in due
course according to the tenacity of its structure, until it
mixes indistinguishably with the surrounding soil. Is it
then that a subjective illusion of ever-being requires, like
other subjective feelings, to be corrected by objective obser-
vation? The true measure of time is not the feeling of
duration but the watch, the true measure of temperatpre
the thermometer. Here again may we take instructive
note what good reason theology has for its instinctive anta-
gonism to science and for its inseverable adhesion to meta-
physics.

Is it true, as we are taught, that we have the instinct we
are straugers and sojourners here, and belong permanently to
another kingdom than the passing kingdom of this world?
It is not true that the instinct is uaiversal, but it is certainly
true that we have here no abiding place, and that we and

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 219

the changing fashions of this world shall pass away. How
can it be otherwise, since this world being the world that
each one's senses fashion for him must be as transient as
they are ? It is the internal synthesis which he makes of
the infinitesimaUy small fraction of the whole to the mole-
cular vibrations of which he is sensible. When the functions
of sense cease at death, and the mental organisation that
they have built up undergoes dissolution with the rest of the
bodily parts, these become again a part of the whole out of
which it came into temporary being, entering into and re-
suming their rights in those cosmical operations whose range
is outside the sense-built world of human experience. From
the standpoint of the individual the world was not before
he was and will not be after he is not.

This we may say at the end of these reflections concerning
the natural modes of origin of a belief of personal immortality
— and there is perhaps little more to be said — that the various
imaginative constructions which different systems of religion
have built up respectively to give the mind the stay and satis-
faction of positive conceptions in that wherein its nature and
the nature of things deny them, useful and essential as they
have been in the process of human development, may not on
that account have any more basis in the fully developed in-
tellectual life of mankind than an embryonic organ of the
body, the functions of which cease soon after birth, has in
the bodily life of the adult individual. When men do not
know the truth they do well to agree in common error
based upon common feeling, for thereby their energies are
fixed in the unity of definite aim and not dissipated to waste
in restless and incoherent vagapes. No doubt the provi-
sional belief may be in many respects harmful, as the belief
in immortality would certainly seem to have been ; for it has
been the direct cause of numberless sacrifices of animals, of
slaves, of women, on the tombs of men; the occasion of a
complete machinery of extortions by priests to have masses
said for the souls of the dead, or to obtain their interces-
sions; has too often dimmed the hope and weighed down the
energy of this life by the overhanging dread of an eternity
of suffering ; has lessened generally the sense of the va,lue

220 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

and weakened the conscience of human life on earth, by pre-
cluding the just feeling of present responsibility for the end-
less consequences of every act done in it ; and has entailed
several other ills that might be mentioned. But these iUs
may be deemed the compensating offsets of a preponderating
good, so long as the belief has genuine vitality. To idealise
the real, and thereafter to present the ideal in concrete
notion or sensible form and to pretend it is the real —
that is the law of the nisus of man's mental evolution, the
pleasing means by which he is duped into development.

Passing from these reflections, though they might easily
be continued to a much greater length, I now advert briefly
to two more religious beliefs that are of transcendent mag-
nitude. The first is that of the Atonement. How came it
to pass that men ever conceived naturally the notion of the
redemption of the whole human race by the sacrifice of one
person through a painful and ignominious death? Develop-
ment they could perceive plainly in nature, and degeneration
they could perceive ; but how conceive the notion that a great
vicarious sacrifice of God incarnate as man was required and
made in order that God might fulfil His purpose of increasing
development and lessening degeneration? It will be said,
perhaps, that the stupendous strangeness and uniqueness of
the conception were the natural consequence of the fact that
it did not and could not come naturally, but did come super-
naturally; that its natural improbability was just what
might be expected from its natural impossibiUty. Is the
notion then so extraordinary, so independent, and so unre-
lated, so entirely a thing-of-itself, that it must have come
by special message from supernatural sources to a select
fraction of the human race ? or may it not have come as the
culminating development of other notions of the same kind,
but of lesser magnitude, that have prevailed in divers forms
among aU fractions of the race ? There cannot be a doubt
that the rite of sacrifice by which guilt was expiated or bless-
ings gained was one of the most remarkable and constant
observances of different religions; and it is not therefore any
violation of probability, nor any violence of legitimate scien-
tific inference, to suppose that the supreme sacrifice of the

CERTAIN MENTAL PRODUCTS OE EVOLUTION. 221

only Son of God was tlie grand climax of this notion of
vicarious atonement. For naturally in such sacrifices it was
best that the victim should be as rare and spotless as possible,
the value and efficacy of the sacrifice increasing with the
purity and rarity of the thing offered. Now certainly there
could not be a more rare, more pure, more costly sacrifice
than that of the only-begotten and well-beloved Son of God.
Abraham's designed sacrifice of his son Isaac, Jephthah's
sacrifice of his daughter, Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia,
and the like instances : what more probable stepping
stones to the stupendous notion of that supreme vicarious
sacrifice for the whole human race? Plainly evolution in
that (Erection has come to an end now; it has reached a
matchless height in the climax of the conception of sacrifice,
and cannot ever go a step further ; and any change in time
to come must be the undoing change of dissolution.

It is not perhaps hard to understand how the notion of
vicarious sacrifice, once it had come to be, reached its
supreme evolution. But what is not so evident is how the
original idea came into being. Most likely from the wish to
placate by suitable offerings— rthe more costly and precious
the more acceptable — the terrible gods and other mysterious
powers with which primitive imagination peopled nature,
and in particular the special guardian spirit or God of the
family, the city, the tribe. Man approached his gods as
he would have approached an earthly tyrant whose favour
he desired to win or whose anger he hoped to propitiate,
by humbly presenting to them offerings of that which
was most precious to him, or what custom ordained as by
them most esteemed. If he had not or could not obtain that
which he desired to offer, as being too costly or not in the
nature of things procurable, he substituted in lieu of it some
other offering to please the propitious or to appease the
incensed Deity.

This fact also we ought to apprehend and consider well
— ^that vicarious sacrifice is implicit in the constitution of
society; the very structure of which is based upon the
principle that we suffer for one another's sins, bear one
another's burdens, expiate one another's errors, profit by

222 WILL m ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

one another's gains, gain by one another's pains.' It is an
immanent law of the constitution and development of the
social organism, and very manifest in its elemental factor or
unit — the family : the solidarity of mankind in social union
the basis of it. Children suffer the bitter pains of their
parents' wrong-doings, who themselves go through many
labours and sorrows in order that their children may have
joy and gladness; the wife is the innocent victim of her
husband's sins and reaps the finiits of his painful toils, as
he in turn suffers the penalty of her failings and profits by
her virtues — each benefiting by the pains and gains of the
other; the idle, reckless and improvident live on the fruits
of the labour of the industrious, prudent and provident ; the
greatest benefactors of mankind have often been the greatest
sufierers at its hands — have died some of them publicly as
known, many of them in obscurity as unknown, martyrs of
humanity. Without doubt all guilt is avenged upon earth,
but never wholly, and sometimes hardly at all, upon the
individual sinner. Everywhere the same story meets us :
that vicarious atonement and vicarious recompense are
essential principles of social union. To forgive one's
enemies and to do good to them that use us ill should not
be, as it commonly is, the hardest task of Christian humility,
or the highest reach of philosophic indifference, but the easy
and natural result of a just and adequate view of one's social
debtor and creditor relations. If now this principle of
vicarious suffering was implicit in the earliest social de-
velopment, and the necessary condition of that development,
is it any wonder that some faint and vague adumbration of
it, some dim intuition of its meaning, should have been re-
vealed to the minds of the early leaders in the social move-
ment, and inspired and initiated those rites of sacrifice that
have been such marked features in many religions ? To say
that a diviaely endowed being was sent into the world to
make atonement for mankind by suffering the penalty of its
sins, and so to redeem it from a fate of unending misery, is
to say that nature developed the means by which nature was
made better: in other words, the organism of humanity,
having reached a certain stage of evolution, gave birth to a
' See Cardinal Newman's Grammar of Assent.

CEETADJ MENTAL PRODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 223

supremely endowed organ by the functions of which its
fature development was determined in the right direction— in
the direction, that is to say, of that moral which is true social
progress. The supreme atonement was the personification
and glorification of the social principle of vicarious sacrifice.
That is seen to be the true meaning of it when we look
sincerely at facts, and do not leave the solid ground of their
relations to busy and beguile ourselves with discussions in
the air concerning a unique, entirely detached, and trans-
cendently mysterious event.

The other widespread religious, or rather theological,
belief to which I advert briefly is that of a personal God.
In the order of development the belief in many gods pre-
ceded the belief in one God. Ignorant and comparatively
helpless as primeval man was, as he stumbled blindly along
in his career, awestruck with vague and vast terror of the
encompassing unknown in relation to which he could not
make definite adjustments of conduct nor frame distinct
apprehensions of feeling and thought, his imagination gave
anthropomorphic personifications to the vast and mysterious
powers whose laws of action he did not in the least under-
stand. Knowing nothing of forces that overwhelmed him,
and yet obliged every moment to act in relation to them, he
was continually offending against them and suffering for his
offences. The aspect therefore in which they were presented
to him was that of angry and terrible powers, evil-inflicting,
hidden, all-powerful, before which he prostrated himself in
abject fear and abasement, eager to appease their wrath and
to win their favour by supplications and sacrifices. All
which was natural enough : how could he account for their
mysterious and seemingly malignant workings, how represent
them to his intelligence, except by imagining, from the basis
of his own experience, hidden beings who acted from like
vengeful motives to those which actuated him and his fellows,
only with vastly greater power? The generalisation war-
ranted by his observation and experience, so far as he could
make it, would be the generalisation of almighty malignity.

It was no less natural that fear abated as knowledge grew
by slow and minute increments through the ages, as more
and more the discovery was made of natural laws uniform

224 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

in their operations, and as more and more clearly lie perceived
he could by conforming to those laws turn them to his profit,
gaining victory after victory through obedience; that god
after god receded further and further into the background,
waning in power and consideration as new provinces of know-
ledge were conquered successively, and finally expired ; that
the personal action of those gods which were left became more
and more remote, obscure, and indirect ; and that at last he
was brought to the recognition of one God, Maker of heaven
and earth, who ordained and governed all things by laws
which were the manifestations of His wiU, The necessities
of thought compelled him to posit somewhere at the back
of known causation, at the beginning, that is to say,
of the series of causes upon causes which he could trace
backwards in endless regress, a self-existing cause — God,
substance, nature — to which no antecedent cause was con-
ceivable. Now this great conception of one God absorbing
into Himself all other gods, and leaving them no continuity
of being but in Him, is plainly the last term, ' the consum-
mate flower,' of god-fashioning evolution ; there can be no
farther progress henceforth in that direction ; a final con-
ception has been reached beyond which it is impossible for
human thought to go.

Always has it been necessary for man to make for him-
self some sort of mental synthesis of the world around him
in order to live in it. He must bind phenomena into a unity
of some kind ; otherwise he would be the play of scattered
and unconnected impressions succeeding one another witli-
out any tie, would have no sense of continuity, and could not
so much as look out on it intelligently or act methodically
in relation to it : moral and intellectual development would
be impossible. The unifying impulse is indeed instinct in
living matter both in its conscious and its unconscious rela-
tions : it is the base of the so-called principle of individuation
which has been defined as the essential characteristic of life.
For the body is a synthesis, each organ of it a synthesis,
each element of each organ a synthesis : organic life is kept up
by the maintenance and organic growth by the increase of a
synthesis. Life in mind in like manner is not possible save

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 225

by virtue of a unifying impulse that is itself the necessary
expression of bodily unity or synthesis. How then must it
necessarily manifest itself in relation to external nature at
a time when, ignorance of matter and its properties and
relations being almost complete, no approach to a scientific
synthesis was possible? By the imaginative construction
of agents dwelling and working in nature — that is to say,
by the fabrication of demons and deities ; to be followed at
a later period of the advance of knowledge, when, demoi.i
and deities fell into discredit, by the creation of meta-
physical entities dwelling in things, which took upon them
the functions of the extinct gods. Always, however, is syn-
thesis of feeling deeper than intellectual synthesis : a man
may have no very definite and consistent theory in the
conduct of his life, but none the less will his mental con-
struction of the world follow consistently an unconscious
synthesis springing from feeling and character ; so likewise
in primitive man the synthesis of feeling was prior to that
of thought, and inspired his grotesquely imaginative inter-
pretations of nature, as it inspires now the particular mental
theory of the world which each individual constructs for
himself. Consider the matter well, without flinching from
the logical issues of reflection, and is it not the fact that the
unity of a science, which so much delights its pursuers now;
that each scientific synthesis in it which the pleased and
patient worker contributes to build up the whole ; that the
grand conception of the unity of all science, which kindles
flaming outbursts of philosophic rapture ; are just as much
subjective creations on our part, mere modes of our know-
ledge, as ever were demons and deities, and for aught we
know may have little more valid foundation in objective
reality ?

The idea of God, as giving unity to the universe, or of
self-subsisting Substance — a natura naturans — which is tacitly
endowed with the attributes of God, is a necessity of thought
imposed upon man by the limitations of his faculties — by
the impossibility under which he, as an individual, lies of
thinking and interpreting the universe save in terms of
himself. Unavoidably and unwarrantably he limits the

226 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

unknown power whicli he calls God, wlien he honestly tries
to make the conception of it, though he starts in instant
affright from the limitation which he suspects he is making,
when he catches a glimpse of it ; and by inventing words that
negate definite meanings, in order to conceal or deny it, he
pleases himself to think that he has got rid of it in thought.
To attempt to comprehend or even to name the inscrutable
is the grossest absurdity : the incomprehensible must remain
ineffable. Nevertheless he may be permitted to believe
that energy from the region outside knowledge works in
and by him, giving impulses and aspirations which he can-
not otherwise account for ; he may feel the energy without
being able to fathom its source, as a man would feel the
moon in the tides, though he were blind and never saw it ;
and he may declare his impotence of thought by such ex-
pressions as from everlasting to everlasting, infinite, absolute,
and the like. But to bring God at all within the compass
of human predication, and above all to give to Him a magni-
fied human personality, a character and a name, asserting
thereupon that man is made in His image, is sheer
blasphemy and nonsense. The Jehovah of the Jew was as
purely tribal a God as any god of the Canaanites over whom
He exulted; as plain a creation of the Jewish mind and
character as the idols of the Chinese are national creations,
which they are said to make with big bellies because the
ruling functionaries are usually corpulent in that respect.
Nor in any other case can assertions made concerning God
fail to do more than reflect the stages of human culture at
which they are made ; even to declare His ways to be what we
call moral is just as absurd as to declare Him to be jealous,
angry, revengeful, or to have back parts.' The most exalted
idea that can be formed is still anthropomorphic, being
nothing else than the most abstract ideal of humanity con-

' The man who does to others as he would have others do unto him, is
moral ; but it is a morality from a strictly human standpoint. What might
the animal which he pursues, enslaves, tortures, kills, eats for his gratifica-
tion, think of that morality from its standpoint ? Or, how may such
morality look from the standpoint of the universe as a whole 1 Let us join
hands and help one another, for we are the glory of the universe, if not its end
and aim, and nothing else has any value in it in comparison with us I

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 227

ceivable ■with a3 many relations as possible got rid of — in
fact with certain attached words that are actually negations
of conceptions, but which are tacitly treated as meaning
realities.

These we may set down as the two supreme absurdities :
first, the assertion that there is nothing beyond human
experience that is not in accordance with human experi-
ence, nothing beyond the actual or possible reach of human
faculties ; and, secondly, the pretence to any sort of know-
ledge of that beyond or the enunciation of any proposition
whatever, positive or negative, concerning it. Every one
has justly the right to rebel alike against the dogmatism
of sense-built- science when it goes beyond its range to deny
supra-sensual possibilities, and against the dogmatism of the
theologian who imposes his fantastic notions of the supra-
sensual as matters of faith.

It is certain that the conception of God at the present
day, as a God of love to the whole human race, is very
different from the Jewish conception of God, this having
undergone a remarkable evolution in Christian thought.
Faith has created the pattern that love desires; and the
jealous and special God of the Jews, nominally worshipped
still, is really banished to the limbo where other dead gods,
like Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and the rest of them, have
gone.

The tendency moreover is day by day more and more to
abandon predications concerning God and to make the con-
ception more and more abstract, vague, remote, undefined,
nebulous. How in any way define, that is mark out from
aU else, when there is no else ? An eminent Unitarian
preacher and writer, after congratulating himself on the
dissolution or fading away of what he calls ' scenic dreams '
of the Christ-drama, says that 'the more the Divine life
awakes in us the less do we ask, and the less can we bear,
that its infinite objects and elements shall be rendered
finite by being brought into the plane of Perception.' ' He
would have a vague and vast feeling of transcendental
possession, not to be apprehended in thought nor uttered in

' Eev. Dr. Martinean.

228 WILL m ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

words, such as he might get, I take it, without any divine
contemplation at all, from a dose of opium ; or such as a
hysterical girl who falls into an ecstasy has engendered
by the practice of self-abandonment to unwisely indulged
feeling. For he omits to inquire into the source, which
may be the lowest bodily, and into the value, which may
be personal and illusive, of this vaguely rapturous feeling by
which he aspires to be possessed and thrilled ; and he would
do well perhaps, first, to assure himself that the afiBatus is
from above and not from below, and then to prove that in
any case it is a wholesome and efficacious substitute for the
concrete Divinity which he has denuded Christ of. It may
be doubted whether by taking the God out of Christ, and
then getting up an ecstasy of vapid sentiment about a
Divinity from which man has been eliminated, there is scope
left for sound and manly feeling ; for with emotion as with
thought the true test of practical value is perhaps to be
sought in the concrete. Otherwise one may arrive at a mood
of mind in which shall be found much comfort and no shock
to reason in a prayer of this kind : — Thou, who wast before
every before, and wilt be after every after; most hidden,
yet most present; unchangeable, yet all-changing; never
new, never old ; ever working, ever at rest ; still gathering,
yet nothing lacking; who lovest without passion; art
jealous without anxiety; repentest, yet grievest not; art
angry, yet serene ; ' — and so forth through an assortment of
blank contradictories that are revealed to the divine intui-
tion of ecstatic feeling as blended in mystical union in a
higher plane of being than thought can reach or aspire to.

Some there are who will be disposed to contend for some-
thing of a human character in the divine consciousness on
the ground that in its contents are the infinite multitudes of
separate human consciousnesses : the grand harmonic whole
must be conscious because it embraces the multitudinous
uudulations that are conscious. In respect of that argument
it must be borne in mind that the sum of any number of
limitations, such as all individual consciousnesses being rela-
tive are, never could make the imlimited. Let them all be
' Most of these expressions are taken from St. Angnstine's Confessions.

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 229

included, tlie resultant is still limited, and that whicli is still
excluded is tlie infinite; of -whicli to predicate the same
kind of consciousness is nonsense. We are thus brought to
the dilemma either to make divine consciousness co-extensive
only with a small part of the universe, namely, that whicli
is humanly conscious, or to extend human consciousness to
the whole, when it could obviously be no longer human. In
the case of such extension, indeed, consciousness would dis-
appear; becoming the whole, it would lose that limitation
by virtue of which it is ; for it arises from the opposition
between subject and object, the ego and the non-ego, and the
resulting changes of state, and is always most acute in those
intensely subjective states of pain, mental or bodily, when
the individual is most limited, the full expression of his
nature most impeded or repressed, and he therefore least in
harmony with the whole. The act of transcending human
limitations, were it possible, and of becoming universal and
unchangeable would be its self-annihilation. A supreme,
absolute, and infinite consciousness could not be, or could be
only as an eternal unconscious intuition, were that conceiv-
able humanly. The generalisation of a divine consciousness
is not more valid than would be the generalisation of a divine
big toe ; for, indeed, to suppose a universal consciousness
answering in any way to the sum of human consciousnesses
is as much a piece of anthropomorphism, though not quite
so gross and palpable an instance, as to represent God in the
exact image of the creature man.

It is another pretty piece of anthropomorphism — ^hardly
less so than to make God moral — to infer from our observa-
tion of nature that He is working out some great purpose in
the remote future through multitudinous adaptations, direct
and circuitous, simple and complicated, of means to ends ;
for how can that which is purpose or end, according to the
fashion of human intelligence, be purpose or end to an
unconditioned and infinite intelligence ? Design in nature is
no more than design in human nature ; and the legitimate
conclusion of man from his discovery of it is not as to the
attested existence of a divine designer, but as to the clever
deception by which he, the real designer, has projected the

230 WILIi IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

shadow of his self-experience and transformed it into an
outside divine worker, of his own complexion. But see his
inconsistency the while ! In the same breath with which he
pronounces the divine end to be past finding out, incompre-
hensible, inconceivable by human intelligence, he declares
and insists on the existence of final purpose in nature, both
in the particular and in the general. He postulates an end,
which, being a term that derives its sole meaning from and
is solely applicable to human conceptions, is simply mean-
ingless, pure nonsense, when applied, or misapplied, to what
transcends human conceptions.

But it is his way, in magnitudes that outstretch his
conceptions, habitually to use meaningless or self-contra-
dictory terms. What more common in his mouth, for ex-
ample, than such expressions as infinite number, infinite
multitude, and the like, when number is number by virtue
only of being definite, and infinite number therefore is
number which is not number ! His manner of reasoning
of the final causes of nature from his standpoint is very
much as if an oyster were to construct a theory of human
doings in London or Paris from the basis of its limited
relations with the interior of its shell ; or as if the little
worm that feeds on the leaves of old books were to con-
struct a theory of their purpose from its experience of their
uses for its food. Now it may justly be doubted whether the
lucubrations of an oyster, however exceptionally well inspired
with the divine aflatus of prophecy, or the intuitions of a
book-worm, though never so much experienced among books,
would rise to the least apprehension of human doings or of
human uses of books. In which connection it is well also to
bear in mind that the vast but still measurable distance by
which human perception outreaches the oyster's perception
is very little, compared with the immeasurable distance by
which human perception is transcended by that which Ues
altogether outside its range.

In the end it is somewhat saddening to think that theo-
logians will insist on identifying religion with theories of
cosmogony. Their notion of God is not religion, not even
an essential part of it, but a metaphysical theory of the uni-

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODUCTS OF EVOLUTION. 231

verse to which, whether true or not, religion has nothing to
say. They may go on for ever questioning the eternal
silence, and eternally will it be silent to their questionings.
Therefore they do religion an ill service who identify it with
the answers which they imagine they extort to questions to
which no answer can be given, or any answer that is given
must by its limitations be false. The pity of it is that with so
ample a scope for their best energies of devotion and self-
sacrifice in a world so much needing to be made better, they
should waste them in sterile endeavours to think the un-
thinkable. Having settled clearly by an exhaustive criticism
of their own faculties that they cannot know anything which
is not relative, why immediately go back to the barren work
of constructing theological, moral, or metaphysical theories of
the absolute ? Yes, and from the very basis of that relativity
which they have just proved and conceded to be no basis at
all. Ideas realise perfection in different degrees, some being
more, others less perfect — that is evident, they say ; there-
fore it is legitimate to infer a complete or absolute perfection
from which they are derived and which they in part and
darkly resemble. But how from addition of imperfections
ever get a perfection ? Having created a perfection in rela-
tion to their ideas — that is, having set up an abstract perfec-
tion of their own, which is still entirely relative — they there-
upon see in the ideas proofs of a derivation from it, and
draw from them an argument of its absolute existence. And
so for ever round and round the self-beguiling circle.

Every theory of cosmogony whatever is at bottom an
outcome of nature expressing itself through human nature ;
it is a product of that part of nature which is being human-
ised in man's development, not a supersession of it by any
influx from without ; it does not therefore ever, nor can it
ever, dispense with that positive basis of nature, or possess
a higher authority than its source, however much above the
things of this world it may aspire or assume to be. How
can that be knowledge which contradicts the fundamental
data of reasoning and thinking by which alone knowledge
is possible ? In the end religion will preserve its vitality
and strengthen its power only by breaking through old

232 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

formtilas, throwing off the encumbering fragments of dead
creeds, and taking a new and purely human development :
by effecting and reflecting, as Christianity at its outset
did, a genuine human solidarity. The timid hypocrisies
which hope to preserve it at the cost of the true, from fear
of the consequences to morality if the truth be made
known, will have to be abandoned ; and though the imme-
diate result of their rejection may be sadly afilicting and
seem to justify despair, yet we may take comfort in the
certitude that the ultimate effects will be good. The true
good cannot consist with what is not true ; for there is a soli-
darity among the virtues, however they present themselves,
whether as that which is true, or good, or beautiful.

NOTES TO PART TI.

Page 195.

Kant's doctrine is that there is a determination of the will by
pure reason ; that so reason gets practical reality ; and that in this
absolute obedience the will has absolute assurance of its freedom.
The moral law is a law spontaneously imposed on the will by pure
reason : it stands high above all the motives, sensuous and their like,
which determine the empirical will ; it pays no respect to them, but
with an inward, irresistible necessity, orders us, in independence of
them, to follow it absolutely and unconditionally — 'tis a categorical
imperative, universal, and binding on every rational will. A happy
thing, certainly, that a wUl determined to unconditional obedience
by so absolute an authority retains nevertheless the absolute assur-
ance of its freedom. But then comes the not unimportant question
— What is it that practical reason categorically commands 1 How
are we to know what the moral law dictates and forbids? The
easiest thing in the world : let only those maxims of conduct derived
from experience be adopted as motives which are susceptible of being
made of universal validity — which are fit to be regarded as universal
laws of reason to govern the actions of all mankind. 7 do right when
T do what all persons would think right in similar circumstances.
Very good, without doubt, although very like the common-place
maxim of every ethical system ; but my difficulty has been to know
in a particular case what all intelligent beings would think right.
How am I to get at the universal standard or precept and apply it
to my particular occasion, so as to know absolutely what I ought
then to do 1

Kant helps me by means of two remarkable illustrations. Suicide
is one. Is suicide, under the strongest temptation conceivable, ever
right 1 I must ask myself then, ' Is the principle of the admission
that suicide is ever right fit to become a universal law J ' No, says
Kant, it is not fit, since the universal practice of suicide would reduce
the world to chaos. Very true ; but it is sadly disappointing to per-
ceive that the sublime and supreme reason has, in order to become
practical reality, found it necessary to come down from its supra-
sensuous heights and to be no better than gross Utilitarianism. All
16

234 -WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAl ASPECT.

that it can tell me, panting for its supreme utterance, is that suicide
is inexpedient as a universal principle of conduct — in fact, it makes
use of the common motives of an experience which is nowise supra-
sensuoas, and instead of helping me to an absolute precept or standard
to measure them by, actually comes to them for its authority.

The second instance is no more helpful. May a person in the
greatest need of a loan, which he knows he will not get unless be
makes a solemn promise to repay what he is perfectly certain he never
will be able to repay, make the promise 1 No, says Kant, for if it
were a universal law, all faith in promises would be destroyed and
nobody would lend money. In other words, in the long run it would
be very bad for society that faith in promises should be destroyed.
An excellent truth, which nobody will deny, but it evidently smacks
much of the earth, earthy ; indeed, it would seem that those who
discover the basis of morality in the social sanction may claim Kant,
when he is not in the clouds, as an out-and-out supporter.

Theories of freewill seem to come very much to this — that the
will that is swayed by low motives is not free, that the will that is
swayed by higher motives is more free, and that the will that is
swayed by the highest motives is most free. Consequently when any
one is blamed for having done ill, he is not blamed for having acted
without motives, but for not having been actuated by the highest
motives. Create an artificial world of names apart from the real
world of facts — a world which shall simply be made up of negations of
all qualities which we have actual experience of — and let the highest
motive in it be known as the Will of Grod or abstract Supreme
Keason, yoa get your service which you please to call perfect freedom.

Page 231.

We may notice how religion stands in relation to theology,
according to one of the greatest modem exponents of those relations,
and how it suffers by the enforced union. By religion, says Cardinal
Newman, ' I mean the knowledge of God, of His Will, and of our
duties to Him.' ' At the outset then we are to understand that there
can be no religion without a knowledge of God, of His Will, and of
our duties to Him. A philosopher of the future from the ends
of the earth, his mind not impregnated by inheritance, nor imbued
by education, with the prepossessions of any theological system, will

' Gramma/r of Assent, pp. 384, 386, &c.

CERTAIN MENTAL PEODDCTS OF EVOLUTION. 235

naturally ask, What God? in face of the different gods that have
been worshipped at'Sundry times and in divers places, and demand
some credentials,' as he has the right to do.' He is a ' hidden God,'
for ' what ''strikes the mind so forcibly and so painfully is His absence
from His own world.' Then there is this further characteristic —
' that the aspect under which Almighty God is presented to us by
nature is (to use a figure) of one who is angry with us and threatens
evil.' That is because ' our shortcomings are more frequent and im-
portant than our fulfilment ' of the duties enjoined upon us,' and
because the principle of His divine government ordains that the
offender should suffer for his offence. In respect of this humanly
vindictive character He resembles the gods which the savage has
conceived for himself by the imaided light of nature ; and when we
go to the authorised revelation of Him for further light, we meet
with the exposition of like human characters, for we learn there that
he is a jealous God, revengeful, easily provoked to anger, loving what
pleases and hating what displeases Him ; who admires His own work,
shows no mercy to His enemies, visits the sins of the fathers upon
the children unto the third and fourth generations, and decrees
eternal torment for those who observe not His commandments to keep
them. Evidently this sentence of eternal damnation is the consum-
mate evolution of the anger of a God made in the image of man. It
is in a knowledge of Him, however, and His Will that the earnest
inquirer is to seek and to find his duties as a man : the highest duties
of man to God and man impossible of attainment save in that way.
And how is he to attain such knowledge i By examining conscience.
' Our great internal teacher of religion is conscience. . . . Conscience
too teaches us not only that God, is, but what He is; it provides for
the mind a real image of Him as a medium of worship ; it gives a
rule of right and wrong as being His rule, and a code of moral duties.'
Here then we learn what certainly is not a little surprising, that con-
science teaches a knowledge of God, imparts a real image of Him, and
gives us a code of moral duties. Kant recognised the moral impera-
tive in conscience and fell down in adoration of it, but he never found
a complete moral code there. Let a man only learn the art of inter-
rogating conscience cleverly, and he has an in&lUble revelation of
what God is and wills, of what He is like, and of what He ordains in
every particular case. But will every one be able really to find, if
he tries, these stupendous contents in his conscience ? Will not the
absolute which he finds attest the relative of his conscience ? Will the
Delaware Indian or Andaman Islander ever extract these sublime posi-
tive revelations from within himself? In truth it is to give an extra-

236 WILL IN ITS PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT.

ordinary extension to the meaning of the word ' conscience ' to find all
these things in it ; for surely it is not the fact that the function of con-
science is knowledge ; it is not by it that we know, but it is by it that
we feel, the right and the obligation to do it and feel the wrong and the
obligation to shun it. But there is no fixed measure in conscience by
which is determined universally and infallibly what is the particular
right or wrong ; for always, in all times and places, the particular right
or wrong has answered to the moral development of the tribe, the com-
munity, the nation. Conscience might more justly be described as
the consodal sense, which is developed in men from conscience and
confederation — i.e. from knowing and working together in social union,
from unity in aim and means : set men to work together for a
common end in a social union and they will end by feeling together.
So it has come to pass that the consciences have notoriously been as
various as the communities of men, and that Cardinal Newman finds
at the present day in his conscience the cosmogony and the moral
code of Christian theology, as interpreted and guaranteed by the in-
fallible authority of the Boman Catholic Church. Had he lived
among the savages who thought it a pious duty to eat their aged
parents, he could not have failed to find in conscience the authority
to eat his father, as he now in profoundest reverence eats the body of
his God at the most holy ceremony of his faith.

PAET m.

THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

SECTION I.

CONCERNIITG DEGENERATION.

The attention of the philosophic and scientific world has
been so much fixed on the theory of evolution, ever since
Darwin set forth the main manner of the process by means
of the survival of the fittest through natural selection, that
there has been a proneness to overlook the fact that all we
see and feel around us is not progress — in the sense we
understand progress. Survival of the fittest does not mean
always survival of the best in the sense of the highest organ-
ism ; it means only the survival of that which is best suited
to the circumstances, good or bad, in which it is placed — the
survival of a savage in a savage social medium, of a rogue
among rogues, of a parasite where a parasite alone can live.
A decline from a higher to a lower level of being, a process,
that is to say, of degeneration, is an integrant and active
part of the economy of nature. Besides the organisms that
have become step by step more and more complex and per-
fect, there are organisms that have plainly lost in the suc-
cessions of the ages organs which, bringing them, when they
had them, into wider and freer and closer relations with the
external world, ministered to a higher and fuller life than
they enjoy now : witness in proof, for example, the wingless
beetles of Madeira, the rudimentary wings of the birds of
oceanic isles, the imperfect and nearly useless wings of
domestic fowls like the Cochin China fowl, the small eyes of

238 THE PATHOLOGY OF WrLL.

moles, some parasites that lire on other organisms ; and I
might justly go on to add such instances as the lapse of
heroic feeling in commercial states, the loss of self-respect in
the courtier, the demoralisation of popular preachers and of
popular scientific lecturers, and many others of a like kind
which illustrate the subdual of the person's nature to the
moral atmosphere that he works in. It is the same with a
creed or system of belief ; in which, when it undergoes de-
generation, the higher parts waste and the lower parts grow.
Tor example, when a savage people are converted to Christi-
anity they assimilate by natural affinity the lowest elements,
and reject, being unable to apprehend them, the highest;
so the higher eletnent disappears, or is degraded by the
association of low ideas into something quite different ; the
unique figure of Jesus Christ becoming no more than that of
the biggest fetish, the fetish of the white man.

Disuse of function leads everywhere to decay of organ ; by
decay of organ going on through generations that which was
complete and capable becomes rudimentary and incapable ;
and so in a backward course the organ or organism reaches
a state of degradation of which it is hard to say sometimes
whether it is the relic of a more perfect structure which has
been, or the inchoate rudiment of a new structure which is to
be. Then it presents a problem about which men may doubt
and dispute, just as in reference to their own true position in
nature they have disputed whether they are what they are by
a degeneration from a higher to a lower state, or whether
they are steps in a process of evolution from a lower to a
higher state, ascendent or descendent, beings a little lower
than the angels or a little higher than the brutes.. How-
ever that be — and the possible angelic relation is not a matter
of great moment, since the angels that they were only a
little lower than could not in any case have been of a very
exalted kind — it admits of no doubt that a law of degenera-
tion is manifest in human events ; that each individual, each
family, each nation may take either an upward course of
evolution or a downward course of degeneracy. Noteworthy
too in this relation is the fact that when the organism —
individual, social, or national — has reached a certain state of

CONCEENING DEGENERATION. 239

complex evolution it inevitably breeds cbanges in itself which
disintegrate and in the end destroy it. It cannot maintain
its equilibrium for ever in face of its environment, and ceas-
ing to aggregate to itself it begins to disintegrate, ceasing to
progress begins to regress, ceasing to develope begins to de-
cline : changing always, when it changes not for the better
it changes for the worse. Perfect repose is death. Here
again a creed or system of belief behaves in the same way,
giving rise in the process of its decomposition to retrograde
products that cannot serve for evolution, since they are
events of a dissolution which, as disintegrants, they help to
expedite. It is a process which may not perhaps be easily
traced in the case of a particular belief, but it is evident
enough after one of those great historical events, such as the
break-up of a system of religion or of a political constitution,
which befall only at intervals of centuries.

In nature, as we see it, we seem to see a conflict of
warring opposites : gravitation opposed, or rather indeed
complemented, by repulsion ; chemical affinities by chemical
repulsions ; magnetic attraction by electric repulsion ; evo-
lution by dissolution; conservatism by revolution, quiet or
catastrophic ; love by hate ; self-love by love of kind ; heaven
by hell. Certain it is that hate and destruction are just as
necessary agents as love and production in nature, which
could no more be, or be conceived to be, without the one than
without the other ; and to call the one good more than the
other, however necessary from the standpoint of human ego-
ism, is just as if one were to call gravitation good and repul-
sion bad, as gravitation, had it self-consciousness, would no
doubt do. In order to have a theory of cosmogony that
shall cover all the facts, it has always been necessary to sup-
plement a good principle by a bad principle, a God of love
and creation by a God of hate and destruction. And it must
always be so. We may, agreeably to the logic of our wishes,
comfort ourselves in our pilgrimage by entertaining the hope
and belief of the working out of good through evil and of the
permanence of good after the disappearance of evil, just as,
if it were useful and pleasing to us to cherish the illusion,
we might persuade ourselves that repulsion will one day be

240 THE PATHOLOGY OF "WILL.

annihilated and gravitation endure, or that evolution will
continue and dissolution cease to be ; but if we look at the
matter in the cold spirit of strictly rational inquiry we shall
always find abundant reason to believe that the sum of the
respective energies of good and evil remains a constant
quantity, the respective distribution only varying, and that
we might as well try to increase the height of the mountain
without increasing the depth of the valley, as to increase the
good in the world by purging it of its so-called evil.

And now to inquire briefly what is meant by degenera-
tion. It means literally an unkinding, the undoing of a
Mnd, and in this sense was first used to express the change
of kind without regard to whether the change was to perfect
or to degrade ; but it is now used exclusively to denote a
change from a higher to a lower kind, that is to say, from a
more complex to a less complex organisation : it is a process
of dissolution, the opposite of that process of involution
which is pre-essential to evolution. In proportion therefore
to the complexity of evolution is the possible diversity of
degeneration : the more complex the organism the greater
the number and variety of its diseases; the more varied
and beautiful animal forms are, the greater are the varieties
of the examples of ugliness and degradation which they
furnish ; and great cities which are the centres of the best
intellectual light become naturally the centres of the
greatest vices. Bacon had noticed the fact of degeneration
in plants and laid stress upon it — ' This rule,' he says, ' is
certain, that plants for want of culture degenerate to be
baser in the same kind, and sometimes so far as to change
into another kind ; ' and he enumerates certain changes of
condition which bring the changes about. Not that a
process of degeneration ever brings a higher species of
organism to the structural pattern of a lower species; in
order to do that, it would have to go backwards through as
long a reach of time, and as many stages of regressive ex-
perience in relation to simultaneous regressive changes of
surroundings, as the lower species had traversed forwards in
its upward transpeciation. Granted that man comes of an
ancestral stock common to him and the monkey, still no

CONCEENING DEGENERATION. 241

excess of degeneration would ever reduce him to the montey-
pattern ; it may certainly sink him very low, as the repulsive
example of a speechless, helpless and slavering idiot shows,
but the traits of degeneracy bear a distinctly human stamp,
they have that superscription and image. The unhinding
which we call degeneration is not then the reduction of a
higher kind to a lower normal kind, but the transformation
of it into a new or abnormal kind ; a kind which, incapable
of rising in the scale of development, tends naturally to sink
lower and lower.

As in the decomposition of a complex organic compound
new products are formed that had no part in its composition,
and that are never met with except as the products of such
decomposition; or as new morbid elements are formed in the
disintegrating processes of disease, the ravages of which
they thereupon accelerate ; so new products of an asocial or
antisocial kind are formed in the retrograde metamorphosis
of the human kind; wherefore it is that we meet with not
only degenerate varieties of the kind, such as idiots and
lunatics are, but also with a great many forms and varieties
of degradation in persons who ax*e neither idiots nor lunatics.
Is it not, for example, a remarkable thing, when we think
of it, that man, highest of the animals — so much so that
the base kinship repugns him — should have invented and
practised everywhere a variety of sexual vices which no
animals, though having as strong sexual passions as he has,
ever perpetrate? The ingenuity of vice which he has
achieved in that respect has reached the limit of its variety
only in the limits of the physical capacities of his bodily
mechanism; so that, these having been now exhausted,
happily no one, how great soever his practical genius, will
be able to invent a new vice of that sort. He has used his
reason to be more brutal than the brutes ; and when he has
devised and done some deed so ingeniously bad that no
brute ever did the like, he characterises it specially as brutal
and inhuman. Brutal, that is to say, when no brute was
ever capable of it, inhuman when it is entirely and exclu-
sively human !

242 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

It is not the brute, but the degradation of the brute in
him, that he ought to accuse ; for instead of using his
higher nature to exalt his lower nature he has used its
resources to degrade the latter to the utmost. The variety
of his ingenious vices bespeaks the foul misuse of his superior
reason to gratify the fundamental passions and selfish im-
pulses of his nature ; he exhausts all the devices of ingenuity
in order to enhance and multiply desires and to vary the
modes of their gratification ; and in doing that, blind the
while to the necessity of idealising, he is in the state of
all states most dangerous — that of man knowing and real-
ising the truth that he is animal, but not knowing and
realising the truth that he is not all animal. The po-
tentiality of a more complex development is always the
potentiality of a more varied degeneration : the height of
Heaven the measure of the depth of Hell. He does well
then to upbraid, in fitting terms of disgust and contempt,
the prostitution of reason to the guilty degradation of his
animal nature — though libelling the animal in the terms he
uses — to the end that the thought of what he has done may
turn him from the wrong way of degeneration and urge him
to pursue the right way of evolution. Retrograde products
of any sort, however, are no less normal in their way than
the products of evolution, just as earthquakes are as natural
as summer breezes, pestilences as natural as prayers. When
men describe them as abnormal, unnatural and the like, it
is because they regard them from one aspect of human life
— from the standpoint of ar progressive human movement.
View them as events of the Whole, as an all-encompassing,
all-seeing Being might be supposed to do, and in that uni-
versal view from the standpoint of a regressive human
movement — a tide which, flowing here and now, ebbs there
and then — and they would seem most fit and proper.

SECTION II.

CONGENITAL DEnCIENCE OR ABSENCE OF MOEAL PEELING
AND WILL.

In what function, and in what changes of it, is it that the
beginnings of human degeneracy show themselves? It is
obvious that in searching for the answer to this question we
must occupy ourselves with the most highly developed states
of man, since the earliest and most subtile signs of degene-
ration can be found only in the most fully developed
specimens. Bear in mind that our business now is with the
individual, not with the complex union of individuals which
is known as a nation, albeit it may be of interest to note in
passing that national degeneration begins in what is strictly
a ciemoralisation — ^namely, in a loss of patriotism ; by which
I mean not the noisy and aggressive so-called patriotism
that rushes into quarrels and combats in order to aggrandise
the nation, but the calm and pure patriotism which,
inspiring self-abnegation and the sacrifice of individual
interests to the good of the community, consolidates a
nation. In like manner, in the individual it is the function
of will in the highest moral sphere — the region of moral
feeling which, representing the highest reach of evolution,
is the consummate inflorescence of human culture — that
will be the first to exhibit signs of impairment : the latest
and highest product of social evolution, that which, latest
organised, is least stable, will be the first to undergo disso-
lution.

In order to ascertain whether the facts of observation
agree with this deduction it wiU he right to examine them
frankly, without bias, and to see what independent induction
they warrant. Should the induction and the deduction
agree, all the more shall we feel the conclusion sound.
Look then in the first instance at the lowest specimens of
beings in a civilised people, those who, marking the last
term of human degeneracy, have never had the responsibility
even of a capacity to degenerate, having been born essen-

244 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

tially deficient — the congenital idiots; beings who, disin-
herited of their human birthright by reason of native defect
of bodily structure generally and of cerebral structure and
function in particular, are incapable of a normal mental
development, and some of them incapable of any mental
development whatever. In them we have human beings so
radically deteriorated, and that without any fault of their
own, souls so enthralled somehow in the meshes of unsuit-
able matter, that they are without the potentiality of
becoming truly human. They are a reductio ad absurdwm of
humanity by the logic of facts : a pretty plain proof that
the way of evolution goes in the opposite direction to the
way by which they have come to be. It is not enough to
dismiss them from consideration as monstrosities, morbid
products, anomalies, abnormal creatures, accidents, and the
like, for that sort of labelling of them is not in the least
instructive, nor does it advance matters a step ; they have
been bred of human stock and are what they are by virtue
of natural processes, the laws of which may be investigated
and their issues modified. "We cannot blame the idiot for
being what he is : whom then can we blame ? If we may
not accuse the bungling of his father who begot him, or the
folly of his mother who conceived and bore him, assuredly
we have the right to hold mankind responsible for him.

Putting aside what may be called accidental causes of
idiocy, that is to say, causes arising out of some accident or
bad state of health in the parents, one pretty sure and
regular way of producing the congenital defect is by the
increase of degeneracy through generations. "Were a
curious person minded to breed a race of idiots he would
probably obtain a large measure of success by setting a
number of insane, epileptic, and weak-minded persons to
propagate; so he would bring degeneracy to its patho-
logical term, human disintegration to its simplest retrograde
human product. If he tried to reach a still lower depth in
this deep of degeneracy by setting idiots to breed, or if he
aspired to keep up a race of idiots in that way, he would
fail; he would find it impossible to carry the retrograde
metamorphosis or process of dehumanisation any further;

CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 245

impotence and sterility in his breed of idiots woidd bring
bis experiments to an abrupt end. Nature has put a limit
to debumanisation in tbe qualities wbicb she exacts in order
tbat tbe combination of two individuals to produce a tbird
may take place at all. Tbere are tben two terms between
wbicb all sorts and varieties of men may be ranged — tbe
lowest term of degeneration and tbe bigbest term of evolu-
tion, and towards tbe one or tbe otber of tbem eacb indi-
vidual in tbe fluent line of being is tending : a double flux
of movement, as it were, ascendent and descendent, tbe
ways or modes of degeneration in tbe descendent line being
almost as many and divers as tbe varieties of evolution in
tbe ascendent line. Some persons are bigb on tbe upward,
others low on tbe downward, patb ; many are just entering
upon tbe one or tbe otber ; but tbere is no one wbo is not
bimself going in tbe one or tbe otber direction and making
tbe way wbicb be takes easier for others to follow in.

It goes without saying that among other qualities in
which idiots are wanting they are wanting in moral feeling
and will; indeed, the manifold varieties of idiocy and im-
becility, representing all degrees and sorts of mental
deficience from the least to the greatest, yield examples
of all degrees of moral deprivation and of volitional
impotence. Here it shall suffice to call attention to a cases
well suited to bring home to the mind the necessity of a
scientific view of such defects and of a scientific inquiry
into their nature ; and it is of set purpose that I select an
instance which presents no marked nor even manifest defect
of brain and of ordinary intelligence, but in which the
moral derangement is extreme; because it will serve to
show bow the fine layer of moral feeling and the supreme
reason embedded in it, so to speak, may be deranged or
clean stripped off from the mind at the beginning of its
degeneracy, without the ordinary intelligence being seriously
touched.

The case is that of a young child, five or six years of
age only, which is causing its anxious parents no little ap-
prehension and distress by tbe singularly precocious display
of vicious proclivities of all sorts, quite out of keeping

246 THE PATHOLOGY OF "WILL.

with its tender years — mischievous and destructive impulses,
cruel and perverse acts, amazing skill in thieving and
lying, even perhaps a startling sexual precocity — and by
the utter failure of either precept or example or correction
to imbue it with right feeling and with the desire to do
right. So strong is the natural bent to, and so intense the
immediate pleasure in, these wrong-doings that punishment
is useless to check them. It may not, as I have said, be
notably deficient in intelligence; on the contrary, it is
sometimes capable of learning quickly when it pleases, par-
ticularly perhaps in some special line of knowledge for which
it shows a singular talent, and it displays acute cunning
in finding and devising the occasions to gratify its evil in-
clinations. It is a moral idiot without being an idiot in
self-seeking and self-serving intelligence: the defect of
intelligence is that it is capable only of half its function,
being acute to apprehend self, impotent to apprehend the
social not-self. Not that the child can be said to be
altogether insensible to the difference between right and
wrong, since it invariably shuns the right and chooses the
wrong, and shows an amazing acuteness in the means it
uses to escape detection and the punishment that might
follow detection. But it certainly does not feel the right as
right, as something stirring an impulse of attraction, and
the wrong as wrong, as something stirring an impulse of
repulsion; and accordingly punishment awakens no sensi-
bility to the social or moral meaning of conduct, no internal
social response, provokes only an acuter display of low
cunning in the endeavour to evade it. The creature is
truly an asocial being. So incorribly vicious as it is at so
tender an age, so perseveringly set on evil-doing, so utterly
incapable of penitence, everybody who has to do with it feels
in the end that it is not really responsible for its conduct,
perceives sadly that the severest punishment cannot do it
the least good, and is constrained to acknowledge that it
labours under a native incapacity of moral development : it
is congenitally conscienceless.

The main scientific interest of a case of the kind lies in
the inquiry how it is that a human being has been born

CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 247

into tie world who is unimbued witli innate moral, and is
imbued witb innate immoral, tendencies ; who will, nay must,
go wrong in virtue of bis bad organisation, and who mani-
fests sucb precocious capabilities of wickedness. Putting
aside the theory of Satanic inspiration as not being an
adequate explanation in an age that at least is infected
with the spirit, where it is not imbued with the habit, of
scientific thought, and having the certitude that the effect
defective comes by cause, we look to the line of the child's
descent for an explanation, to the nature of the antecedents
of which it is the consequent, and seek in ancestral infirm-
ities, erx'ors, misfortunes, and wrong-doings for the cause of
the defective organisation ; defective, that is to say, for
social organisation, but, everything being by a divine dis-
pensation good of its kind, Tery effective for social disorgan-
isation. As a general fact it will be found that such
children are descended from a family in which insanity or
epilepsy, or some form or other of mental degeneracy exists,
and exists not as an accident but as an essential outcome of
character ; that they are antisocial upshots of a process of
degeneration in the line of their descent, manufactured
morbid varieties of • the human kind. The lapse or absence
of the highest inhibitory sensibilities and powers in the lives
of the parents has issued so in the nature of the offspring —
those antisocial in life, these are asocial congenitally : it is an
example of the law of degeneration avenging the infraction
of the law of evolution: a product and a nemesis at the
same moment.

Taking free leave to put complicated and obscure facts
into a somewhat ideally simple scheme, one might represent
the stages of descent in this fashion: 1. Absence of exercise,
and through disuse decay, of the highest social sensibi-
lities and powers, moral and volitional, in one generation ;
therewith lifelong, unchecked exercise of the secondary or
social developments of the egoistic passions in the conduct
of life; a consequent moral degeneration which by its nature
goes deeper into character than intellectual degeneration.
2. In a succeeding generation some form or other of positive
mental derangement ; or such a development of vice in char-

248 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

acter as falls a little short only of madness or of crime. 3.
In the third generation moral imbecility or idiocy, with or
without corresponding intellectual infirmity. This sort of
ideal scheme will serve to mark the main line of the course
of degeneration, which may, however, be modified greatly ia
particular cases ; for as, on the one hand, the second stage
may be omitted altogether, and by an unpropitious reinforce-
ment of the bad tendencies, through the meeting of two de-
generate lines, the third follow directly upon the first; so
on the other hand, owing to the combinations, neutralisations
and other modifications to which ample scope and occasion
are given by the introduction of the elements of a fresh stock
in each generation, and to the inherent tendency which there
is in every organism to revert to a sound type, the outcome
of the degeneracy may be delayed, modified, or hindered alto-
gether. This broad lesson, however, remains for us — namely,
that the acquired infirmity of one generation will, unless coun-
tervailing influences of breed, of training, or of surroundings
are brought to bear meanwhile, become the natural defici-
ence of a succeeding generation ; it is the old tale, as old as
history, that when the fathers have eaten sour grapes the
children's teeth are set on edge. Most certain it is that men
are not bred well or ill by accident, little as they reck of it
in practice, any more than are the animals the select breed-
ing of which they make such a careful study ; that there are
laws of hereditary action working definitely in direct trans-
mission of qualities, or indirectly through combinations and
repulsions, neutralisations and modifications of qualities ; and
that it is by virtue of these laws determining the moral and
physical constitution of every individual that a good result
ensues in one case, a bad result in another.

Of many striking examples of deprivation or derange-
ment of moral feeling and will in young persons that might
be given, let one suffice here : that of a rather sharp-loflking
boy, eight years of age when I saw him, who, however, had
not been able to learn anything systematically; not even a
game of play, since to play with a hoop exacted more atten-
tion and perseverance than he had been able to give. In
fact he could not hold his attention to anything, though

CONGENITA!, DEFECTS OF WILL. 249

very quick in instant perception. He was, however, most
ingenious in mischief which he never missed an opportunity
of doing, and delighted to talk of playing some viciously
mischievous trick, in the imaginative description of which he
exulted in a braggart and grotesquely dramatic fashion ;
chattering incessantly and running from subject to subject,
without other connection than the unity of character given
to them by the leading bent of his destructive disposition.
Though he could tell stories of the events and even minute
experiences of years back with surprising exactness of details,
he had no perception of truth, but evinced an inexhaustible
and uncontrollable craving for what might have been called
lying, had his nature been in the least sensible to truth, but
what were really the constructions of a vivid and busy ima-
gination revelling in its vicious activity. His continual talk
was of killing persons or animals that had in any way offended
him or ruflled his prodigious conceit ; and he was ludicrously
ferocious and boastful in his dramatic conceptions and cir-
cumstantial descriptions of the grand way in which he would
do it. His father had died of what was called softening of
the brain soon after he was forty years old, having been insane
for some time before his death ; his paternal grandmother
had died demented in an asylum at a great age, having lived
there for upwards of twenty years ; on his mother's side also
there was insanity, and she herself, though not actually
insane, was extremely excitable and a singularly insincere
and shifty-minded person. What wonder then that a con-
genitally defective moral organisation was the term of that
line of descent ! The creature was degenerate before it was
generate.

It will not be amiss to take particular notice of the three
prominent phenomena of his mental pathology : first, a com-
plete absence of any germ of moral sense, his asocial nature
in that respect, whence no response to the higher social
stimuli and no capacity to assimilate them — that is, to take
and make them into its own nature; secondly, his congenital
inability to apply his attention steadily so as to get a proper
hold or apprehension of external realities and their relations

— a fatal defect, for the monkey is not teachable that cannot
17

250 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

attend, and the monkey most teachable that attends the
best; thirdly, an extraordinarily active display of the con-
structive energy of brain that we call imagination, unin-
formed by lessons of experience which it could not properly
assimilate, and ill inspired by the vicious mood of his men-
tal nature, whose energies it absorbed into its predominant
and almost exclusive activity. Clearly the vital energy of
the stock, even in the higher expressions of it in the nei-vous
system, were not exhausted, had other defects not precluded
its proper development. Though an extreme instance, it
may serve to teach what little value is to be set on imagina-
tion when it is uninformed by observation and undisciplined
by reason.

A second question that is of scientific interest in cases of
the kind is how it happens that creatures so young are cap-
able of displaying so extraordinary a sexual precocity as they
do sometimes. Those who observe it with dismay are apt to
be painfully shocked by the spectacle and to cry out against
it as if it were not human. But it is human enough. If
the true problem be, as it certainly is, not the origin of evil,
but the origin of good in mankind, the products of the de-
generation of the kind may be expected naturally to exhibit
disintegrate displays of its . fundamental egoistic • passions.
In what modes else could the decomposition or disintegration
of human nature show itself? Were the infant in arms
possessed of power answering in measure to the outbursts of
its transitory passions, had it a giant's strength in its feeble
limbs to execute its froward will when it goes into contor-
tions of rage because it does not like to be washed, it would
be as dangerous and destructive as any madman : it is the
helplessness of its body which, rendering it impotent, makes
it innocent. It is well to idealise, but it is not necessary to
suffer the brightness of the ideal wholly to obscure the real,
and it is not well therefore to take quite seriously the vast
deal of nonsense that is written concerning the purity and
innocence of childhood ; the purity is a negative purity at
best, a blank virtue, while the activities that exist are for
the most part not innocent. Are not children, as La Bruy^re
described them, naturally boastful, scornful, passionate.

CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF WILL. 251

envious, curious, selfish, idle, prone to steal, apt at dissimu-
lation, and ready liars ; easily moved to immoderate joy or
thrown into excessive grief by trifles; not willing themselves
to suffer but eager and pleased to inflict suffering ? It is a
description that would suit well for savages in a low state of
civilisation, though no one would be vehemently eager to
ascribe purity and innocence to them. •

Take away from a young child's mind the germs of those
highest inhibitory functions that are presupposed by a poten-
tiality of moral development, and you leave the natural pas-
sions and instincts free play ; not the fundamental instincts
of animal nature only, but the secondary or acquired egoistic
passions into which, in a complex social state with its dif-
ferenced interests and pursuits, the primary instincts have
undergone development. To lie, to counterfeit, to deceive,
to envy, to hate, to steal, to devise cunning means to gratify
sense or interest are human enough qualities j everybody
may, I suppose, be said truly to be a potential liar, a poten-
tial thief, a potential adulterer, even a potential murderer,
since whatever sinner any man has been every man needs
to pray that he may not be ; and therefore it is natural that
the congenitally unsound or defective individual inherits and
displays some of these potentialities, more or fewer according
to the degree and variety of degeneration that he represents.
It is because its kind is in it, mutilated, fragmentary, disin-
tegrated, and the more special evolution of kind which con-
stitutes its family-nature, that the morally imbecile child
sometimes shows startling immoral aptitudes, and talents
in vice that certainly could never have been acquired by it ;
any more than the sexual movements which it may perform
with surprising skill could have been voluntarily devised and
performed by it, or are voluntarily devised and performed by
any one. The degrees and varieties of moral and intellectual
defect will, of course, be as many as the degrees and forms
of the degeneracy. In the lowest examples of all there will
scarcely be a clearly expressed instinct, nothing more than
the uncertain show of a vague, feeble and faltering instinct
of self-conservation not reaching beyond the mere appetite
for food, without any sense of the means to gratify it ; at a

252 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

little higher level you shall hare the sexual and self-con-
servative instincts in gross, bestial, and perhaps perverted
display ; and at a higher level stUl, with the social egoistic
instincts in pretty full activity, there vrill be an entire
absence of the altruistic instincts, accompanied it may be
by a -great deal of cunning intelligence. Prom all which it
plainly appears that in the downward process of the undoing
of the human nature belonging to a complex social develop-
ment an early event is a deprivation or a depravation of
moral feeling and will : how indeed could it be otherwise if,
as I have previously argued, the altruistic impulse is formed
out of the social fusion and transmutation of the egoistic
impulses ?

Another proof, were other proof necessary, of the in-
nate fixity of immoral or anti-social potentialities, and of the
less fixed and stable nature of moral instinct, is that moral
action in any of its modes is not an absolute instinct in any
person ; there is always the consciousness of, sometimes the
glance at, and oftentimes the resisted inclination to the
opposite course ; at any rate there is not the instant, direct,
blind, unquestioning obedience to an instinct that there is
in a man's walking upright. No one in walking seems to
entertain the notion of going on all fours, but the mind of
the most chaste and virtuous man alive is invaded sometimes
by the intrusive thought of adultery which he has not the
least intention to practise. Let a man's heart overflow with
brotherly love to his kind, it is still sensible, deep in it, of
occasional pulses intimating that at bottom men naturally
hate one another. So it is with other evil imaginations of
the heart. Were the secrets of all hearts laid open, it
would be a strange phantasmagoria of evil thoughts passing
through the minds of the best of men, thoughts that they
would shrink with horror from letting the tongue put into
words ; many times no more than vague, half-formed, fleet-
ing fancies, like the changing shapes of drifting clouds, but
sometimes marshalled by busy imagination into more or less
vivid and coherent tableaus and dramas, without exciting
any more horror than similar thoughts do in dreams, when
we break all the ten commandments with serene equanimity.

CONGENITAL DEFECTS OF 'WTLL. 253

Why not, if the inspiration of the moral sense be at bottom
social and external? Obviously, when the supreme inhibi-
tory functions are suspended or destroyed, high reason and
■will dethroned, these hidden and subjected tendencies will,
like slaves in a servile rebellion, come turbulently to the
front and disport themselves riotously.

But is it always in such case that only what was
unseen is now unveiled by the removal of the restraint,
or is there sometimes a positive growth or new develop-
ment of vice after the removal ? Was all that evil actually
in the man which he displays when reason and will are
dethroned by mental derangement? Was your sister or
brother or lover whom you esteemed as a model of virtuous
innocence, and against the smallest suspicion of whose
purity of mind you would have indignantly revolted, really
so degraded a creature, and you knew it not? No, not
so : the germs of immoral tendencies were there, as they
are in all persons, but they grew and underwent patho-
logical development by mutual interaction after the over-
throw of reason and will, not otherwise than as they disport
themselves in new functional activities of a transient kind
during dreams. After dissociation of mental elements there
takes place the association of congenial elements of the dis-
sociate products. Psychologists have a good deal to learn yet
before they apprehend adequately the purely organic con-
structive energies of the brain for good or ill that lie beneath
consciousness and do that which we are conscious of only in
the result ; by virtue of which it is that just as the sound
mental organisation when exposed to wholesome influences
developes in higher thoughts and imaginations, so the un-
sound mental organisation which is incapable of wholesome
assimilation developes in morbid thoughts and impulses and
imaginings. It is the lower nature in the man asserting its
autonomy, so to speak, in a rapid degenerative growth when
the control of the higher nature is withdrawn. The concep-
tion and execution of a new degradation by any one is not
more bodily nor less mental than the conception and execu-
tion of a great invention or of a great work of art ; only in
the former case it is the energy of degeneration, in the latter

254 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

case the energy of development. To ask that the morbid
mind should stay at a certain level of degeneracy and cease
to display new morbid functions vrould be very much like
asking that a morbid growth amid healthy structures should
not increase and undergo its own changes independently of
them ; or to ask that the physiologically inco-ordinate move-
ments of convulsions should forbear to have any pathological
co-ordination whatever, Not to exercise and to grow to the
exercise of one's better nature, is to exercise and to grow to
the exercise of one's worse nature.

Were anybody to observe carefully what goes on in his
mind during waking, he would perceive that it was the
theatre of as many fantastic, grotesque, incoherent thoughts
as in dreams; but they are fleeting and not attended to,
because consciousness is fixed on the events and interests of
real life, whereas in dreams they are solely active, usurp
what consciousness there is, and so become more or less
dramas. Obviously it will depend much on the occupation
that each one gives his mind, and on the habits of attention
and thought that he has trained it to, how large a part these
incoherent vagaries of thought and imagination shall play in
his waking mind, and indeed in some measure even in his
dreams also. Were men ordinarily in the habit of thinking
coherently, as they fondly flatter themselves they are, were
they not actually dreaming during more than half their wak-
ing lives, their very dreams would be a great deal more co-
herent than they are now. The incoherences of ordinary
dreams are no more than stronger instances of the incohe-
rences of the ordinary thoughts of most persons. By the
habitual practice of accurate observation and reflection when
awake, owing to the engagement of the attention in the steady
pursuit of some line of systematic study, the dreams that take
place become less incoherent, are indeed sometimes entirely
coherent, and a happy thought perhaps occurs that one
gladly retains on waking. Now if it be thus possible by
good and regular exercise of the higher faculties of mind to
gain some mastery over thought in dreams, how much more
is it within our power and shown to be our duty to obtain
and exercise dominion over the vain and evil thoughts, in-

CONGENITAL DETECTS OF WILL. 255

clinations and imaginings of the day, and so to hinder their
luxuriant growth !

Before passing from the consideration of the nature and
meaning of moral imbecility and of its obvious lessons, it
will not perhaps be amiss to state that the idiot must of ne-
cessity be essentially an anti-social being, passive or active,
according to the degree and character of his congenital de-
privation: active and anti-social when he displays vicious
desires and tendencies, as the moral idiot does ; passive and
asocial when, by reason of a deeper and more general depriva-
tion of mind, he is capable of little more than a vegetative
life. In the latter case, the organs by which he should make
sensible acquaintance with the external world and react to
its impressions upon him, so as to apprehend it justly, are
manifestly defective. The dulness of sensibility, more or less
evident in all idiots, is very remarkable in some : witness- the
new-born idiotic infant that hardly feels at all and shows no
instinct to find and little power to touch and grasp the
mother's nipple when it is put to the breast ; or that older
idiot at the Earlswood Asylum that sat smiling at its ease
while its toenail was torn off.' As one would expect, moral
insensibility is more common and more complete among
them than insensibility to pain : take as instance the idiot
mentioned by Morel who, being accustomed to assist at the
funerals in the asylum of which he was an inmate, and to
be rewarded for his services on each occasion with a little
tobacco, killed another patient during a long dearth of deaths
in order that there might be a funeral; or an imbecile boy
I saw in an asylum on one occasion who had all but succeeded
in strangling an idiot child, giving no other reason for his act
than that he 'thought he'd put him out of his misery.' This
boy was not entirely devoid of intelligence, as the cool motive
of his act showed; moreover, he could read and write a little,
and do a simple calculation; and when he was asked the
question he acknowledged that what he had done was wrong
and that he should not like to be treated so himself, his
vacantly smiling face assuming for the moment a caricature-
like seriousness and then relapsing into empty giggle. Hia
' Mentioned by Dr. Grabham, late Superintendent of that Asylum.

256 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

admission that it was wrong was plainly the mere parrot-like
repetition of words of the meaning of which he had no real
feeling. Many times the idiot is not less deficient in powers
of motor reaction than he is in sensibility to impressions, so
that in extreme cases he is quite unable to build up in him-
self any conception of the external world, and unable in any
case to build up an adequate conception of it. And aptly do
the sluggish muscles of his expressionless face betray his
mental vacancy : for as it is through the eye mainly that we
take in or apprehend the world, so it is through the eye that
the world as we have apprehended it looks out ; or, speaking
more correctly, as it is through the muscular system that the
external world is buUt up in us, so the world as it has been
built up is expressed in the whole bodily features as they
have been moulded by the fit muscular actions of habitual
internal states. He is a poor medical psychologist who can-
not see idiocy in the walk as well in the talk of his patient ;
and he will be a very expert psychologist in time to come
who shall read a full knowledge of the whole character of
any individual in his gait, carriage, conformation, features
and look. With that reflection I take leave of the idiot.
Placed, as he is, in the midst of a complex social develop-
ment, without the faculties to feel and to respond to the
many and special complex and refined relations of his sur-
roundings, he is necessarily a being apart, isolated, as his
name {lBimT7]s) implies ; and if he has any active tendencies
they are such as, being inspired grossly by the self-conserva-
tive instinct generally, or by the sexual instinct sometimes,
are likely to bring him into trouble.

SECTION III.

DEGENEEATION OP MOEAL PEELING AKD ■WILL IN DISEASE.

Continuing our studies in moral pathology, the next fact to
claim notice is that degenerative disease ■will impair or
destroy moral feeling, leaving the person as destitute in
that respect as if he ■were -without the capacity of moral
feeling in consequence of congenitally defective organisation.
Of nervous disorders that affect mental function hysteria is
perhaps that -which furnishes the strangest and most
grotesque examples of depravation of moral feeling and
■will. It is not merely that hysterical ■women, -without
deliberate consciousness on their part, simulate different
diseases so closely that it is many times hard and sometimes
impossible to say -whether they have them or not, deceiving
themselves and others, but in exti ^mer cases of moral per-
version they -wilfully and designedly fabricate diseases and
inflict long and painful sufferings on themselves in carrying
the deception through. To this class of half deceived and
half deceiving impostors belong the ecstatics or stigmatics
-who fall into periodical trances from -which they awake -with
blood oozing from the palms of the hands and from the skin
of the forehead, in imitation of the bleedings of Jesus
Christ from the nails that were driven through his hands
and the crown of thorns that -was set on his head, they
having secretly pricked themselves with a needle or pin
during the supposed unconsciousness ; the fasting girls who
profess to live without food, which they contrive to get
secretly themselves or to have secretly conveyed to them ;
the paralytics who keep their beds for years or are wheeled
about in Bath chairs, when they have no other paralysis
than that of will and could rise and walk at any moment if
a strong enough motive were brought to bear upon them ;
the hystero-epileptics who fall instantly into and out of the
proper convulsions or the proper trances when the proper
stimulus is applied ; those women again who drop acids on
their arms or on other parts of the body for the purpose of

258 THE PATHOLOGY OP WILL.

fabricating extraordinary skin-diseases, or who blacken their
eyelids in order to keep up the appearances of an illness
which they feign, or are afflicted with a blindness or a
speechlessness that vanishes with the restoration of moral
sanity and will ; and many other similar cases too numerous
to mention.

If these persons are removed from the conditions of
life in which their maladies had origin and afterwards grew
to their present habits in response to the attention and
sympathy bestowed upon them — the conditions, that is to
say, to which their perverted moral natures have definitely
adjusted themselves; and if they are placed in new sur-
roundings where the social impressions are different and
they feel they have no fitly sympathetic audience to act to,
but on the contrary find themselves in presence of fit and
firm moral influences brought steadily to bear upon them ;
they speedily begin to make more wholesome adjustments
and so regain their true moral tone and their natural power
of will. For them, as a rule, the sympathy and interest of
their family and friends are the most favourable audience,
and therefore the most unfavourable environments, since they
supply social sanction and support to the unmoral imperative
of their perverted natures. Meanwhile the endurance they
show in inflicting pain on themselves and in keeping up the
more or less wilful deception, and the perverted pleasure
that they feel in harassing their friends with the alarm and
anxieties that they occasion them, are a signal testimony to
the essential part which the social medium has in the con-
stitution of the individual's nature ; for in no case would
they be so afflicted had they not a sympathetic medium. It
is impossible to conceive hysteria attacking one who was
not a social being, or one again who, Eobinson Crusoe-like,
was planted alone on an uninhabited island. Their example
proves also how the derangement of the social sense leads
naturally and inevitably to a deterioration of moral feeling
and will : it is demoralisation following desocialisation.

Another lesson we cannot help learning from them ia
how helpless a purely psychological theory leaves us in a
case where it suffices not to have only words that sound

MOEAL FEELIKO AND WILL IN DISEASE. 259

rather tlian signify; for assuredly it yields not, nor even
pretends to yield, the least explanation of the impairment of
win — how it has come about, what are its nature and extent,
and how it is to be got rid of. Is it that the will's essence
is affected, or is it that, perfectly pure and unimpaired
itself, its manifestations are hindered and lamed by
obstructed nerve-paths? Are we to look upon the will
itself as in fault, or are we to look compassionately upon a
faultless will struggling in vain with a defective instru-
ment? The psychologist of the study does not trouble
himself to answer in that matter, but the medical psycho-
logist who has to deal practically with disorders of will and
to bring them back to order, if possible, cannot pass the
question by : he must do as mankind with consistent incon-
sistency have always done actually, in spite of their theory
of the spiritual separateness of will — treat its derangements
through the body exactly as if it were entirely dependent on
the body, product not prime mover.

In order not to delude himself with words that mark no
definite ideas, but to have substantial meaning in the terms
he uses, he must learn to fall back upon the physiological
conception of a number of confederated nerve-centres, co-
ordinate and sub-ordinate, as the physical substrata of all
mental functions. To him, as he then conceives matters,
the just co-ordination of these confederated centres will be
seen to be the essential condition of will, and the completest
co-ordination the condition of the best will ; which nowise
therefore predetermines and effects the process, as the
common illusion is, but by its being marks and attests the
accomplishment thereof. Now in these hysterical persons,
whose extreme mobility of nature shows itself at the best
of times by rapid transitions of moods, notions, and caprices
according to the different impressions which they undergo,
there is a certain instability in the confederation of nerve-
centres; that is to say, instead of being bound together
firmly in compact association these are prone to easy dis-
sociation in consequence of moderate disturbance, whether
moral or physical, and to take on more or less separate
action. It is such dissociate function that is the disinte-

260 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

gration of will aBd the desocialisation of the individual.
Any one who is brought under the dominion of the pre-
dominant or exclusive activity of one of these centres or of
an allied group of them, the functions of the rest being
inhibited and perhaps almost completely suspended for the
time, is necessarily an incomplete and changed being ;
not an integrate self but absorbed as self in the special and
partial function, and insensible therefore to those relations
to which the other centres separately or in the imperial
union of the whole minister: mentally disintegrate and
therefore morally deteriorate. The consensus gone, the con-
science goes with it. The condition of things is of the same
kind as, though much less deep in degree than, that which
seems to exist, reaching its climax, in such discontinuous
mental states as hypnotism, somnambulism, catalepsy and
other allied disorders.

Similar considerations will apply to those hysterical con-
ditions, not calling for description here, in which socially
morbid impulses are exhibited sometimes by young women
— especially when they are somewhat weak-minded, or have
inherited a distinct predisposition to mental derangement —
who have lately passed through the physiological changes oi
puberty : for example, impulses to steal, to set fire to houses,
to make false accusations of indecent assaults, and even
sometimes to kill. When, in consequence of those changes,
the newly awakened functions of the reproductive organs
come into action and enter into the mental life through their
representative centres in the brain, they produce a commo-
tion there which is the commencement of a revolution of the
entire mental being ; and if the nerve-centres are unstable, it
easily happens that their equilibrium is overthrown, and that
instead of compactly associate function of the whole, a dis-
sociate and predominant function of one centre or group of
centres is set up.

The odd thing from the psychological point of view is that
all these hysterical persons are cured best by moral means ;
that a vigorous moral shock or a suitable moral discipline is
the most effective agent that can be applied ; that the physical
disorder of the confederate centres is removed and the unity

MOEAL FEELING Am) "WILL IN DISEASE. 261

of their function restored by operating upon that spiritual
agent in the 'background which, according to the psycholo-
gical theory, has no point of contact or relation with them.
Always, however, is the psychologist willing, notwithstanding
his theory of their absolute separateness, to admit the power
of mind over body more readily than the power of body over
mind: it is only in the one direction that he desires the
great gulf which he places between them to be impassable.
From the physiological point of view it is not strange at all
that the social nature incorporate in the individual nature
responds to the proper social stimuli, and that when the
dormant or suspended energies of the inhibited centres are
aroused the energy of the predominantly active centre is
withdrawn or inhibited; the excitation of a neighbouring
centre is the diversion of energy from the active centre ; the
restoration of the normal equilibrium the destruction of the
morbid equilibrium.

Another disease which effaces moral feeling temporarily,
and even shatters moral character sometimes, especially in
young children, is epilepsy. Somehow, though we cannot
tell how, the exquisitely fine and complex organisation of
nerve-structure is damaged by the intense molecular com-
motion which is the condition of the epileptic explosion.
Perhaps it is that the fine nervous substrata of this supreme
organisation are so exhausted by the discharge, the principal
trait of which is the violation or the abolition of normal co-
ordination, that they are unable immediately, and in sonie
cases ever, to recover their inhibitive powers and so to take
their proper part in the co-ordinations and sub-ordinations
of function. It is in that case a sort of paralysis of function
following convulsion. Undoubtedly it has happened that a
child's conscience has been as clean effaced after a succes-
sion of epileptic convulsions as the memory is effaced some-
times in like manner ; and in that case the child is made by
morbid art very much like the child that is by nature con-
genitally destitute of moral sense. Those who see much of
epilepsy are witnesses of equally remarkable moral transfor-
mations in connection with the seizures in the adult ; the
changes either preceding or following the fits or in some

262 THE PATHOLOGY OF "WILL.

instances occurring in their stead. Looking first on this
and then on that picture of the person in the two states, it
is hard to realise that they are pictures of the same person.
Perhaps the change goes no deeper than an exceeding irri-
tability and suspicion and an extreme aptness to take offence
where not the least offence was meant or given, but in other
instances it is so great as to amount almost to a transforma-
tion of character : suspicion, surliness, indolence, irascibility,
and a disposition to false accusations and vicious deeds
taking the place of candour, amiability, good temper, an
obliging disposition and gentle behaviour. Happily the
abrupt change is mostly a passing phase : it might be com-
pared well to that which takes place when a clear and
cloudless sky is overcast suddenly with dark and threatening
thunder-clouds ; and just as the darkened sky is cleared by
the thunderstorm which it portends, so the gloomy moral
perturbation is discharged sometimes by the epileptic fit or
fits, and the mental atmosphere cleared, the patient returning
soon to his natural character. Not always, however: for
the effect of a continued epilepsy, especially in children, may
be a permanent deterioration of moral character ; the func-
tional impairment, when unremoved, lapsing by degrees into
structural impairment. Be that as it may, the fact is plain
that a physical cause of some kind, deranging the fine, in-
tricate, and probably unstable organisation which subserves
the highest functions of mind — those, namely, of moral feel-
ing and will, abolishes temporarily those functions.

A similar derangement of moral feeling and will may
follow the shock of an attack of acute mania in a young
person of fourteen or fifteen years of age, especially if it be
in a person who, inheriting a predisposition to insanity,
has unstable nerve-centres. The order of events is in this
wise : after the abatement of the acute excitement there is
apparent recovery, for the intellect regains its clearness and
sharpness in the ordinary relations of life, but there is not a
concomitant return to the normal moral character ; on the
contrary, a persisting moral alienation shows itself in ex-
treme self-conceit, impudence, indolence, deceit, wilfulness,
even violence ; therewith a complete moral insusceptibility,

MOEAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 263

SO that, tliougli knowing right from wrong well enough, he
is not impressional to good influence, likes and does the
wrong, and evinces no desire to suit his conduct to his know-
ledge. The social self in him is extinguished. A plain
proof this, if proof were necessary, that a keen intellectual
apprehension of right and wrong is useless to generate a
good will without the inspiring and driving force of good
feeling. In any case there is very little altruistic feeling in
the mind of a boy or girl before puberty, for which reason
an alienation of mind before that great physiological event
has taken place and brought about its resulting evolution
of new thought, feeling and desire, usually presents many
features of moral derangement ; stiU in all healthily consti-
tuted beings of civilised parentage there is a certain moral
germ or capability on which education works ; and that it is
which has been damaged or destroyed by the storm of the
mania. The interpretation of matters is something of this
kind : a natural instability of the supreme nerve-centres, the
ill-boding gift of inheritance ; easy and complete overthrow
of their unstable equilibrium in the excitement of the mania,
which in such case breaks out on a comparatively slight oc-
casion and passes quickly into extreme incoherence ; incom-
plete restoration of normal stability after the subsidence of
the mental storm; a consequent impairment or extinction
of the most fine inhibitive functions, which means an in-
capacity to bring the highest regulating ideas and feelings
to bear upon the lower feelings and impulses.

The dissolution of the union of the federated supreme
nerve-centres may of course take place without evident statical
or structural disorder — may, that is to say, be purely func-
tional in the first instance ; all that has happened is that a
mental equilibrium somewhat unstable naturally has fallen
into a temporarily more stable equilibrium of an abnormal or
morbid kind. In all forms of mental derangement there are
two underlying pathological conditions : the one dynamical,
being a functional dissociation or severance of the nerve-
centres that have been organised to act together physiologi-
cally, whence naturally for the time being an incoherence of
function and a discontinuity of individual being ; the other

264 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

statical, consisting in a structural change in the nerve-cells
or in their uniting fibre, whence a permanent disintegration
of the substance of ideas. The physiological order of de-
velopment is association and then integration of ideas, the
pathological order of degeneration is dissociation and then
disintegration of them. I am not prepared to say which
condition of things obtains in the child whose moral sense
has been destroyed by an attack of madness — whether, that
is to say, the main trouble is an interruption of the bonds of
association, a dissolution of partnership, so to speak, or
whether some minute structural change in the nerve-elements
that no microscope can detect has been produced ; but in any
case the former condition, in which patient and systematic
training, intellectual and moral, might work a cure, is obvi-
ously a less serious mischief than the latter, in which it is
hard to beli'eve that a cure could ever be effected. Note by
the way, that in using the term instability of mental organ-
isation one may, conformably to the foregoing theory of
pathology, properly distinguish two conditions : (a) an insta-
bility of the association or federation of centres, whereby
they are prone to dissociate function ; and (&) an instability
of the nervous molecule itself, whereby it is prone to easy
explosion.

There are other conditions occurring in connection with
the development of the reproductive system at puberty that
may occasion a good deal of moral disorder, but I need not
discuss them here. On physiological grounds one might
venture to predict that to eliminate the sexual system and
its intimate and essential mental workings from the consti-
tution of human nature, would be to eradicate the vital
principle of morality, of poetic and artistic emotion, of reli-
gious feeling among mankind. Eunuchs, so far as informa-
tion about them goes, lend strong support to the opinion,
since they are for the most part deceitful, liars, cowardly,
envious, malignant, destitute of social and moral feeling,
mutilated in mind as in body ; ' and it is, I think, still

' ' Certainly there is a consent between the body and the mind ; and where
Nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other. tJbi pecoat in nno
perioUtatur in altero. . . . Kings in ancient times (and at this present in some

MORAL FEELING AND "WILL IN DISEASE. 265

fiirtlier strengthened by observation of the mental and
moral effects of the development of the reproductive system
at puberty, and of the special features of the different forms
of mental derangement that occur at different periods of
life. What then shall be said of those holy men of old of
whom we are told that they made themselves eunuchs for
the kingdom of heaven's sake ? This certainly : that they
emasculated virtue in order to escape from the temptations
of vice; and that only would they find the kingdom of
heaven a fitting place for them if the glorious company of
angels, apostles, prophets, and holy men and women there
were moral eunuchs. In our dealings with physical nature
we conquer not except by obeying ; and so likewise in the
conflict of the passions of our nature it is necessary to
acknowledge and assimilate their true force and character,
and so to get the best use of them, not by vain and foolish
attempts to extinguish them as mortal enemies, but by wise
and patient efforts to turn and guide and use their forces in
the path of a higher development. A castrated chastity is
a chastity without contents, neither virtue nor vice in any
character. The holiness of Heaven postulates the root-
passions of Hell.

The next examples of moral degeneracy to claim notice
are those that are met with often at the commencement of
mental alienation, before the person is so far deranged as to
be deemed positively insane. Almost every kind of mental
disorder begins with a moral alienation, not very marked
perhaps at the outset, but so thorough after a time in some
cases that a person may seem the opposite of what he was
in feeling and conduct. Then the hidden potentialities of
his nature reveal themselves in a sad and startling develop-
ment. In place of diffidence and self-restraint we see
exhibited a bold and presumptuous address; in place of
refined manners and modest conversation, coarse behaviour
and indelicate allusions ; in place of chaste and decent con-
countries) were wont to put great trust in eunuchs ; because they that are
envious towards aU are more obnoxious and officious towards one. But yet
their trust towards them hath rather been as to good spials and good whis-
perer?, than good magistrates and officers.' — Bacon, Eaay on DeformAty .
18

266 THE PATHOLOGY OP WILL.

duct, indecency and even open lasciviousness ; in place of
prudence in business, foolhardiness in speculation ; in place
of candour and honourable dealing, duplicity, guile, and
even vicious and criminal tendencies : — these are the trans-
formations that are witnessed in different cases. Moreover,
this moral alienation, which is manifest before there is
positive intellectual derangement, accompanies the latter
throughout its course, and may last for a while after all" dis-
order of intelligence has gone ; it is the truer and deeper
derangement, being a derangement of character; and
therefore it is notoriously not safe to count the recovery of
a person sure and stable until he has returned to the senti-
ments and affections of his natural character.

Here then we perceive plainly that when the mind under-
goes degeneration the moral feeling is the first to show it, as
it is the last to be restored when the disorder passes away :
the latest and highest gain of mental evolution, it is the
first to witness by its impairment to mental dissolution : the
first effect of mental degeneration, it is the last to witness to
fuU. mental regeneration. In undoing a mental organisation
nature begins by unravelling the finest, most delicate, most
intricately woven and last completed thi-eads of her mar-
vellously complex network. Were the moral sense as old
and firmly fixed an instinct as the instinct to walk upright
or the more deeply planted instinct of propagation, as many
people in the presumed interests of morality have tried to
persuade themselves and others that it is, it would not be
the first to suffer in this way when mental degeneration
begins; its categorical imperative would not take instant
flight at the first assault but would assert its authority at a
later period of the decline ; but being the last acquired and
least fixed, it is most likely to vary, not only, as I have
shown, in the pathological way of degeneracy, but also, as
might be shown abundantly, in physiological ways, according
to the diversities of conditions in which it is placed. Like
all forming organic matter, it is plastic and exhibits a cir-
cumstance-suiting power; and therefore it varies in its
sanctions in different nations, societies, sects, castes, indi-
viduals in a way that a thoroughly formed and fixed instinct.

MORAL I^ELING AlfD WILL IN DISEASE. 267

like the instinct to walk upriglit, does not. Why should
not a savage steal when he wants food, or kill his mother
when she is old and useless, or sell his sister's children,
since it seems the most natural and proper thing in the
world to him? 'Tis the categorical imperative of his
practical reason, the instinct of right in him.

In this relation the most interesting form of mental
disease perhaps is that which is known in medicine as
general paralysis; interesting because it is usually accom-
panied with a signal paralysis of moral sense from the out-
set, and because we can trace nearly from their first
beginnings morbid changes in the brain going along with
the decay of mental and motor powers. Not exact and
complete relations, it is true, but such broad general rela-
tions as warrant the belief of exact and complete relations ;
while towards the end, when the waning mental and motor
functions are well-nigh extinct, there is plain evidence of
waste and destruction of nerve-elements suiting well with
the decrepit functions. At the beginning of the disease
the prominent mental symptoms in the most typical cases
are those of deterioration of moral sense and will j the
earliest derangement of all being a great exaltation of ideas
and feelings and will very like that which characterises the
early stages of alcoholic intoxication. Indeed, it is an
example that may help us to a conception of the physical
nature of the initial process of a moral derangement. An
active determination of blood accompanies an excessive
action of the nerve-centres, the result of the agitation or
commotion in them being an impairment of the interinhibi-
tive functions ; and accordingly the individual cannot apply
his mind closely and exactly to impressions, social or physi-
cal, so as to get a real touch or hold of them and of their just
relations to one another — that is to say, to apprehend and
truly reflect them as they are. Thence flows the appearance
of an egoistic disdain or disregard of them; all the more
marked because the lower feelings of the excited and exalted
self, which preserve the unity imparted to them by the
organic life, assert themselves with an unaccustomed freedom
from reserve. How indeed can the individual perceive

268 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

properly tlie object and its relations if the group of centres
that have been organised to act together in the perception
of it, and the associate action of which is the perceptioii,
cannot combine as they should owing to commotion in them ?
And how can he, unperceiving the impressions justly, feel
and act justly in relation to them ? The unity of his higher
nature is more or less impaired by the excessive stimulation —
its altruism suspended ; the unity of his lower nature remains
and is made more self-assertive by it — its egoism exag-
gerated. So it is perhaps that you get the moral impairment
of incipient drunkenness and of the first stage of typical
general paralysis.

A not unfrequent feature of the moral deterioration of
the disease, striking enough in some cases, is a persistent
tendency to steal, the person stealing stupidly for the most
part what he does not particularly want and perhaps makes
no use of when he has stolen it. It is not uncommon
therefore for those who are victims of the disease in its early
stages to be sent to prison and treated there as criminals,
notwithstanding that a duly skilled medical observer might
be able to say, and perhaps does say, with entire certitude,
from an appreciation of the physical and mental symptoms,
that the supposed criminal was attacked by an organic
disease of his brain which had destroyed his moral sense at
the outset, which would go on to destroy the other faculties of
his mind in succession, and which would end by destroying
life itself. Not wickedness but disease is what we are really
confronted with ia that case ; and though with the imperfect
instruments of research at our present command we cannot
discern the actual minute structural changes which are the
physical conditions of the deteriorations of character, and
link them in an exact correspondence the one with the other,
we feel none the less sure of their existence and of the un-
failing correspondence. In the visible destructive changes
that are patent after death we recognise the extreme patho-
logical issues of the minute molecular changes which, though
unseen, we are sure are there at the beginning.

Note here and consider for a moment, in passing, the
impulse to steal which is so marked a feature in some,

MORAL HEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 269

though not in all, cases of general paralysis. Whence
comes it? It would not be true to say that there is a
hidden instinct to steal in all persons who fall victims to
that disease, an instinct that is unveiled by its ravages,
since all general paralytics do not exhibit it. But it is true
that there is in every one a strong self-conservative instinct,
which in the domain of complex social evolution shows
itself in manifold secondary modes of self-preservation and
self-aggrandisement. The information we need, and which
must be set down as entu-ely wanting, is a full and exact
previous history of the character of the individual who ex-
hibits this symptom, in respect particularly of the strength
and forms of his acquisitive tendencies, and the full and
exact character-histories also of the members of his family,
since in one or another of them we may perceive in full dis-
play what lay in germ only in him. It is a close and rigid
study of individual psychology that is wanting and is wanted ;
for to learn, as we do perhaps in some cases, that insanity or
another form of nervous disease existed in his ancestors,
though a distinct advance on anything that prire psychology
can tell us, is stUl knowledge so vague and general as to be
of little more value than it would be to know that he was
born when this or that planet was in the ascendant. Had
we such exact histories at our service, and could we there-
upon find our way through the complicated interactions, by
tracing the orderly developments which undoubtedly exist
in the seeming disorder, it is certain that we should discover
the required explanation. The impulse to steal would
perhaps be revealed as the pathological evolution of strong
or strongly self-regarding acquisitive impulses in that family
nature.

More than a mere knowledge of the family bent of
nature, however, would be needed in any case : in order to
understand fully the varieties of moral derangement, it
would be necessary to study them in relation to (a) the
exact character of the individual as it has been formed
by inheritance and training ; (b) the particular disinte-
gration of it by disease, according to the degree, extent
and particular character of the disease — that is to say, its

270 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

special morbid range and the special damage it has done ;
and (c) the subsequent pathological developments of the dis-
integrate character ; which may be of little moment in some
eases, as in general paralysis, -where the severity of the
organic disease, entailing a mental destruction, precludes
them, but of great importance in other cases, as for example
in chronic hereditary insanity, where there is no such
hindrance to the developments of morbid or degenerate
varieties of human nature. Let no one then at any time
deceive himself by laying the evil impulses within him to the
charge of a devil or any other external principle of evil, but
let him rather search diligently for the source of them in
himself and in his ancestral antecedents, and endeavour
patiently to eradicate them in himself and in his posterity.

Here let us pause for a moment in order to mark the
ground which has thus far been gained and to see where
we now . stand. It was shown first, being set down as a
fact of observation, that mental derangement in one gene-
ration is sometimes the cause of an innate deficience or
absence of moral sense in the succeeding generation, the
child bearing the burden of ancestral depravation in a con-
genital deprivation ; and we now place by the side of that
statement this second observation — that moral feeling, the
finest flower of social evolution, is the first function of mind
to be affected at the beginning of mental derangement in the
individual. Thus it appears that an absence or impairment
of moral sense marks the way of degeneracy in the individual
and through generations : as man begins to go to pieces,
alike as individual, as family, as society, as nation, as
humanity, the moral feeling goes : the last to inspire him it
is the first to expire in him.

The next examples of marred moral character and will
to which I call attention are those which sometimes follow
injuries of the head. It happens in these cases after an in-
jury that may or may not have caused immediate symptoms
of a serious nature, that slow degenerative changes are set
up in the brain, which go on in an insidious way for months
or years and produce first great irritability, then little by
little a weakening, and eventually a destruction of mind.

MOEAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 271

The person who appears perhaps to be all right soon after
his accident turns out to be all wrong, and irretrievably
wrong, years after it. Now the instructive matter is that
the moral character is usually impaired first in these cases,
and in some of them is completely perverted without a corre-
sponding deterioration of the understanding. The injury has
given rise to disorder in the most delicate part of the mental
organisation, the part which is only separated from actual
contact with the internal surface of the skull by the thin
investing membranes of the brain ; and once this delicate
organisation has been seriously damaged, it is seldom that it
is ever restored completely to its former state of soundness.
The first symptom to attract notice is a change of temper
and disposition for the worse, the most fine sensibilities and
the highest inhibitive functions having been plainly impaired.
He is easily and unduly excitable, especially by alcohol, a
little of which will produce a great effect, perhaps rendering
him actually insane for the time its effects last ; he is prone
to outbreaks of anger which mount almost to outbreaks of
maniacal fury; may indulge in excesses that are quite
foreign to his natural character ; a moderate fever or other
inflammatory disorder will give rise to delirium ; he is easily
exhausted by mental exertion to which he finds himself un-
equal; is incapable of systematic and steady application.
The meaning of these symptoms is that the co-ordination of
the supreme miiid-centres has been so weakened by their dis-
order, their equilibrium rendered so unstable, that it is easily
overthrown by causes that would have no such effect upon a
sound mental organisation. As matters get worse, an in-
creasing loss of memory and other symptoms of mental
decay show themselves, and the course of events is pretty
regularly, or with interourrence of acute mania and perhaps
epileptic fits, to dementia — the term of the morbid degene-
ration.

Here it will be proper to take particular note of the sig-
nificant fact that one whose mental organisation has been
lamed by injury to the head in the way just described is, at
the commencement of the trouble, very much like in general
temper and quality of mind one who has inherited a distinct

272 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

tendency to insanity : his weakened brain is brought to an
unstable state very much like that which the latter has in-
herited naturally. Easy excitability, especially by alcohol,
oiitbursts of passion that overflow into torrents of incoherent
fury, sudden and passing, delirium lighted by a moderate
fever or by other causes which would be inadequate ordi-
narily to produce that effect — these and the like are signs of
weak inhibitive powers of the higher social or moral sort ;
the natural result of such weakness being the indulgence of
egoistic tendencies, anti-social in their operation, and an
ever-increasing mischief as habit makes the way of disorder
easier and the return to order harder. Later on more shall
be said concerning the qualities of a brain whose temper has
the flaw of a predisposition to degenerate mental function ;
at present I desire only to note the resemblance between it
and the brain that has been damaged by the effects of
violence. Assuredly passion and prudence, self-control and
reflection, right and wrong, even pleasure and pain have
very differeat meanings to a person so constituted or so
maimed morally from what they have to one who has no
reason whatever to blame either inheritance or accident.

To discuss at length the abstract question whether pleasure
is the aim of human conduct seems to be hardly a more fruit-
ful procedure than it would be to discuss whether stockings
are the aim of human feet. I suppose if mankind had not
practically felt it a proper aim to pursue pleasure and to shun
pain they would not have invented Heaven as a place to be
aspired to, and Hell as a place to be recoiled from ; a reflec-
tion which may be allowed to settle the abstract question for
us here. Certainly a prior obligation that would properly
lie upon us before we made the attempt to ascend into the
high regions of abstract discussion would be to find a solid
standing ground in a concrete study of the particular indi-
vidual and his particular likings and dislikings, pleasures
and pains, as determined by natural temper, training, age,
constitutional state and the like ; for certain it is that one
man's pleasures are another man's pains, and that the same
person may find very bitter at fifty years of age what he
relished acutely at twenty-five. Moreover, if pleasure, is it

MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 273

immediate or distant, seeingthat it depends on the individual's
foresight whether he looks beyond the moment, or the hour,
or the day, or the year ? And, if distant, is it minutes, years,
or centuries distant, since the direct pleasure of the moment
may be a sacrifice of self to an unborn posterity ? To settle
abstractly whether pleasure is or is not the end of human
conduct is very much like settling the question after it has
been emptied of its contents.

Thus far it has been shown that moral feeling and will
are impaired or destroyed by degeneration going on through
generations, by the disorganising effects of disease, and by
direct physical injury to the brain. I now go on to point
out that the same effects are produced by the chemical
action of certain substances which, when taken in excess, are
poisons to the nervous system — ^by the abuse of such nerve-
stimulating and nerve-narcotising substances as alcohol and
opium. Nowhere is to be found a more miserable specimen
of degradation of moral feeling and of impotence of will than
is presented by the person who has become the abject slave
of either of these pernicious indulgences. His finest moral
sensibilities are extinguished and his least fine blunted:
steadily sensitive to his own selfish wants and persistent to
gratify them, he is insensible to the feelings and claims of
his family whose dearest interests he sacrifices without real
compunction, and indifferent to the obligations and responsi-
bilities of his social position ; he will often profess you very
fine sentiments, and perhaps indulge in the pleasant debau-
chery of a visionary imagination inspired by intensely egoistic
feeling and stimulated by the drug, but uncontrolled by reali-
ties, the disciplinary and disagreeable hold of which the drug
has deadened or destroyed ; for the most part he is untruth-
ful and untrustworthy, and in the worst end there is not a
meanness of pretence or of conduct he will not descend to,
not a lie he will not tell, not a degradation he will not undergo,
scarce a fraud he will not perpetrate, in order to gratify
his absorbing craving. It is not enough to say that passion
is strengthened and will weakened by indulgence, as a moral
effect : that is so no doubt, but beneath that effect there lies
the deeper fact of a physical deterioration of nerve-element ;

274 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

for the alcoliol and tlie opium enter the blood, are carried
by it to the inmost minute recesses of the brain, and act
there injuriously upon the elements of the exquisitely deli-
cate structures. So its finest, latest organised, least stable
parts which subserve moral feeling and supreme will are
marred. Vain is it to preach reformation to one who has
brought himself into this damnable predicament; if any
good is to be done with him he must be restrained forcibly
from his besetting vice for a long enough time to allow the
brain to get rid of the poison, which it will do pretty soon,
and its tissues to recover their healthy tone, which they will
take a long time to do, if they ever do. Moreover, the tis-
sues have sometimes had the congenital misfortune to begin
with the original taint of a depraved tone; they have in-
herited the proclivity to drink, it is ingrained in their nature ;
and once the craving is stirred it is kindled quickly by gra-
tification into uncontrollable desire.

There is nothing pleasant in the taste of alcohol or of
opium — at any rate in the first instance before experience
of their pleasing mental effects has associated that pleasure
with the experience of the means to it, and so, by a fusion of
the pleasure of the end with the means, produced a vitiation
of the natural taste — to make men betake themselves to
them so eagerly as they do all over the world. This eager
use running headlong into abuse is evidence of the longing
that there is in human nature for the ideal ; for an elation
of feeling, an expansion of sympathy, a freedom of mental
• power, an exaltation of the whole nature, mental and bodily,
are obtained thereby which are denied to it by the real. The
low savage does not care for the taste of rum, but once he
has had the ideal opened to him by feeling the exhilarating
effects of it he will sacrifice everything he possesses, even
his last blanket, to procure it, and abandon himself unre-
strainedly to its effects whenever he has the opportunity ; so
that there is no surer way of initiating and hastening the
decline and extinction of savage races than by the introduc-
tion of alcohol among them,' Herein we see a curious proof

' Except perhapa to bring them into contact with civilisation, and to
expect them to conform to its usages 1 To impose regnlaritj and constraint on

MORAL FEELING AND WILL IN DISEASE. 275

of the wide gap that there is between the lowest human
being and the highest animal, for no animal, except perhaps
here and there a monkey or an elephant, appears to have
such a taste of the ideal kindled in it by alcohol as to over-
come the repugnance of its natural taste. When it is made
a reproach to the drunkard that he degrades himself in a
way which no brute ever does, he may claim that as proof of
his highcir capacity and higher aspiration, confessing how-
ever, if he be penitent enough, to a cultivation of the ideal in
a wrong fashion. Were he mere brute he would be content,
like it, to live in the gratifications of his senses : it is because
he has higher yearnings in him that he is dissatisfied with
the real of sense, craves a compensating ideal of the imagina-
tion, and creates it for himself either as drunken bliss, or as
a vision of earthly grandeur in some shape or other, or as a
life of eternal happiness in the world to come — a house not
made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Pessimism in fact
supplemented by optimism in theory — such the eternal plan
of human life ; wherefore the two rules of it come finally to
be, according to the dark or bright ground-tone of the indi-
vidual's nature, according as it is instinct with the hard logic
of reason or animated with the warm hope of imagination —
llfaut cultiver rwtre jardin, and Ilfaut cuUiver notre ideal.

natures that demand lawless liberty ; to create In them wants which they
have not and which they think you strangely contemptible for having ; to
attempt to instil abstract thoughts and moral feeling into beings whose lan-
guage is a vehicle incapable of conveying them, who have only sensations and
few, simple, and mean ideas, and who practise a gross sensualism ; — ^what is it
but to break up the foundations of their mental being 1 To beings of so low
and simple a mental organisation Christianity is a disintegrant — as pernicious
almost as alcohol.

276 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL,

SECTION IV.

THE MOEAL SENSE ATTD WILL IN CRIMINALS.

Habitual criminals are a class of beings whose lives are
sufficient proof of tlie absence or great bluntness of moral
sense. It is the common experience and common testimony
of those who have much to do with these antisocial varieties
of the human kind that a certain proportion of them are of
distinctly weak intellect, albeit not suflGlciently so to warrant
their seclusion in asylums as idiots or imbeciles. They
abound among vagrants, partly from a restless disposition
and an inability to apply themselves to steady and
systematic work, and partly because they do not easily find
or keep employment. They are addicted to petty thefts, to
acts of wanton mischief, and, much more so than the
criminals that are not of such plainly low organisation, to
arson, to sexual offences, and even to homicide. The ex-
ternal conditions of civilised life are too fine and complex
for their blunt and defective capacities, and they are unable
to adjust themselves to them so as to procure the gratifica-
tion of their propensities or even the means of living ; hence
it is that, urged by their instincts and impatient of restraints
whose nature they are incapable of appreciating, they are
prone to explode in some criminal act. Sometimes they are
provoked to a passionate act of violence by those who tease
or otherwise irritate them ; sometimes they are impelled to
imitate a crime of which they have read or heard spoken ;
sometimes they are used designedly as instruments by
criminals of stronger intellect whom they look up to with a
sort of respect. Their fate is indeed a hard one. Congenital
outcasts from the social organisation by the preordination
of the society^ that has produced them, it is nevertheless
demanded of them that they should conform to the laws
of a body of which they are not a part, but from which they
are apart ; and they natmally fall back upon the inalienable
right of the individual to be: that right of which no one
can be deprived or deprive himself, quo nemo cedere potest, as

MORAL SENSE AND WILL IN CBIMINALS. 277

Spinoza says — the right, that is to say, to live and to pursue
the means to live.

In prison they prove troublesome to the officials, partly
because of their irritable moods and small self-control, and
partly because other prisoners, taking advantage of their
weakness, instigate them to acts of insubordination. They
vrill generally listen respectfully to the admonitions of the
chaplain and express readily and superabundantly the
penitence which he solicits ; one of them, for example, of whom
Dr. Guy makes mention, confessed to as many as five
murders which he had never committed ; but they have no
real sense of the wickedness of their doings, feel no true
remorse, are incapable of genuine penitence. Their de-
fective natures will not take the stamp of virtue. Their
lives therefore are spent in alternations of long periods in
and of short periods out of prison; for after undergoing
their punishment for some offence or other they are dis-
charged at the expiration of their sentences, and, soon
committing crime again, are soon convicted again. Prison
officials who perceive them to be mentally weak and irre-
claimable, and know how surely they will resort to their
criminal ways when they are free, would gladly see a way to
some means of detaining them in a special establishment at
the end of their terms of punishment or immediately after
conviction, but as they cannot certify them to be actually
insane or imbecile in the legal sense no such protec-
tion is given. Some of them are epileptic, and others of
them have sprung from families in which epilepsy, insanity,
or some allied neurosis exists. Malformed or deformed in
part or whole of body, with irregular and bad conformation
of head and face — ^that has been the representation of
criminals by sculptors and painters at all times ; and it may
justly be taken to be the intuition of experience, the con-
solidated result of observation that the organisation of the
wicked is commonly defective. Pity it is that no better use
is made of beings so mal-organised as to be utterly incapable
of moral sensibility and therefore of repentance and reform,
than to punish them with sufferings which do them no good,
and after that to turn them loose again upon society in

278 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

whicli they can make no living room for themselves except
by crime. It is as if the bodily organism, having bred a
morbid element which by its nature could not take part in
the healthy physiological life, but must cause disorder of it
by its presence, were not solicitous to get rid of it altogether
by excretion or to render it harmless by isolation in a
morbid capsule or in a special morbid area, but were to
launch it again and again after each brief period of isolation
among the elements of the healthy structures in order to
generate new disorder. To educate them is not to improve
them, it is simply to render them more dangerous.

Weak as these habitual criminals sometimes are in
understanding, it is instructive to observe how they consort
together by an elective affinity and are united into a loosely
gregarious society by bonds of a kind — ^for example, by the
respect which the weaker has for the stronger criminal, by
their mutual aid and defence against the common enemy on
which they prey, by the secrecy which they have to preserve,
by the thieves' honour which they show in the division of
spoils, and by the like tacit leagues: a society that they
would not keep up, since they would never conform willingly
to any code, but for the constant pressure and always mena-
cing danger from without. In these rude rudiments of morals
they yield us an incidentally instructive example of a moral
sense in the making, for they consider it entirely wrong to
do to one another what they do not think it in the least
wrong to do to society as a whole ; not otherwise than as,
according to the moral code of the Old Testament, ' Thou
shalt not kill ' and ' Thou shalt not steal,' having a specially
tribal application, did not mean, 'Thou shalt not kill a
Canaanite ' and ' Thou shalt not spoil an Egyptian.'

A class of people who, congenitally destitute of moral
sense, have not the sensibilities to feel and respond to im-
pressions of a moral kind, any more than one who is colour-
blind has sensibility to certain colours — ought to be deeply
interesting to the metaphysical psychologist, who, however,
has strangely ignored them in the construction of his philo-
sophical theories. They are apt instances to prove to him
that if, as he alleges, the moral sense has not been acquired

MORAL SENSE AND WILL IN CRIMINALS. 279

in the process of natural evolution, but infused by a super-
natural inspiration, it may at any rate be degraded and lost
by the operations of natural law in a process of human de-
generation. Degenerate varieties of the kind who would
have to be regenerate in order to be fit for any true social
use, they mark the categorical imperative of the moral sense
brought down to zero. What more important and helpful to
him in the construction of a moral scale from positive data
than to have the zero thus definitely fixed ? Unfortunately
they have not yet been made the subject of exact and positive
inquiry, although I cannot doubt that a thorough and com-
plete scientific study of one such person, and of the ante-
cedent conditions of his being, making manifest how he
had come, what exactly he was, and what was the social
meaning of him, would be more instructive than all the
scholastic disquisitions concerning the moral sense that have
been put forth by ambitious thinkers. It is in truth sad
to reflect that no scientific use is made of the abundant
material for practical studies in psychology which our prisons
contain, and that when the world is startled by some
atrocious crime, and shocked by the subsequent exhibition
of an entire moral insensibility in its perpetrator, it thinks
it has done enough when it has uttered a loud howl of re-
probation and insisted on his being put out of the world or
out of the way. The makers and administrators of law ought
really to have some pity for these defective beings suffering,
as they do, under an irremediably bad organisation ; but so
far are they from showing compassion for them that they
punish them angrily, not with the hope of reforming them,
seeing that experience has proved that to be impossible, nor
with the hope of warning and improving others like them,
seeing that their special examples can be no benefit to those
who, defectively organised like them, are equally beyond
remedy, but in retaliation for what they have made society
suffer by their wrong-doings. Therein, though they cannot
plead the warrant of philosophy, they rightly plead an imita-
tion of the Divine exemplar who, claiming vengeance as his
own, has given it full play in the infiiction of eternal punish-
ment : the institution of infinite torture, paradox as it seems.

280 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

being the necessary and logical result of God's infinite love
for Himself.'

So much, for the victims of a bad organisation who are
urged into crime by instincts whose natural restraints are
wanting, whatever their circumstances of life, and are not to
be reformed by instruction, or by example, or by correction.
Another class of criminals, standing at the opposite end of
the scale to them, comprise those who, not being positively
criminally disposed by nature, have yet fallen into crime in
consequence of a gradually increased or a suddenly inflicted
pressure of adverse circumstances. They were probably
much like hundreds of persons who have never overstepped
the conventional line between their trade-morality and
acknowledged crime, but they were so unfortunate in the
changes and chances of life as to be exposed to suddenly
urgent or to insidiously sapping temptation; and they
succumbed. Plainly they had not the best moral fibre, or
they would have stood firm in resisting whatever temptation
they were exposed to, but they were not worse endowed in
that respect than many who, by reason of more fortunate
circumstances, have escaped a similar adverse stress and
fate. A great deal of the virtue of life is owing to the
absence of the fit provocation to vice ; if among a hundred
women one commits adultery, may we not safely say that
there are some of the ninety-nine others who would have
done the same in the same circumstances ?

Between the two classes of criminals mentioned, the
nature-made and the circumstance-made criminal, will come
a third class comprising those who, having some degree of
criminal disposition, would have been saved from crime had
they enjoyed the advantages of a good training and of
favourable surroundings, instead of growing up without
education and amidst criminal surroundings. The circum-
stance-suiting faculty of the brain adapts itself readily to
the criminal atmosphere and grows to that mode of exercise.
And in this relation it certainly ought not to be forgotten
that there is education and education, and that it is small
profit to teach a child the distance of the sun from the earth,
' See an article in the Month of January 1882, by the Eev. Father Clark.

MORAL SENSE ANB WILL IN CEIMINALS. 281

if it be not taught at the same time to know, and not taught
to know only but trained to feel, the distance between its
higher and lower natures.

This division of criminals into three classes serves well
for convenience of apprehension, but of course they are
not thus separated by actual divisions in nature ; on the
contrary, they are united by all varieties of intermediate
cases ; degrees of difference of moral strength in different
individuals being as constant and as common as different
degrees of intelligence. To apportion responsibility exactly
according to deserts would be a task exceeding the re-
sources of human justice ; but to attribute the same
measure of moral capacity to all persons is to accuse divine
justice, -which has ordained things far otherwise. Meanwhile
it is not a little curious to reflect that while all the world
entertains more or less pity for the criminals of our second
and third classes, making allowance for them as victims of
unfortunate circumstances, it has no sort of pity for those of
the first class, who are really the victims of a worse fate —
the fate made for them by the tyranny of a bad organisa-
tion. I suppose the reason of that is that they stir an in-
stinct of repulsion, because, regarded from the standpoint
of the human ideal, they are felt to be less human. But
why, viewing the matter from a more detached standpoint,
should a lame mind provoke any more anger than a lame
body ?

The foregoing reflections suffice to show that when man's
nature is made the subject of serious study the instigation
of the Devil is not an admissible explanation of its evil im-
pulses ; that in all cases we must seek elsewhere for a natural
cause of the effect defective. Nor is it again enough to think of
such impulses as self-procreated in a spiritual entity, spring-
ing up mysteriously in ib from nowhere, and not legitimate
subjects of scientific inquiry. Man will never truly realise
the progress in self -improvement which he is capable of
making, until he searches out exactly the laws by which he
has become what he is and uses his knowledge systematically
to make himself different. The problem is the same here as

it is in the lower sciences — prevision for the purposes of
19

282 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

action : to observe in order to foresee, and to foresee in order
to modify and direct. And the method to be employed is
the same as that which has served so well in them — that is,
the patient and diligent application of the method of obser-
vation and induction. At one time it was the general
belief that earthquakes, destructive storms, and other great
physical calamities were the work of Satan ; the belief that
lunatics were possessed with devils, who instigated their
violent deeds, continued in vogue until quite a late period ;
and it is still a belief in many quarters that the evil impulses
of the wicked are inspired in them by the Devil, who by the
loss of successive provinces in nature has now been driven
to his last entrenchment in the human heart. And it seems
likely that he will soon be driven out of that ; for as we
search out diligently the causes of those great physical
calamities of nature which were once thought to be of super-
natural origin, and endeavour to prevent or to lessen by
suitable means and appliances the damage which they do ;
and as in like manner we inquire patiently into the nature
of the diseases that afilict the insane and try to cure them ;
so we have now to search and learn whether the evil spirit
that is in the wicked man, who in the land of uprightness
deals unjustly and will not turn away from his wickedness
to learn righteousness and to do justly, is not the legacy of
parental or other ancestral error, wrong-doing, misfortune, or
vice. When that inquiry has been completed successfully,
it is not improbable that the domain of the- supernatural in
human affairs will be yet further contracted ; but if it be
actually extinguished mankind must bear the last great
loss patiently, as they have borne the extinction of Mars and
Minerva, of the miracle-worker and the astrologer, of the
beliefs in witchcraft and in special supernatural interpositions
to reverse natural laws. Meanwhile it is worth noting here
that the theory of Satanic impulse was based upon a genuine
recognition of facts in so far as it admitted a determination
of the individual by a stronger power in himself than he
could counteract, while it strove hard, ingeniously compro-
mising matters, to save responsibility by ascribing to the
individual the indulgence of the evil passions through which

WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 283

the Devil gained access to the citadel. It is the same old
difficulty always coming back upon us in different guises
and under different names : what part has determinism,
what part freewill, in human doings ?

SECTION V.

DISOEDESS OP WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT.

It is a trite enough observation that nature does not show
anywhere broad lines of demarcation, but makes everywhere
easy passage from one class of things to another by gentle
gradations, so that between the least things and the greatest
a continuity exists throughout. It is we who make separate
sciences, in consequence of the constitution of our faculties
limiting our channels of apprehension to a few special points
of contact with the external : we divide and classify in order
to apprehend, making thus a sort of anatomy of nature. But
inasmuch as we can only anatomise the dead, and as nature
certainly is not dead aAd dividual but living and unity, we
perforce sacrifice or lose much by these enforced divisions.
Could we comprehend nature as a whole, which however
intelligence c^-extensive with it could alone do, the meanest
things and the mightiest, the most like and the most unlike,
the nearest and the most remote, all things great and small
would be perceived to be bound together essentially as ele-
ments of one mysterious whole. We should then perceive by
an instantaneous intuition how necessary an issue of all the
operations and changes of matter on earth from the begin-
ning to now was any present act done there — the very act
for example which I perform of writing the word that I
write at this moment — and foresee in it all the possible
operations of matter in time to come.

Between the most sanely constituted individual, compact
of well-balanced moral feeling, under^rfianding and will, and
the ill-constituted individual whom all the world is agreed
to pronounce mad, there are beings who make a line of human

284 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

continuation from the one to the other: mediators they
might be called, since a mediator must by virtue of being
it share the natures of both the persons or classes between
which he mediates. Near the borders of insanity then, yet
not actually within them, we meet with persons some of
whom it is not easy to classify : persons who in their modes
of thought, feeling and will show marked peculiarities or
positive eccentricities which make them remarked as unlike
the ordinary run of men ; who have in fact an insane tem-
perament — that is to say, a temperament of mind which be-
speaks descent from a family in which insanity exists, which
is itself a predisposition to insanity, and which betrays itself
in odd departures from the common standard of social feeling
and conduct. With the moral peculiarities go in extreme
cases some peculiarities of bodily features and functions, such
as ill-shaped or unsymmetrical head, ill-formed or deformed
ears, squint, stutterings and stammerings, grotesquely dis-
cordant expressions of face — one part of which perhaps looks
serious while the rest is wreathed in smiles — extreme grim-
acings, especially under the influence of excitement, and
other nervous distortions of features that occasion disloca-
tions of the ordinary harmonies of expression, and that are
of the same nature as the dislocations of the muscular co-
ordinations and of the ordinary associations of ideas; but in
many cases there is nothing more noticeable in that respect
than a specially marked stamp of physiognomy which has
been fashioned by the mood-marking muscles of facial expres-
sion. In the lines and play of their features, in fact, and
often also in the carriage, attitudes and gestures of body,
one sees moulded the predominant traits of their moral
character.

Without going into details which, suitable enough in a
treatise on mental pathology, would be unsuitable here,' we
find, when we inquire what are the broad features of this
unsoundly leavened mental temperament, that they mark,
first, a partial degeneration or at any rate an incomplete
sanity of moral feeling, and, secondly, a corresponding im-
pairment or incomplete development of will. That is what

' For details of the kind I refer to my treatise on the Patlwltxgy of Mimd.

WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 285

miglit perhaps have been foretold ; for if a temperament is
unsound it is predisposed to degeneracy, and the degeneracy,
•whether it be into madness or into badness, will be marked
by some defect of moral feeling and will. Not that the pecu-
liarity in these persons commonly reaches a depth or takes
a character of moral decline which could rightly be termed
moral degradation; in many instances it is rather of the
nature of a moral eccentricity or a moral discord, while in
others it consists in the exaggerated growth of some parti-
cular quality of character which, natural in temperate develop-
ment, in excess becomes vice. Vanity grown to such a height
as to lose the restraint of sanity ; love of gain developed into
an extreme avarice and miserliness ; suspicion and distrust
of others so excessive as to become a veritable monomania ;
a mobile impressionability so little ballasted by logic of cha-
racter or training as to present a perfect exemplar of inco-
herence of thought and insincerity of feeling ; — these and the
like egoistic tendencies in hypertrophied growth are the
tokens of the deep fault, so to speak, in the moral disposi-
tion. The fundamental note of character beneath the exces-
sive growths is an intense and narrow self-regarding egoism :
not necessarily a deliberate, conscious selfishness, but an
acute self-feeling ; a constant and inveterate reference of all
impressions to self, which is easily touched to the quick, being
what is called very sensitive, as well it may be when all its
Hensibilities are collected into one sensitive point and that
point self; a serene and exacting assumption, of a tacit kind,
that what is important to him is or ought to be of equal mo-
ment to all the world and a corresponding exacting demand
on the services of others, without any sense of obligation or
(gratitude ; a sheer incapacity to conceive the insignificance
of self in the economy of the whole and to view it and its
relations objectively. The one thing a person of this kind
cannot do is to objectify himself — to surmount self by a
humorous criticism of self. It is impossible for him to
believe, as he gets to the worst, that he and his concerns do
not or ought not to fill as large a place in other people's
thoughts as they do in his own, who, he may come to per-
suade himself at last, are thinking or speaking ill of him,

286 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

scheming and plotting against him, ridiculing and shunning
him, and the like.

These excessive growths of egoism which put the indi-
vidual out of sound and wholesome relations with his fellows,
and so far isolate him, exemplify very well the dif&culty of
attaining to and maintaining the right equilibrium between
a development of individual tendencies and a just regard to
the influence of the social medium : too much influenced
from without, there is an end of spontaneity and he becomes
little more than an automatic piece in the social mechanism ;
too little influenced from without, individuality is apt to run
into an excess which verges on madness in extreme cases,
and in all cases lacks the wholesome discipline and support
that are got by growth against resistance and are essential
to its best development. Vanity is a passion which is of
social origin, springing from a love of the admiration or
praise of the kind, and so far is a useful force in the social
organisation, since it spurs the individual to gain what it
pleases his vanity to have; although intensely egoistic in
character, it is altruistic in the source of its sanction as
an incentive of conduct, and altruistic also in the self-
sacrificing energies which it sometimes inspires, since a
person may risk what he values most, even life itself, out of
an exalted vanity; so it has an intermediate and useful
position between the more purely egoistic and the more
purely altruistic feelings. Its social significance is well
shown by two reflections — first, that the vainest mortal does
not look for the admiration of his horse, and, secondly, that
his horse does not look for the admiration and flattery of its
kind. But vanity, like other egoistic passions, cannot ever
obtain its completest gratification if it is too self-regarding ;
for it then defeats its own end of attracting praise and
admiration, and brings on its possessor dispraise, ridicule
and contempt. It is a quality which, in order to discharge
its function well, must not grow beyond a certain mean ; the
further it exceeds that measure the further it puts the indi-
vidual as a social element out of the reach of the controlling,
modifying, directing and inspiring influences of the social
organisation ; until at last he becomes a positive morbid ele-

WILL IN M.ENTAX DEEANGEMENT. 287

ment, useless or injurious in it. That we see to be the ten-
dency and foresee to be the probable outcome of the narrow,
intense, excessive vanity of the insane temperament. Envy
again, another passion of social origin, has an innocent side in
so far as it stirs the individual to exertion in order to emulate
him whom he envies ; but when it is suffered to grow rank
and malignant in the mind it con-odes the strength and eats
out the goodness of character. So also with regard to the
feeling of suspicion, which is a natural function in a
complex social state ; for it is certain that without it no
one would be able to conduct his life successfully in the
midst of a crowd of self-regarding elements many of them
justly deserving to be suspected. Held in due balance by
the sense of surrounding checks and assimilating their
influence, it is beneficial; suffered to grow to excess, in
disregard of the restraining, consolidating, and strengthen-
ing forces of the social medium, it runs into a mania of
suspicion that cuts the individual off from communion with
his kind, and becomes truly insanity. It is unfortunate
that while the virtues of the mean in the general are evident
enough, the real difficulty is to find and to keep it in the
particular, seeing that it is always relative ; the virtue of one
social medium being the vice of another, the faith of to-day
the fable of to-morrow.

As it has undoubtedly been the effect, we may say that
it has been the aim, of the social union of men to facilitate by
mutual help the satisfaction of their fundamental or primary
wants — ^that is to say, the food-want, the sexual want, and
one may perhaps add the clothing-want ; and the condition
and effect of such union ha,ve necessarily been, as I have
already pointed out, a certain repression of the personal or
egoistic element, since the individual must needs conform to
restraints on his primary passions in order to have the
benefits of co-operation and even to render it possible. But
a further and more remote effect of the increasing social
complexity is to bring the personal element again into active
development through the manifold secondary interests,
ambitions, passions that are engendered in the complex
social state — ^those social egoisms which are the less crude.

288 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

but not less selfisli, social developments of tlie primary
passions. Personal gratification no longer seeks or attains
its aim in tlie mere satisfaction of physical wants ; it has to
seek and attain them in a social medium by social means
and in social advantages ; and so it is that pure egoism
necessarily undergoes social transformations in spite of
itself. It appears then that egoistic and altruistic are
terms which mark too abrupt a division when they are set
over against one another to signify opposite and unrelated
passions : for egoism cannot operate in the social sphere to
its own advantage except by putting on the form of altruism.
Now the constant tendency of the personal element is to
inspire and urge to undue gratification these secondary
passions that are developed out of the social union. Hence
the difiBculty, nay the impossibility, of keeping a society pure ;
hence indeed an inevitable tendency in itself to breed cor-
ruption. Selfish devotion to pleasure, eager pursuit of
wealth without the least regard to the oppression and
misery that the pursuit may entail on others, unworthy
ambitions of power and place and the use of unworthy
means to attain them, guile and fraud in business, enerva-
ting luxury and effeminacy, decadence of public spirit, all
the elements of decay that mark the decline of a society
and go before its destruction, — these are the outcomes of an
excessive egoism in its social developments. Obviously their
tendencies are not to social consolidation but to social dis-
ruption : without the sentiment of human solidarity intellect
and power are selfish and disintegrant. In the social fusion
of egoistic energies, however complete, there is always latent
a disruptive or explosive disposition, as we may plainly
understand there must be if their natural repulsions have
been constrained under tremendous pressure to efface them-
selves in the development of affinities : it is a tendency of
them to get free, which gains force rapidly when the
surroundings are not favourable to the maintenance of the
social solidarity, and which in any case has its way in the
end. Tor a society cannot any more than an individual
continue to develope for ever, or for ever continue in one stay.
In its primary forms of crude and simple passions the

WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 289

necessary repression of egoism was efiPected only by the
awful terrors of superstition and by tbe most rigorous ex-
ecutive measures on the part of the community to enforce
conformity to the tribal or national customs and religions :
what is there available to do a like needful work now for
the secondary social egoisms when the gods have one after
another become extinct and when supernatural terrors have
lost nearly all their force ? It is a vastly momentous ques-
sion for modem societies, and they will hardly solve it in
the best way by going on as if it will never need to be
solved. In any case it will not fail to solve itself, for
assuredly the feeling of human solidarity, which is the basis
and essence of religion in its true sense, is in the social
organism very much what the heart is in the bodily organism :
when it ceases to beat there corruption and death begin.
In a complex social state the individual has not, it is true,
very great power singly to do mischief, be his aim and work
never so selfish; if he is to spread his influence, whether
baneful or beneficial, widely he must work in combination
with others. Hence it is that associations and societies for
co-operation in a common work are so many and active in
modern communities. Selfish and corrupt men find it
necessary or advantageous to unite together in societies or
companies in order to make their evil gains at the cost, and
oftentimes to the ruin, of the ignorant and the unwary whom
they delude and defraud. Persons of the same trade,
though competing eagerly against one another, join in the
observance of a common trade-morality, which is actually an
immorality, being a sanctioned fraudulent combination
against the community under the guise of the custom of the
trade. Too often the modern commercial company is a
signal and sad example of the social union of bad men to
extend the area and increase the power of their entirely
selfish activity; and the pity of the matter is that the ex-
posure of nefarious schemes that have overwhelmed hun-
dreds in ruin do not overwhelm their authors in infamy. So
it is made evident that a complex society breeds in itself the
morbid elements which feed on it, flourish in it, and in the
end kill it. For it is another evil of the social system of

290 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

which such pernicious antisocial elements are bred and in
which they flourish, that the wrongdoer mostly goes un-
punished; the appeal of his victim to law for redress is
frustrated, because the process has been rendered so tedious,
troublesome, complex and costly, by the exactions of many
personal interests engaged in it, as to make it a less suffering
for him to bear wrongs and less repugnant to allow the
guilty to go free, than to seek an uncertain redress by that
means ; more especially when the appeal has to be made to
those who are tainted with a sympathy for such commercial
enterprises and cannot see the iniquity of them.

If such a society is to be saved from corrupting decay,
nothing but a revolution of some kind will save it ; further
evolution will only be the evolution of further elements of
dissolution. The ideal which it worships is a debased and
debasing one, not truly an ideal, but in reality an anti- ideal,
and it sees it not. The only salvation then lies in a revolu-
tion the great and tragic events of which, sweeping away
conventionalisms and fusing barren and obsolete forms in
its fire, extinguish ruthlessly these social egoisms, and
bring men back to the stern realities and radical principles
of human association. And it is only from below that such
effective uprising, if it comes from within the society, can
come. There would appear, however, to be one of three
events which may happen to a society in this stage of germi-
nating disruption, as Vice pointed out : either the strong
hand of a dictator or Caesar who, making himself master,
holds interests in firm check and gives executive force to
the administration of paralysed law; or subjugation by a
nation whose strength has not been corrupted by luxury and
effeminacy, and which, inferior in so-called civilisation, is yet
stronger and better, in so far as it is able to conquer and to
govern ; or lastly, when despot and conqueror alike fail, civil
strife and war arising out of excessive personal interests and
weakened social bonds — a return in fact to a waste of barbar-
ism fro mwhich at some distant day new life may spring. It
is Bacon who makes the apt comparison of such disorganised
and expiring commonwealths to 'the streams of Helicon
which being hid under the earth (until the vicissitude of

WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 291

things passing) break out again, and appear in some other
remote nation, though not perhaps in the same climate.'

With societies as with individuals it is not intellect that
constitutes character and will save their souls alive : more
acute intellect will only be a keener pursuit of selfish
aims if there be not beneath it a sound solidarity of social
feeling. The mere lust of knowledge is no better in itself
than the mere lust of power. It is poor progress to be able
to move over the earth at a speed ten times faster than our
forefathers, if we lose our forefathers' simple and solid social
virtues ; no great thing to surpass them in the brilliancy of
electric lighting, if we get no better moral illumination. Of
all foohsh labours that may obtain a record in the history of
humanity, when its course on earth is run, should some
higher being there ever vn:ite the tragical story down, the
most ludicrously abortive will be seen to be the attempt to
build up a stable nation on a gospel of smartness. Any one
who chooses may convince himself that the great revolutions
of the world which have been the visible beginnings of new
eras of progress did not spring from intellect but from feel-
ing; not fully formed, Minerva-like, from the scheming head,
but by slow gestation from the brooding heart, of mankind.
When a revolution has been an affair of the understanding
it has not been difficult to stop it by cutting off the heads of
the few who conspired, but when a revolution has been bred
in the hearts of the people it has not been stopped by cutting
off their heads. Underneath the surface-waves of national
consciousness which show themselves in the traditions,
opinions, open feelings, institutions, aims of a people,
there are in the deepest fountains of its character a great
many latent energies at work ; and it is these that pursuing
their secret and silent courses in infra-conscious depths really
prepare the future and, when their waves are felt on the
surface, determine its course. Manifesting their deep pulses
here and there from time to time in scattered and disorderly
volcanic upheavals which the ignorant ruler, uninspired by
them, despises, so making ultimate revolution necessary, but
the wise ruler, inspired by them, takes wise account of, so
making evolution gradual, — they are the premonitory beats

292 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

of a movement that, coming from tlie brooding heart of
society, lies deeper than knowledge, and that knowledge will
one day have to reckon with.

As indeed with the individual so it is with humanity as
a whole : it is feeling that inspires and stirs its great pulses,
the intellect fashioning the moulds into which the feelings
shall flow. If you ask then what in time to come is to
break to pieces the rampant egoisms of modern society,
and to bring men back to the radical principles of human
solidarity, seek the answer in a calm and purely scientific
examination of such scattered upheavals of the great
sub-conscious social forces as take place from time to time
in communistic, socialistic, nihilistic, anarchic outbreaks;
blind, reckless, wildly visionary, seemingly insensate, it
is true, but not therefore mea.ningless — neither causeless
nor without final cause ; on the contrary, pregnant with the
deepest meaning, being effects of what is in weltering ferment
now beneath the surface and forewarnings of what will be,
either catastrophically or gradually.' There will be a grim
experience and a troubled future for the nation that has not
known, before that hour comes, how to guide these forces in
the right way, and to absorb and embody them in fitting
forms of social and political organisation. The French Ee-
volution was momentous enough as an event, but it is per-
haps more so as an awful example teaching how silently the
great social forces mature, how they explode at last in vol-
canic fury, if too much or too long repressed, and how terrible
and apparently meaningless a desolation they produce. But
not meaningless actually; for, as mankind is constituted,
human progress is through human society, and these devas-
tating storms are the revenge which the evolutional nisus
takes on transgressed laws and at the same time the sweep-
ing remedy which it applies to a rotten social organisation.
It is anything but a sign of vigorous health when no such

' Are they to be denounced, deplored, violently suppressed as wildly
insane, because they appear simply destructive ? You might as well denounce,
deplore, and violently suppress the destructive break-up of old chemical com-
binations, because you cannot foretell the new and higher combinations that
.are eventually to follow.

WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 293

infra-conscious energies are active in a nation, for it means
that the evolutional impulse in it is exhausted and decadence
in progress.

To return from this endeavour to point out the disruptive
consequences of excessive antisocial egoisms to the straight
path of our inquiry. A society thoroughly pervaded by sel-
fish aims and pursuits may, like an individual moved by pre-
dominant egoisms, go on — the former for several generations,
the latter perhaps for a lifetime — ^without showing any further
tokens of degeneracy; whereupon the passing observer
remarks only how well the wicked flourish. But let him pass
by in succeeding generations and things shall not, perhaps,
wear so flourishing an aspect. The antisocial conditions of
one generation predetermine the social disintegrations of
following generations, and the antisocial egoistic develop-
ment of the individual predisposes to, if it does not predeter-
mine, the mental degeneracy of his progeny ; he, alien from
his kind by excessive egoisms, determines an alienation of
mind in them. If I may trust in that matter my observations,
I know no one who is more likely to breed insanity in his
offspring than the intensely narrow, self-sensitive, suspicious,
distrustful, deceitful and seK-deceiving individual who never
comes into sincere and sound relations with men and things,
who is incapable by nature and habit of genuinely healthy
communion either with himself or with his kind. A moral
development of that sort is more likely, I believe, to pre-
determine insanity in the next generation than are many
forms of actual mental derangement in parents; for the
whole moral nature is essentially infected, and that goes
deeper down, and is more dangerous, qua heredity, than a
particular derangement : a mental alienation is the natural
pathological evolution of it. Once more, then, we perceive
how deterioration of moral feeling proves itself to be an initial
mark of degeneracy, by the distinct mental degeneracy which
it produces when it has free course.

It goes without saying that the best will cannot coexist
with such imsound moral dispositions as I have described
under the name of insane temperament. True it is that
they present sometimes that thin, shrill, eager, intense will

294 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

which, inspired by passion, is a sort of spasmodic self-will,
but we do not observe that calm, full, strong, free will which
comes of large and true appreciation of external relations
and of just co-ordination of thoughts, feelings, and desires.
Moreover, we mieet sometimes with most remarkable instances
of singular impotencies and perversions of will among per-
sons who have this insane temperament. A thought of a
painful kind or an impulse to do some absurd or wrong act
arises in the mind and keeps its footing there, despite the
most earnest desire to get rid of it; thrust into the back-
ground for a moment bj the urgent call of present interests
or duties, it returns again and again to the front at the first
chance, getting at last such a hold of the mind that the
alarmed individual, who feels himself demoniacally possessed
by it, is brought to a state of extreme horror and distress.
Ludicrous as the tale of his sufferings seems in the telling of
it, even to himself, it causes an unrest and anguish of mind
which are far from being ludicrous ; for the sense of having
lost hold of himself, of being at the mercy of an internal
impulse which is not himself, the alarming apprehension that
he may in an unguarded moment some day yield to an insti-
gation which it costs him all his strength of watchful will to
withstand, the awful feeling of a disruption of self and the
appalling dissolution of self-confidence that accompanies it,
— ^these produce an abiding distress and at times an inde-
scribable despair. Even when the idea or impulse is in
momentary abeyance, present enjoyment is hindered and
the pleasure of hope frustrated by the overhanging dread of
its recurrence.

Here then we are presented with a very remarkable dis-
integration of will in one who is certainly not insane in the
sense of having lost his reason, seeing that he is clearly con-
scious of the nature of his affliction and able to reason quite
as justly about it as any one need be, but who is not sane in
the sense of having a sound and compact union of well-
balanced nerve-centres as the basis of his mental organisa-
tion, and the consequent power over himself which would
come of such a union. This native weakness, the outcome
of which is a divided will — a dread of willing in obedience to

WILL IN MENTAL DEEANGEMENT. 295

a rebellious impulse of self tliat whicli the larger and truer
self would not will — is with him a matter of inheritance
mainly, but a similar condition of nervous system is some-
times brought about by special nerve-enervating causes.
Whatever be the intimate and hidden molecular conditions,
it is plain that the bonds of association between the different
nervous centres that together constitute the mental organisa-
tion are so weakened as no longer to exert the inhibitive in-
fluence necessary to keep them in their natural equilibrium
and make them act together in perfect unison. The result is
much like that which befalls when a particular muscle or a
set of muscles in a physiological group or series betakes
itself, in consequence of disorder of the proper nerve-centres,
to independent action against a person's will and occasions
the sort of mutinous movement we caU choreic : it is a kind
of St. Vitus's dance of the idea or impulse. The movement
is perhaps distressing to him in the highest degree, but he
cannot hinder it ; the more he tries to do so, and the more
he thinks about it, the worse it is. There is a functional
dissolution of the mental organisation, a disruption of the
solidarity of its associated centres, the consequence of which
is a decomposition or disintegration of will. For the will
means, as I have already shown, the conscious expression of
the co-ordination of mental functions working to an end :
that co-ordination imperfect, will is imperfect; impaired,
will is impaired ; exact and complete, will reaches its high-
est quality and energy, its highest functional expression, in
the particular person. Disruption of co-ordination is de-
composition of will ; decomposition of will is dissolution of
self ; dissolution of self before it is so great as to entail the
actual loss of normal consciousness — that is to say, when it
is impending and forefelt rather than actual and present —
is accompanied by the most alarming shock to self-con-
fidence.

So much then concerning the special features of that
unsoundly tempered character which, stopping short of
actual insanity, is yet, as it were, the premonition of it. Its
peculiarity being a native deficience of mental co-ordination
and a consequent tendency to separate and inco-ordinate

296 THE PATHOLOGY OP WILL.

action of parts— a neurosis spasmodica, as I have elsewhere
described it, which translates itself in consciousness as a con-
vulsive psychosis — as distempered moral feeling and dismem-
bered will — it is obvious that any enervating cause reducing
still lower the natural energy of such a mental organisation
will easily occasion those more serious disorders of function
which are recognised as positive mental derangement.
There is no reserve power in the background available to
counterbalance the exhausting conditions, and the degeneracy
runs quickly down to complete anarchy. Herein we may
discern the explanation of three events which claim notice in
the clinical history of hereditary madness : the first is the
ease and rapidity with which the malady passes from its
beginnings into a display of extreme incoherence ; the second
is the like rapidity with which recovery takes place some-
times from an extreme and almost hopeless looking incoher-
ence, an equilibrium easily upset being easily restored ; and
the third is the rapidity with which, when recovery does not
take place, the disease runs down into an extreme and hope-
less dementia — the easily induced functional disorder of the
first event lapsing quickly into the organic deterioration of
the last event. The essentially weak or unstable constitu-
tion either of nerve-element itself or of the organised associa-
tion of nerve-centres, or of both — the first being perhaps a
main condition of the production of the second — in persons
who have a strong hereditary predisposition to madness is
shown furthermore by the fact that a similar condition of
things, betraying itself by similar symptoms, is produced
sometimes by active nerve-exhausting causes in persons who
have not up to that time shown any noticeable signs of such
a predisposition.

The briefest survey of the main features of the leading
forms of mental derangement is enough to show that a
loss of power over the thoughts, feelings, and acts is an
essential fact of the anarchy. Not that the aflSicted person
is himself distressed usually by this failure of will, or even
so much as aware of it ; on the contrary, so far from being
unhappy is he that oftentimes he is jubilant in the exulting
consciousness of a glorious power of intellect and of a freedom

WILL IN MENTAL DERANGEMENT. 297

of will which he never experienced before. However, if we,
distrusting this exultant declaration of self-consciousness,
set ourselves to watch him attentively, we soon perceive
that it is innocently playing a gross deception on him ; it is
the true witness to an exuberant activity of a sort, but by
no means a competent witness to the quality of the activity,
for it is inevitably suborned to testify directly as it is directly
inspired. Before he has actually fallen into mania, indeed
while he is displaying the premaniacal semblance of mental
brilliancy that is often so signal a feature of the beginning
of the attack, it is plain that thoughts and feelings surge up
in his mind in an irregular and tumultuous fashion, and
impel him to strange and disorderly acts. There is manifest
an extraordinary mobility of ideas and feelings for a short
time before the stage of actual incoherence is reached:
instant, abrupt, and rapid transitions from subject to subject
without a following up of the natural affinities or sequences
of any subject ; no restrained excitation of the proper acces-
sory ideas, supplemental or complemental, to complete the
grasp of the perception or of the conception, which therefore
is only partially formed in the mind^ but instant and promis-
cuous excitation and discharge of ideational centres or tracks
that receive and react with amazing rapidity ; a correspond-
ing instability of moods shown by quick and abrupt transi-
tions through the gamut of feeling from expansive amity
and effusive cordiality to angry suspicion and menace with-
out any external provocation ; a restless change of movements
answering in some measure to the rapid changes of ideas
and moods. Obviously the natural inter-restraints or inhi-
bitions of the mental nerve-centres have been impaired or
abolished ; instead of one of them when stirred to function
being held in due balance by another that would naturally
offer such a resistance, the effect seems to be a quick and
easy inter-stimulation, not perhaps unlike that which persons
exert upon one another in a crowd inflamed by fear, fury,
or fanaticism. Instantaneous makings and breakings of
thought-circuits, and the makings, no sooner made than
unmade, of all sorts of accidental connections, are the order,
or rather disorder, of events. We may conclude that the
20

298 THE PATHOLOGY OP WILL.

symptoms mark two stages of degeneration, though, at
bottom perhaps these are degrees of the same process : first,
an excitation of nerve-element whereby the sensitivity of the
centres and the conductivity of the inter-connecting paths
are extraordinarily increased, so that quick, varied and
transient associations of flashing ideas, often only half com-
plete, give a momentary semblance of mental brilliancy ; and,
secondly, as the disorder increases, a further impairment of
the natural stability of the associated centres, so that disturb-
ance of equilibrium passes readily and quickly from one to
another without meeting with any resistance, and there ensues
a general and tumultuous incoherence. Here, if we consider
it, appears the truth of the old saying that anger is a short
madness, especially in those persons whose ideational centres
have naturally quick sensibilities and little inhibitivities, if
I may coin such an uncouth word ; for in that respect it is
certain thab there exist very great constitutional differences,
in one person any outbreak of anger being an actual inco-
herence, while another is hardly ever transported out of
himself by rage, although in most persons a furious passion
is more or less incoherent.

It is curious and instructive to watch the struggle which
is taking place sometimes in the mind at the beginning
of acute mania, before the undermined will is completely
shattered. We may observe the patient succeed by a mani-
fest effort in bringing himself under its control for a few
moments when he is aware that some one is watching him,
or when he is spoken with or sharply remonstrated with;
collecting himself on the instant he speaks and acts in a
calm, measured, and coherent style, as if after grave deli-
beration, although he is under an evident strain ; but it
is an over-strain that he cannot keep up, for the enfeebled
will soon lets go the reins and he relapses into a turmoil
of incoherent thought, speech, and conduct, becoming, as
the disease makes progress, incapable of a moment's real
self-control. In saying that the will lets go the reins, I
employ a metaphorical expression that properly befits the
abstract psychologist only ; what is concretely meant is
that the increase of the inco-ordinate and separate action

WILL IN MENTAL DEEANGEMENT. 299

of the supreme centres is the deepening disintegration of
will.

Take another variety of madness : the person who is
suffering from that deep morbid gloom of mind which is
called melancholia — a gross exaggeration of ordinary melan-
choly, as mania is a gross exaggeration of ordinary anger —
finds pei-haps some painful thought, blasphemous, obscene,
or otherwise afflicting, come into his mind against his
earnest wish, causing him unspeakable distress, and hold its
ground there in spite of all the efforts of an agitated and
enfeebled will to expel it ; so hateful an intruder is it, so
alien to his feelings, so repugnant to him, so independent of
his true self, that, unable to account for it naturally, he ends
perhaps by ascribing it to the direct inspiration of Satan, to
whom he believes himself abandoned because of the enormity
of his sins. Or he may be afflicted with a frequently up-
starting impulse to do harm to himself or to others, conscious
all the while of the horrible nature of the impulse which he
resists with frenzied energy, and going through agonies of
distress during the paroxysms of its activity, and the struggles
that he makes to prevent his true will being overmastered
by it.

The monomaniac broods over some idea of greatnfess or
of suspicion, rooted in its congenial feeling of vanity or sus-
picion and drawing to itself the sympathetic nourishment of
like-kinded ideas and feelings, until the weakened will loses
restraining hold of it, and it grows to the height of an insane
delusion. It is an instance of the disruption of the solidarity
of the mental nerve-centres : first, by a concentrated or
predominant function of one group of them, and subsequently
by an excessive development or hypertrophy of that group,
so to speak ; and with these conditions goes a corresponding
breach of the integrity of will, functional and remediable in
the first, organic and for the most part irremediable in the
second, event. Here again it is curious and interesting to
watch the alternating predominance of the true and the
insane self at the outset of the degeneracy, according as the
individual is or is not under the sway of his delusion, and
the sort of struggle for existence that is going on between

300 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

them ; in the good event of recovery the sane self gradually
gains the day and he emerges into clear consciousness ; in
the bad event of deterioration, the insane self carries the
day, and he imagines himself, if of optimistic temperament,
prophet, king or other great personage, or believes, if pessi-
mistic, that the whole world is in a conspiracy against him.
Whatever the event, it is an example of the survival of the
fittest : the fixed delusion is the fit pathological develop-
ment of the naturally weak and vain temperament which
withdraws from the discipline of facts into an unwholesome
indulgence of egoisms ; the return to sanity is the proper
self-assertion of a stronger and sounder natural temperament
which is capable of coming into wholesome relations with
its surroundings. Were I called upon to compress into one
short precept the essence of the best rules to be observed in
order to prevent the development of such an insanity, I
should be tempted to say to the individual, Learn to think
yourself no less a fool than anybody whom you think a fool.
Everywhere then we observe impaired will to mark the
beginnings of mental derangement, and effaced will to mark
its last and worst stages. Tor when we contemplate the sad
spectacle of its last term, as we are confronted with it in the
utterly demented person in whom all traces of mind are well-
nigh extinguished, who must be fed, washed, dressed by
others, cared for in every way, being incapable of any care
of himself, whose life is little more than a mere vegetative
existence, we see plainly a complete abolition of rational
will go along with the complete mental disorganisation. Is
there behind this degraded matter, and struggling in vain to
utter itself, a soul of the same substance and quality as that
of the philosopher ?

SECTION VI.

THE DISINTEOEATIONS OP THE ' EGO.'

A DILIGENT study of the facts of mental pathology would do
the pure psychologist a real service, if it moved him to obtain
and frame for himself some kind of notion of the material
conditions of things which he concedes to run parallel with
the divers will-energies, albeit he might continue to uphold
the self-sufficingness of his introspective method. Why not
resolve to have a definite mental representation of the two
invariably and essentially parallel processes, when he has
occasion to think of either ? It would be an excellent check
on vagueness of thought and expression, for it would help
him to feel that he has a definite meaning in the abstract and
somewhat empty psychological terms which he uses so freely,
and to make others feel it, and would perhaps render his
use of them a little more deliberate, exact, and sparing.
Nor would it be amiss by way of gaining a conception of
the nature of the mental organisation, and of the expression
of ibs co-ordinate functions in will, to reflect at the same
time on the solidarity that exists between the various parts
of a complex State, ideally well ordered and well governed,
whereby the executive action is the full and faithful repre-
sentation of all interests in their due subordinations and
co-ordinations; or, if he likes better to go down to the
physiological organism than upwards to the social organism
for a helpful illustration, let him consider the wonderful
sympathy and synergy of organs there, and ask himself if
they would do their work so well had they the disturbing
gift of consciousness. This in any case he should not fait
to apprehend : that in that exquisitely fine and intricately
complex organisation which is the physical basis of mind
every interest of the entire body, every organic energy, has
direct or indirect representation: there is nothing in the
outermost that is not, so to speak, represented in the inner-
most. Not one organ but all organs, not one structure but
all structures, not one movement but all movements, not one

302 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

feeling but all feelings ; all vibrations of energy, of wbat sort
soever, from all parts of the body, tlie nearest and the most
remote, the meanest and most noble, conscious and infra-
conscious ; — stream into the unifying centre and make their
felt or unfelt contributions to the outcome of conscious
function. The brain is the central organ of the bodily
synthesis, sympathy, and synergy, and the will at its best
the supreme expression of that unity. Therefore it is that
in will is contained character : not character of mind only,
as commonly understood, but the character of every organ
of the body, the consentient functions of which enter into
the full expression of individuality.

That being so, it is made evident that disorganisation of
the union of the supreme cerebral centres must be a more or
less dissolution of the conscious self, the ego, according to
the depth of the damage to the physiological unity. Even
if any one organ of the body be defective, it is a breach in
the supreme uniby of consciousness, for it is a deprivation to
the extent of its deficient energy, and a disturbance to the
degree that its work is thrown upon other organs : it is like
a horse in a team that does not do its exact share of the
work uniformly. The constant feeling of personal identity
on which metaphysicians lay so much stress as a fundamental
intuition of consciousness, discerning in it the incontestable
touch and proof of a spiritual ego which they cannot get
into actual contact with in any other way, may be expected
to be sometimes wavering and uncertain, in other cases
divided and discordant, and in extreme cases extinguished.
But that is a dismayful expectation to entertain concerning
the ' I,' the ' ego ' — the ens unum et semper cognitum in omni-
bus notitiis — of which they thus protest we have more or less
clear consciousness in every exercise of intelligence. Look
frankly then at the facts and see what conclusion they
warrant. Is there the least sign of a consciousness of bis
ego in the senseless, speechless, howling, slavering, dirty,
defenceless, and utterly helpless idiot, whose defective
cerebral centres are incapable of responding to such weak
and imperfect impressions as his dull senses are able to
convey, and incapable of any association of the few, dim and

DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 303

vague impressions that he does receive ? No doubt his body,
so long as it holds together by the ministering care of others,
may be said to be an ego or self; but from the human stand-
point what a self ! It is not a mental ego, since the central
organic mechanism in which the lower bodily energies should
obtain higher representation, and mental organisation take
place — the before-mentioned synthesis, sympathy, andsynergy
be effected — is either altogether wanting or hopelessly ill
constructed. The miserable specimen of degeneracy does
not and cannot therefore in the least know that he is a self,
or feel that a human self is degraded in him. If the sure
and certain proof of a soul existing independent of the organ-
ism, and the thereupon based sure and certain hope of a
resurrection to life eternal, be the distinct and permanent
consciousness of identity amongst all changes and chances
of mortal structure, it is certainly a mighty pity that
the proof should fail us in the very case in which its certi-
tude is most needed, would be most consoling and assuring,
and its success most triumphant.

While the idiot yields us a signal example of the depri-
vation of a consciousness of self the records of mental
pathology yield abundant examples of its derangements or
depravations. What shall be said of the mean person born
in a garret and bred in a kitchen who has never gone
beyond the dreary routine of the basest manual labour, and
who nevertheless believes and declares himself to be king
of England or the Saviour of the world ? It will be said
perhaps that after all he has not lost consciousness of self,
seeing that he is conscious he is a self, albeit he has a wrong
notion of the self which he is. Certainly he is likelj', so long
as his body keeps its unity of being, to be conscious of being
that unity ; but it is plainly nonsense to say that he has a
distinct, ever-present, intuitive consciousness of personal
identity when he cannot identify himself. The curious
thing is that this great personage, after he has found his
way into a lunatic .asylum, sometimes settles down there into
a quiet and monotonous routine, doing the humble work set
him to do as if he were quite a common person, and accept-
ing the attentions of his lowborn relatives when they visit

304 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

him ; not failing, however, to assert his pretensions when-
ever reference is made to them, and becoming angry and
excited when they are called in question, ridiculed, or denied.
In practice, so long as he thinks not of himself, he is his
true self ; in thought, so soon as he thinks of himself, he is
his untrue self. He presents a double or divided personality :
his true one representing the habits of his automatic being
and the more stable functions of his lower nervous centres,
which he exhibits in his capacity of routine-worker doing
mechanically what he is set to do ; his other and not true
self, which he exhibits when he reflects on himself and
asserts his pretensions, representing the less fixed and now
deranged functions of his supreme nerve-centres, especially
of that group of them which is the basis of his deluded
thought. Thus he has lost what was his last, human gain —
his consciousness of true moral identity; he has retained
consciousness of his personality as an eating, drinking, and
labour-performing organic machine. No wonder that his
conduct exhibits a gross inconsistency, and stirs a sort of
doubt or suspicion whether he really believes himself to be
the great person he claims to be, when his mental nature is
thus divided into two dissentient parts that act indepen-
dently, and cannot be brought into consentient function.
As when an organism has become the seat of a serious
morbid growth which increases at its expense and to its
detriment, yet lives its own life apart from it, it can no
longer be said to have a true physiological unity, but actually
embodies in itself two different and hostile unities ; so with
the mind in which a morbid delusion has grown to such a
height as to impose itself upon the judgment, and, taking
no part in normal thought, lives its own life apart, there is
no longer unity but division of the personality or self — a
pathological unity developed within the natural physiological
one. The metaphysical assertion that the ego has not exten-
sion and is not divisible is then confronted with two weighty
objections : first, that it is impossible for extended beings to
form a mental representation or even so much as a definite
conception of an entity of that nature, and, secondly, that
it is directly opposed to plain facts of observation.

DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 305

The tmth is that the manifold varieties of mental
derangement yield examples of all degrees of lessening
brightness of the consciousness of self down to its actual
extinction, and of all sorts of derangement and confusion of
it from the least unto the worst distraction. Always the
difficulty in a particular case is to know exactly what the
defect or confusion is, since it is not possible to enter into
another person's mind, to realise his state of consciousness,
and in that way to measure and appreciate its exact degree
and quality. The tendency is inevitable to misinterpret
facts, because it is to interpret them by the light and
according to the standard of a sound consciousness; and
that is a mode of interpretation which may be quite as
wrong as it would be to judge the defective sense of the
colour-blind person by the colour-sense of one who is sensi-
ble to all the varieties and intensities of colour. The latter
finds it hard to realise in the first instance, and if he be an
ignorant person can hardly be made to realise, thab any one
has that defect, because it is so contrary to his own experi-
ence, and his preoccupied mind is not open to receive the
plain evidence of facts. So it is with the sundry and divers
defects and abnormalities of consciousness met with in the
different varieties of mental derangement ; the railing judge
denounces the insane criminal whom he sentences to death,
just as if they both had the same sane consciousness, and
he, abandoned wretch, had wickedly violated it for the selfish
pleasure of doing murder ; and the introspective psychologist
bases his entire philosophy upon a method which assumes
the self-sufScingness of his individual consciousness. Mean-
while it requires a long and patient observation of instances,
for which there is for the most part neither the opportunity,
nor the inclination, nor the training, to correct these errors
of assumption and to infix in the mind just conceptions of
the variety of obscurations, eclipses, and distractions to which
consciousness is liable.

How many patient observations and experiments, and
how much steadfast insistence, on the part of the physiologist
were required to prove to the introspective psychologist,
measuring all human actions by a standard of consciousness.

306 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

that there was a class of movements which, having a purpo-
sive form and constituting a large part of daily conduct,
were nevertheless strictly automatic, being performed with-
out will and in some instances without consciousness. Even
now his recognition of them is not much better than a lip-
acknowledgment, and he rather annexes them as a foreign
appendage to his philosophy, than assimilates and incorpo-
rates them into its substance. Consider it well, and it will
be seen that in the formation, nature, and purpose-effecting
work of a complex reflex act there are all the elements of
that which when consciousness goes with it — as it does in the
functions of the highest nerve-centres — we call knowledge :
reception and reaction, registration of experience, associa-
tion of registered experiences, adaptation of means to end,
and definite action in accordance with these anterior opera-
tions — in fact, incorporate knowledge, reason made substance.
For whafi are these purely bodily operations at bottom but
processes which, when, they take place consciously, we
describe as feeling, retention or memory, apprehension,
judgment, belief and will ? An agile person who is accus-
tomed to cross a busy street quickly, darting in and out
among the vehicles with which it is crowded, performs a
dozen acts of judgment in as many seconds on each occasion,
without being conscious of them. Let him deliberate about
the several decisions which he makes and he will most likely
be knocked down and run over. For the relations of his
quick and apt movements are not to the conscious ego, of
which they are well-nigh independent in direct aim as in
function, but essentially to the preservation and maintenance
of the organic ego. The mind has little, if any, more to do
immediately with them than it has to do with the short
flight that a hen makes after its head has been chopped
ofi'. It will probably be a long time yet before the full
meaning of this physiological fact is realised, and the con-
ception applied to the bodily operations of the same kind
which, because they are illumined by consciousness, are
deemed to mark a new order of being and called mental,
and before, therefore, clear and exact notions are obtained of
what the body can do by itself and of the part which con-

DISINTEGEATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 307

sciousness truly has in mental function. Probably it ■will
be a still harder matter to convince the psychologist of the
derangements and distractions which the consciousness of
self actually undergoes in disease, since they are entirely
opposed to his mental preoccupations, and the domain of
them lies altogether away from his observation. Contra-
dictory instances that discredit the very basal principle of
his method, it is more easy and natural to pass them by
without consideration as morbid and irrelevant, than to make
an unwelcome study of them.

It is a common event in one sort of mental disorder,
especially at the beginning of it, for the person to complain
that he is completely and painfully changed ; that he is no
longer himself, but feels himself unutterably strange ; and
that things around him, though wearing their usual aspect,
yet somehow seem quite different. I am so changed that I
feel as if I were not myself but another person ; although I
know it is an illusion, it is an illusion which I cannot shake
off; all things appear strange to me and I cannot properly
apprehend them even though they are really familiar ; they
look a long way off and more like the figures of a dream than
realities, and indeed it is just as if I were in a dream and my
wUl paralysed. It is impossible to describe the feeling of
unreality that I have about everything; I assure myself
over and over again that I am myself, but still I cannot
make impressions take their proper hold of me, and come
into fit relations of familiarity with my true self ; between
my present self and my past self it seems as if an eternity of
time and an infinity of space were interposed ; the suffering
that I endure is indescribable : — such is the kind of language
by which these persons endeavour to express the profound
change in themselves which they feel only too painfully but
cannot describe adequately. An observer of little experience,
or one who has made little good use of his experience,
judging these complaints by a self-inspective standard, is
sure to think that the distress and impotence are largely
fanciful or at any rate much overstated, and that they might
be got rid of if the will could be stirred to proper efforts ;
not able to realise in his own experience such an extraor-

308 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

(linary mental state, he cannot enter into real sympathy with
it or believe thoroughly in it. But if he has never had the
delirium of a fever to give him practical experience of strange
conscious states and to confound and alarm him with the
most singular distractions of self, let him call to mind what
has doubtless happened to himself more than once when he
has been awakened suddenly out of sleep and been helplessly
unable for a few moments to realise who he was or where he
was or whether he was at all, although seeing around him
the usual objects, cognising but not recognising them,
hearing words distinctly but apprehending them not; let
him then imagine this brief and passing phase of conscious-
ness to persist, and to be his ordinary mental state ; and he
will in that way obtain far juster notions of the extraordinary
states of abnormal consciousness than he will ever get by
the sharpest and most skilful inspection of its ordinary states.
The interpretation one may guess to be something of this
kind. When the sleeper wakes in a sudden start out of a
deep sleep or in the midst of a dream, the impressions made
upon the senses from without, though he is dimly conscious
of them, do not strike an accordant (ihime of the correspond-
ing idea-centres, and therefore no perception takes place,
the mind is a blank — the senses in fact are awake before
their perceptive centres. As these, however, awaken in
instant succession from their torpor, he becomes more clearly
conscious, the mind less blank but more confused, because
external impressions begin now to strike some partial and
wavering accordances with the partially awakened ideas and
their associations ; the result being a sort of half-conscious-
ness of self, or rather a dim consciousness of a distracted or
half-self. At last the whole mental organisation recovers its
full functions, the internally organised percepts accord com-
pletely with their fitting external impressions and are in free
relations with one another, and he is himself again recognis-
ing distinctly everything about him. So it is with the
deranged and partially deranged mind. In consequence per-
haps of some intimate disorder of the nerve-elements of the
brain, but at any rate in consequence of the interruption of
the bonds of association between the functionally grouped

DISrNTEGEATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 309

centres whereby they combine in each percept and, at a
higher level of abstraction, in each concept, the indivi-
dual is cut off from his natural hold of external realities,
cannot make circuit with them, so to speak, and they there-
fore seem to be removed to a greater distance or wear a
strange aspect of unfamiliarity ; the dull and dim sensations
that he has from them cannot be brought into full, close, and
exact relations with the past organised constituents of the
ego. These his perceptions and conceptions of the external
world as he has learned by experience to perceive and con-
ceive it do not, because of the disorder of their mental
organisation, supply the fitting interpretation of the signs or
language of sense through which objects appeal to it ; 'tis
just as if he were being addressed in foreign language only
partially understood by him ; and accordingly the impressions
made upon the senses by his surroundings, not being tho-
roughly recognised and adequately interpreted by the excita-
tion of their accordant percepts, are not felt and known
as familiar, not truly realised, seem not in fact to be his.

Is it not as if the cerebral molecules had undergone a sort
of half -turn or dislocation — some polar displacement perhaps
— and were fixed there, and so could come only into partial
relations with one another ? Manifestly were that to take
place between the molecules it would entail a corresponding
dissociation of the functionally grouped centres, an event
which for that or some other reason has certainly taken
place. The supposition, fanciful as it is, of a temporary
polar dislocation of the molecules, accords at any rate with
the singularly sudden and complete way in which the whole
trouble vanishes sometimes, the person who is at one mo-
ment sunk in the deepest apathy and gloom bounding almost
instantly into an opposite state of brisk and joyous energy.
' With one bound the depression vanished,' wrote a lady who
had been for two or three months in a profound apathy of
mental prostration. ' It always goes in that way. Last night
I could have maintained that some abscess broke in my brain.
It was like the bursting of a dyke : no pain, but something
seemed to give way.' In this relation there are two simple
observations that seem fitted to teach something concerning

310 THE PATHOLOGY OF "WILL.

tlie mystery of personal identity : tlie first is, that a foreign
body — an artificial tooth, for example — which is in constant
sensory contact with a part of the body becomes in feeling a
part of it; and the second is, that a paralysed or much
numbed part of the body becomes in feeling apart from it,
in fact, a foreign body. Thus then an artificial tooth, after
it has become a habit of the body, is positively a truer part
of the conscious ego than a paralysed finger. If you do not
get the impressions from without, the world of experience in
its modes as you have perceived and thought it habitually,
into fitting contact with your organised perceptions and con-
ceptions within, so that they are in unison, it is a strange
world to you or you are strange to it — that is to say,
an estranged or alienated self. Severed from the surround-
ings, physical and social, to which, in which, and through
which the individual has grown and lived, he is virtually not
himself. There could be no intuition of the ego without a
complementary or correlative non-ego, no social individual
being without a social medium.

An interesting and very striking example of changed
personal identity is furnished by a form of mental derange-
ment which, as it revolves regularly through two alternating
and opposite phases, was called by French writers circular
insanity, but is better called alternating insanity. An attack
of much mental excitement with great elation of thought,
feeling, and conduct is followed by an opposite dark phase
of depression, gloom, and apathy, each state lasting for
weeks or months, and the usual succession of them recurring
from time to time after longer or shorter intervals of sanity.
Between the two states the contrast is as striking as could
well be imagined : in the one the person is elated, exultant,
self-confident, boastful and overflowing with energy ; talks
freely of private matters which he would never have men-
tioned in his sound state, and familiarly with those above
and below him in station whom, when himself, he would not
have tbcught of addressing; in like manner writes many
and long letters full of details of opinions, affairs, and plans,
to persons with whom he has a slight acquaintance only ;
spends money recklessly, though not reckless in that way by

DISINTEGEATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 311

natural disposition; projects bold aud sometimes wild
schemes of adventure ; is ready and pleased to harangue in
public who never made -a public speech before ; is careless of
social proprieties and even disregards moral reticences and
restraints; listens to prudential advice but heeds it not,
being inspired with an extraordinary feeling of well-being, of
intellectual power, of unfettered thought and will. An
actual disruption of the ego there is not, but there is an
extraordinary exaltation of it, in fact an extreme moral
rather than an intellectual alienation. The condition of
things is much like that which goes before an ordinary out-
break of acute mania, when there is great mental exaltation
without actual incoherence, alienation of character without
alienation of intelligence, but it is not, like it, followed by
turbulent degeneracy ; for when the excitement passes off
there supervenes the second phase, that of extreme mental
despondency and moral prostration.

How changed the person now from what he was ! As
self-distrustful as before he was self-sufficient ; as retiring
as before he was obtrusive ; as shy and silent as before he
was loud and talkative ; as diffident as before he was
boastful; as impotent to think and act as before he was
eager and energetic to plan and to do ; as entirely oppressed
with a dominating sense of mental and bodily incapacity as
before he was possessed with an exultant feeling of exalted
powers. To all intents and purposes he is a different person,
another ego, at any rate so far as consciousness is con-
cerned — subjectively though not objectively — since in all
relations he feels, thinks, and acts quite differently. Not
less marked than the mental transformation is the accom.-
panying veritable bodily transfiguration in some cases ; for
during the exaltation there is a general animation of the
bodily functions which makes the individual look, as he
feels, years younger. The skin is more fresh and soft, its
wrinkles are smoothened, the eyes bright, eager, and
animated, the hair less grey than it perhaps was, the pulse
more vigorous, the digestion stronger, the activity increased
tenfold, and one who had ceased to be after the manner of
women may become so again. During the sequent prostra-

312 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

tion the contrast is so great that he would hardly be known
to be the same person by one who knew him only slightly ;
for every one of the foregoing signs of youth and vigour has
given place to as marked a sign of age and want of vigour.
In the one state he is as if he had drunk a draught of the
elixir of life, in the other as if he had foretasted the apathy
of death.

An interesting fact which cannot fail to attract attention
is that during the exalted state of this alternating derange-
ment the person does with almost exact automatic repetition
the things that he did, and has the thoughts and feelings
that he had, in former exalted states, and during the pros-
trate state that he thinks, feels and does exactly as he did
in former prostrate states. In the one state, however, he
has not a clear and exact remembrance of the events of the
other ; not probably that he forgets them entirely, but that
he has only that sort of vague, hazy and incomplete remem-
brance which one has oftentimes ,of the events of a dream,
or that a drunken man has, when sober, of his drunken
feelings and doings. How indeed could he remember them
clearly, since it is plain he would be compelled, in order to
do so, to reproduce exactly in himself the one state when he
was actually in the other? It is impossible therefore he
should realise sincerely the experiences of the 6ne during
the other, though he may know as a matter of fact that they
occurred to him, and, feeling some shame for what he
remembers, and misgivings concerning what he does not
remember, be unwilling to recall them and speak of them.

Nearly related to these cases, and probably belonging to
the same category, are the examples of so-called double
consciousness that have lately attracted psychological atten-
tion ; notably a case described by Dr. Azam, of which great
notice has been taken, though there was no special novelty in
it. The mental disorder of a hysterical woman revolved
through two quite different abnormal phases alternately :
from her normal state when she was serious, sober, reserved,
industrious, she passed, after an interval of sleep and loss of
consciousness, into an abnormal state, when she was gay,
talkative, imaginative, turbulent and coquettish, remember-

DISINTEGRATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 313

ing then her former similar states and also her normal life.
In due course this lively condition was followed hy an
extreme torpor of mind and hody, from which she returned
gradually to her natural self ; and in this her normal state
she is said to have entirely forgotten everything that passed
during the abnormal states, albeit remembering the events
of her proper life — that is to say, remembering her experi-
ences when she was her true self; not remembering her
thoughts, feelings, and doings when she was not herself,
but another self. As she advanced in years, the normal
states became shorter and rarer, the abnormal longer, and
the transitions from the one to the other almost instanta-
neous. These are the usual features of the recurrent mental
exaltations and torpid depressions that characterise alternat-
ing insanity ; and it is the common order of events in such
cases for the lucid intervals to become shorter, rarer and
less complete, until the disease takes a continuous course
with periodically changing phases. One may doubt perhaps
whether all the events of her abnormal states were as clean
swept from the memory as the reporter of the case assumes,
since those who suffer as she did, having a dull, painful, and
at the same time confused consciousness of having done and
said foolish things during their states of excited ahenation,
will say they forget them rather than attempt to bring back to
their minds what they would gladly forget and willingly be
thought to have forgotten. The natural self, a.shamed of the
abnormal self, is unwilling as it is certainly in gi-eat measure
unable to identify itself with it, confessing however by this
very sense of shame a vague consciousness of identity.

It admits of no doubt that there are states of deranged con-
sciousness in which things are done that are not remem-
bered in the least when the person comes to his true self,
just as there are dreams that are not remembered : in the
so-called hypnotic or mesmeric state, for example, and in
some remarkable varieties of epilepsy, with which the pheno-
mena of somnambulism in some respects and the paroxysms
of recurrent mania in other respects exhibit suggestive
affinities. There is an epilepsy of consciousness, so to speak,

which has no more true relation to the normal consciousness
21

314 THE PATHOLOGY OF 'WILL.

- of the individual than the epileptic convulsions to his natural
movements, or than the convulsive frenzy of people iu a
panic when a crowded theatre takes fire to their normal
mental states. Ask one who has gone through such an
excited experience to describe to you what he saw, felt, and
thought during it, and you will learn how little a person
may remember immediately afterwards of that which he was
acutely conscious of at the time. After a genuine epileptic
seizure certainly, sometimes perhaps before it, sometimes
in its stead, the individual will go through a series of
acts in a more or less methodical way, as if he were con-
scious of what he was doing ; and there is no one who,
observing him, would not say he was ; and yet, when he
comes to his true self, he shall have no more remembrance
of what he did than the somnambulist has of his doings in
the night. It is a hard matter then for those who see him
act with so much purpose and coherence, and consider the
method shown in his behaviour, to be persuaded that he
knew not what he did ; but assuredly if he is conscious at
the time, he forgets immediately afterwards (how help it if
he cannot produce at will the exact recurrence of his
abnormal state ?) ; and though his acts may have evinced
something of the form of his habits, they were not the out-
come of his true self, not what he would have done had he
been in possession of his normal consciousness. To make the
normal self responsible for them would be just as if one
were to make a person responsible for the imagined deeds of
his dreams; in which case everybody would have to be
hanged. Indeed it is dream-life that is best fitted to give
us a just conception of the nature of these abnormal states of
consciousness, since we cannot enter into them from the
data of a sound consciousness, and of the partial, confused,
uncertain memories, or of the complete oblivion, of them
after they are gone.

In spite, then, of aught which psychological theory
appealing to its own internal oracle may urge to the con-
trary, it is incontestably proved by observation of instances
that there are states of disordered consciousness which,
being quite unlike states of normal consciousness, are not to

DISINTEGEATIONS OF THE 'EGO.' 315

1)6 measured by them, and the events of which may be
remembered only dimly, hazily felt rather than remembered,
or completely forgotten. The lesson of them is the lesson
which has been enforced over and over again on physiolo-
gical grounds — namely, that the consciousness of self, the
unity of the ego, is a consequence, not a cause ; the expres-
sion of a full and harmonious function of the aggregate of
differentiated mind-centres, not a mysterious metaphysical
entity lying behind function and inspiring and guiding it ;
a subjective synthesis or unity based upon the objective
synthesis or unity of the organism. As such, it may be
obscured, deranged, divided, apparently transformed. For
every breach of the unity of the united centres is a breach
of it : subtract any one centre from the intimate physio-
logical co-operation, the self is pro tanto weakened or
mutilated ; obstruct or derange the conducting function of
the associating bonds between the various centres, so that
they are dissociated or disunited, the self loses in corre-
sponding degree its sense of continuity and unity ; stimulate
one or two centres or groups of centres to a morbid hyper-
trophy so that they absorb to them most of the mental
nourishment and keep up a predominant and almost exclusive
function, the personality appears to be transformed: strip
off a whole layer of the highest centres — that highest super-
ordinate organisation of them that ministers to abstract
reasoning and moral feeling — you reduce man to the condi-
tion of one of the higher animals ; take away all the supreme
centres, you bring him to the state of a simply sentient
creature ; remove the centres of sense, you reduce him to a
bare vegetative existence when, like a cabbage, he has an
objective but no subjective ego. These are the conclusions
which we are compelled to form when, not blinking facts,
we observe nature sincerely and interpret it faithfully,
going to plain experience for facts to inform our under-
standings, instead of invoking our own imaginations to utter
oracles to us.

I have said enough to show that moral feeling, will, and
consciousness of self are no less liable to suffer from the
accidents of bodily structure than the mental functions of a

316 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

lower grade ; tliat the highest have no immunity or privilege
over the lowest in that respect ; that when disease invades
the physical substrata of mental organisation they are the
first to attest its deranging effects. Nothing would be
gained by going into fuller pathological details, for the
difficulty is not to multiply instances, as might easily be
done, but to get plain instances attended to and the lessons
of them taken to heart.' The teachings of mental pathology
are at one with the teachings of mental physiology, and
indeed with some of the teachings of a rightly interpreted
introspection, in pointing to the same plain conclusion —
namely, that mind does not mean a new order of things in
the sense of a new, entirely special and unrelated order of
being, not subject to the laws which reign in nature, but
inspired from God in the first instance and not anywise to
be known afterwards except through the same inspiration ;
that in the study of sound mental function we have to do
with a natural evolution from the basis of all that has gone
before in the order of existence, with that indeed which is
the latest and highest outcome of the long travail of matter,
and in the study of mental pathology with a dissolution or
unbecoming; and that the fruitful method to be pursued
is the positive method of observation and induction, which
has been successfully employed in the other sciences. That
is the true way, and their gains are the solid steps, by which
we can ascend and enter into the chamber of mind.

' I may refer here to a small volume entitled Zes Maladies de la Volonte,
by Monsieur Th. Eibot, the well-known editor of the Revue Philosophique. I
legiet that the hook reached me after this work was in type.

SECTION VII.

WHAT WILL BE THfi END THEEEOP?

Aee we to look forward to a continued becoming or to an
ultimate unbecoming of tbings ? Will evolution on eartb go
on for ever ? Or is not tbe end of life on earth foredoomed
by as certain a fate as tbe end of individual life 9 Will not
tbe same causes tbat bave formed it, and are bringing it to
perfection, even sbould tbey continue to operate, inevitably
bring it to destruction ? To us, wbo are alive, it may seem
incredible tbat death can be tbe adequate end of such a long
succession and such a vast complexity of life ; but it is
incredible only because we are alive and conceive things
according to our own measure ; it will be more credible to
each of us when he is nearly dead, and not incredible at all
when he is dead. Without doubt there will be further great
gains of evolution yet in the long long while the world may
last, but all the signs point plainly to the conclusion that
its range on earth is limited, its end forefixed in its past,
foretokened in the present, foredoomed in the future. It
may be the time will come after many ages, as good men
hoping believe, when mankind, dwelling together in peace
and unity, shall not learn war any more, and righteousness
shall reign upon earth, or when, as philosophic fdealists
dream, a higher race of beings sprung by evolutional ascent
from man and realising his loftiest ideals shall supplant
him ; but even if these visions of devout imagination become
facts they will only be the steps of a progress that lead
progress so much nearer to its grave. Nay, it may well be
that man is destined to perish off the face of the earth
before he has attained to the wisdom and goodness that he
aspires to; that he is doomed, Moses-like, only to see from
a distance, but never to enter, the promised land of his hopes.
The universe makes no sign of feeling itself under the least
obligation to make him realise his ideal, and the predomi-
nance of the ideal itself in the world must be deemed
precarious so long as an evil power or anti-idealistic process

318 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

exists ill it, since the latter may always hope to win in the
end. Alongside a process of evolution there has always been
iu operation a process of degeneracy, and the simple ques-
tion is whether this process will not eventually gain the
upper hand, and then increasing in a geometrical ratio undo
rapidly all that has been done slowly through the ages.

For what is the actual basis, the fundamental condition,
of all the progress from simple to complex combinations of
matter, from dead to living matter, from low to high
organisms, from simple sensation and movement to moral
feeling and will ? If the answer be made that it is God that
giveth the increase, the answer must be received in silence,
provided only that is not the particular God of any particu-
lar people that is meant : not the God of India, nor of Egypt,
nor of Greece, nor of Rome, nor of Abraham, nor of Mahomet,
nor even the God, older than these Gods, that was worshipped
by the ancestors of the whole Aryan race under the names
of Light and Sky — Dydus-pitar or Heaven-Father, who
became afterwards the Zsiis iraTrjp, or Jupiter. Without
vainly attempting the impossible feat of going beyond our
relations back to a First Cause which must necessarily be
incomprehensible, and even so much as to name is to defame,
we see plainly that the essential condition of all the succes-
sive becomings of things on earth (the ipva-is of the Greek
philosophers which, meaning literally a becoming, we trans-
late and personify as Nature, and bid fair soon to personify-
as Evolution) is the light and heat of the sun. This is the
force — ^represented of old as Father-Heaven generating upon
Mother-Earth — which, acting upon matter through countless
ages, has inspired it to go through its evolutional changes :
the sun, ' of this great world both eye and soul,' praised by
herbs and trees and flowers in the joy of their vernal beauty,
by birds in their thrilling melodies of song, by poets in their
rhapsodies of love. Praise him, ye hosts of planets, poised
in your orbits by him ; praise him, ye mists and exhalations ;
praise him, ye winds, and wave your tops, ye pines; join
voices, all ye living souls ; ye birds, bear in your wings and
in your notes his- praise ; ye that in waters glide, and ye that
walk the earth, praise him.

"WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 319

Hail, xiniversal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us only good ; and if the night
Have gathered aught of evil, or concealed,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark ! '

Such the language of adoration and praise whioli Milton
represents our first parents as addressing to the Lord of
light and life, the power which has infused their energies
into all these things, whose might they continually declare
and whose praises they continually show forth. When we con-
sider that the sun is the immediate source of these energies,
is it any wonder that Sun-worship was the religion of man
at an early stage of his development ? Nor can it be any
wonder that when he came to perceive that the sun with its
system of attendant planets, which at one time seemed the
universe to him, was but a little thing in a galaxy of suns
and stars, no more than an atom-cluster in an innumerable
multitude of similar atom-clusters extending through un-
fathomable space, he rose to a wider and higher and more
abstract conception of the Power in Heaven which fixed the
stars in their places and holds the planets in their orbits,
which appointed the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule
the night on earth, and in which all things there live and move
and have their being. But however high and far in its widen-
ing conception of the universe human thought may relegate
God to the tenuity of the abstract, it remains certain that
for us practically and for our earth the sun is all in all, and
that when its light and heat expire all those energies on
earth which it animates will expire also.

The common law of life is slow acquisition, equilibrium
for a time, then a gentle decline that soon becomes a rapid
decay, and finally death. It is a law which governs the
growth, decline, and fall of nations as well as of individuals,
for a nation, being a complex union of very complexly con-
stituted individuals, cannot any more than they continue for
ever in one stay. Nor can humanity as a whole escape the
doom thus plainly decreed for it. , If the force at the back of
all becoming on earth is that which the sun has steadily

> Pm-adise Lost, Book V., pp. 180-200.

320 THE PATHOLOGY OF "WILL.

supplied to it througli countless ages, and still steadily
supplies, it is plain that when it fails, as fail it one day
must, there will be a steadily declining development and a
rapidly increasing degeneration of things, an undoing by
regressive decompositions of what has been done by pro-
gressive combinations through the succession of the ages.
The disintegrating process may be expected to take effect
first in the highest products of evolution and to reach in
deepening succession the low, lower, and lowest organisa-
tions and organic compounds. The nations that have risen
high in complexity of development will degenerate and be
broken up, to have their places taken by less complex associa-
tions of inferior individuals ; they in turn will yield place to
simpler and feebler unions of still more degraded beings ;
species after species of animals and plants will first degenerate
and then become extinct, as the worsening conditions of life
X'ender it impossible for them to continue the struggle for
existence ; a few scattered families of degraded human
beings living perhaps in snowhuts near the equator, very
much as Esquimaux live now near the pole, will represent
the last wave of the receding tide of human existence before
its final extinction ; until at last a frozen earth incapable of
cultivation is left without energy to produce a living particle
of any sort and so death itself ig dead.'

The inevitable end of all that is done under the sun when
the sun itself is extinguished is a world undone — a world,
that is, become inorganic in the reverse way of that by
which it became organic. We have only to reflect how hard
and mean, torpid and incomplete, human life is now in those
frozen regions of the north where its bare continuance is
precarious, and how paralysing are the effects upon human
activity of an exceptionally severe winter in those temperate
parts where it is usually in full vigour, to perceive that no.
great or prolonged cold will be needed to wither all the
finer feelings and the loftier aspirations of mankind, and to

' All this, if the world perishes by the processes of what may be called
natural decay. But there are equal chances, according to the astronomers,
that it will come to a premature and violent end, the elements being melted
with fervent heat owing to the fall of a comet into the sun.

WHAT WILL BE THE END THEKEOF? 321

bring to an end all the higher forms of its energy. Nor is
it without interest to note how ancient and widespread has
been the notion that the world would relapse into chaos
again. Lucretius was content to believe it on grounds of
reason without desiring to witness it — ■

Quod prooul a nobis flectat fortuna gubernans :
Et ratio potias quam res persuadeat ipsa.

Once the dissolution of things has got full start and way,
it will be vastly quicker than the evolution has been ; for
the degenerate products of social disintegration will not
fail, like morbid elements in the physiological organism or
like the poisonous products of its own putrefaction, to act
as powerful disintegrants, and to hasten by their anti- social
energies the downward course. Not that humanity will
retrograde quickly through the exact stages of its former
slow and tedious progress, as every child now goes quickly
forwards through them : it wiU not in fact reproduce savages
with the simple mental qualities of children, but new and
degenerate varieties with special repulsive characters —
savages of a decomposing civilisation, as we might call
them — who will be ten times more vicious and noxious, and
infinitely less capable of improvement, than the savages of a
primitive barbarism ; social disintegrants of the worst kind,
because bred of the corruption of the best organic develop-
ments, with natures and properties virulently anti-social.
We may note now that degenerate nations which have fallen
far from their once high estate do not recover it, and that
they are really more diflEicult to lift into the path of progress
than barbarous nations that have never known a higher
state : they have exhausted the self-conservative impulse of
evolution and are a fit soil to breed and nurse the retrograde
products of disintegration. In the progressive communities
of to-day we have only to do with such products as occasional
intruders — sporadic occurrences that are foreign to the social
constitution, which, inspired with strong vital energy, is able
to thwart and to eliminate them ; but when it has entered
upon the path of its decline they will predominate and meet
with no counteracting resistance in the healthy vigour of a

322 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

growing social organism. So tten we may read the lesson
thus : as the products of organic decomposition are fatal to
the organism, if not eliminated or counteracted, and the
most virulent and fatal those that are derived from the cor-
mption of its own substance, so the products of social
disintegration will be fatal to social integration, when they
are not eliminated or counteracted, and the most virulent
disintegrants of a nation or society those that are the pro-
ducts of its own social corruption.

If we are minded to guess what will be the effect of the
waning of the evolutional or generative force in nature
upon the feelings and aspirations and energies of mankind,
consider the effects that follow the waning of it in the
individual. Contrast the different mental characters of
puberty, of manhood, of old age : the overflowing energy
of the first, its raptures of love, its generous enthu-
siasms and fervent hopes, its expansive friendships, its
bright and lofty ideals, its ambitions to do great things,
its eager desire of fame — all attesting an exuberance of
evolutional energy ; next the more sober ideals of ripe man-
hood, when the vital energy has attained and maintains an
equilibrium with its environment — activity of more measured
kind, sedater judgment, a great cooling of enthusiasms and
inflamed hopes, calculated amities, colder and clearer reason,
and therewith a considerable disillusioning whereby the
estimate of the value of immediate fame sinks much and
gives place rather to the ambition of a larger and more last-
ing fame in the mouths of a wiser posberity; lastly, the
mental effects of age, as it quenches gradually the ag-
gressive energies of life, disturbing the equilibrium in
favour of the environment, and leaves the self-conservins
energies more than they can do to hold their own. Among
these effects are the extinction of the ideal in a contracted
egoism ; an almost entire absorption in the present and its
pursuits, or at any rate a very small regard to the future,
especially to that great future which is so near at hand ; a
life in sensations and habits ; obtuse or cynical indifference
to the opinion of cotemporaries or of posterity, if the natural
vanity of a vain character has not grown to excess in the

■WHA.T WILL BK THE END THEEEOF? 323

decaying soil of senility ; oftentimes an intensely persistent
grasp of what was possessed and an obstinate desire to be
what he has been, attesting the self-conservative struggle of
failing vitality to hold that which threatens to slip from it ;
decay of all enthusiasms and of the finer moral sensibilities ;
incapacity to feel real sympathy with the joys and sorrows
of others, or indeed to feel deeply any sorrow ; overmuch de-
liberation in endless repetitions withoiit executive energy to
resolve and to accomplish ; no expansive desire or hope to
propagate an esteemed name amongst living kind or through
the ages, the desire, if any, being a joyless habit, like the
possibly still feebly surviving reproductive function. It is a
pregnant lesson and a grim forewarning : a lesson that the
extinction of the reproductive energy of the individual is the
extinction not of his desire only to propagate his bodily kind,
but of his desire to propagate himself mentally through the
ages ; a forewarning that what is taking place day by day in
individual life will one last long day take place in the life of
the race. Is it any wonder then that the generative force in
nature, under one guise or another, has been the object of
worship in so many religions, when worship is itself an out-
come and incident of it ?

What an awful contemplation, that of the human race
bereft of its evolutional energy, disillusioned, without
enthusiasm, without hope, without aspiration, without an
ideal ! To it now such an issue may well appear incredible,
since youth and energy cannot believe sincerely, can only
think it believes, in decay and death. Perhaps it will be
declared repugnant to reason to suppose that mankind could
cherish ideals, and thus far ever rising ideals, were these
not destined some time to have full realisation somewhere ;
and much more so to believe that, having reached its zenith,
these will give place to ever worsening ideals of ever worsen-
ing states of things, as the foregoing theory of human
extinction assumes will happen. But the instinctive repug-
nance ought not to count as a fact of much weight : in the first
place, it is no argument against death that life in full energy
has a repugnance to it and cannot realise it ; in the second
place, the extinction of evolutional energy that must follow

324 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

■»
the gradual extinction of solar energy will involve in its con-
sequences tlie extinction of the upward-tending ideal, and
mankind will go on contentedly with a downward-tending
ideal, or anti-ideal, without feeling it to he such, just as declin-
ing nations do now, any forlorn Cassandra that may raise a
warning cry meeting her eternal fate of heing unheeded ;
and in the third place, if there he an intuitive truth in the
hope and conviction of a future realisation of lofty ideals, it
does not follow that the realisation will take place on earth.
It is perchance a cosmic instinct of the matter of which we
are constituted. In the countless millions of space-pervading
orhs it may have heen and may be again the functions of
many to take up the tale of organic evolution and to carry
the process to higher and higher levels, even to organisations
that are utterly inconceivable to us, constituted as we are.
For us men and for our salvation the earth and its sun are
all in all, but in the universe and its evolution new heavens
and new earths may be natural incidents, and the whole solar
system to which the earth belongs of no greater moment than
the life of the meanest insect is in the history of that system, of
no greater proportion than a moment in its duration. How
grotesquely ludicrous then the absurdity of man's vainly at-
tempted conceptions of a great final cause or purpose of
things ! In order to conceive a cosmic final cause it would be
necessary for tbe individual to achieve the abolition of time,
which is the mere condition of human thought, and to acquire
the power of thinking beyond himself, which would be the
abolition of himself. Let an insect, bom in the morning and
dying of old age in the following midnight, be supposed to
think as we think, it might well believe it impossible that
the glorious pageant of the rising sun, with the accompany-
ing awakening of animal and vegetable life, its waxing
brightness into the full splendour of noontide, and its
gradual waning through evening twilight into darkness
could be the worthy end and purpose of such great events.
Although it would be the absolute end for it, and could not
by it be thought otherwise, it would not be the end, since
after the darkness another day would dawn and countless
other days after that, as countless days had dawned before.

WHAT WILL BE THE END THEHEOF? 325

So may it well be witli the universe as revealed through
human relations. Before our world was an innumerable
multitude of worlds were, and after it has been an innumer-
able multitude of worlds will be. Even though righteous-
ness never reign on earth, and the belief of that blessed
consummation be an illusion with which man dupes himself
into faith and self-sacrifice, righteousness may still have
reigned, may even now reign, and may reign hereafter in the
universe. Those who believe in the fall of man from a high
state of happiness and perfection which he once enjoyed on
earth, the dim memory of which remains in him as an ideal
to aspire to and to regain, so accounting to themselves for
the othetwise inexplicable existence of the ideal in him,
ought to transfer the scene and date of Paradise to another
planet of another solar system countless ages ago. Let them
then discover in the matter of this earth a kind of dimly
instinctive intimation or memory of its experiences from all
eternity, and amongst them of the experience that it once
had of that better life in the defunct planet or planets of
which it formed part.

If the evolutional nisus in nature, and in man as a part
of it, inspires idealism, its failure must be the avatar of
pessimism. The highest becoming of things, the highest
expression of which is in the best human feeling, imagination
and will, then will come to an end, and in its stead will pre-
vail a lower becoming of things, first manifest in the highest
human feeling, imagination and will. No throb more will
be felt of that mysterious inspiration which has been thought
supernatural, and which, whatever its source, has created
ideals and inflamed aspirations, has infused a sacred and
authoritative sanction into morality, and has taken form in
so many inadequate human representations ; and in place of
these dethroned divinities there will be no aspiration, no
holy sense of duty, no belief, only dreary apathy or torpid
resignation. Pessimism declaring the extinction of illusions
will then actually, as sometimes now theoretically, make for
itself an ideal of despair and be content with its gloomy con-
ceit. Be that so or not, however, it may justly be doubted
whether it is anything more than illusive imagination that

326 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

foresees, as crown of organic evolution, a race of placid beings
bound together in unity of spirit, making the whole earth busy
with their peaceful industries, persuaded rationally of the folly
of war, and living lives of good-will and good works to one
another ; whether in fact such a consummation would not
mean the emasculation, physical, moral, and intellectual, of
the race.

Is it so certain as it is assumed to be, that a higher moral
evolution, should it take place, will tend necessarily to the
greater happiness of mankind ? More refined and delicate
sentiments may render an individual too sensitive morally,
and therefore painfully vulnerable in a world the march of
which is marked by no little brutal force. He may become
hyper-sensitive morally as well as physically. A certain rude
and blunt vigour of fibre is a necessary endowment of the
man who is framed in mind and body to succeed well in
practical life. The survival of the fittest is not commonly
the survival of the finest nature. It would be plain ruin for
any one to attempt to realise a lofty ideal in his daily busi-
ness where he is brought into competition with others who
act on a sjstem of reticence, dissimulation, and overreaching.
Do not crushed sensibilities, disillusionment and despair
cause many more suicides than cancer and other painful and
hopeless diseases? Certainly it is not idiots and animals
that commit suicide. In order that morality may succeed
in the world it will be necessary for the immoral to make a
beginning.

If a disillusioned and degenerative end of mankind on earth
has been forefixed from the beginning, it would seem that we
ought to observe here and there, and from time to time in
its history, forewarning indications of that consummation,
more especially now when it has plainly reached a high stage
of self-reflection. May it not be that we are in daily pi-esence
of such foretokens without thinking enough of their meaning ?
Are there not faintly heard from time to time, afar off, the
solemn tolls of destiny which, though hearing them, we un-
derstand not? Metaphysical disquisitions concerning the
reality of an external world ; scepticism as to the very founda-
tions of knowledge, and doubts whether all that we see and

WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 327

seem is not pnre illusion — a dream within a dream ; elaborate
introspective self-analyses ; thin and shi'ieking sentimentali-
ties ; emasculated sensualities in art masquerading as art for
art's sake ; the increase of sorrow that increase of knowledge
is ; the conviction of the utter vanities of all things under the
sun, which has been the experience of the greatest sages and
is the central truth at the heart of all religions ; the multi-
plication of suicides from life-weariness or from impotence
to face life's struggles : — all these and the like maladies of
self-consciousness, notably absent in the animal and un-
civilised man, where generative energy is in full vigour and
has not become self-conscious, what are they but proofs
that the highest achievements of thought sever the unity of
man and nature and bring doubt and disillusion ? It is not
man who, as a being separate from nature, prophesies thus
of it, but nature that testifies of itself in him. They are
its forewarning intimations of inevitable decline and death ;
the proof that nature itself is reaching a stage of develop-
ment at which disillusioning begins.

The oiganised system of belief in the ideal and of the
pretence of belief that- it is being realised will no doubt con-
tinue for a time after genuine belief has expired. But not
for ever ; when there is no longer the aspiration to realise
the ideal, the inclination to idealise the real will fail also.
The elaborately organised pretences of virtue through the
systematic concealments of vice will not be kept up, and life
will be viewed in its bare misery and vanity. Men will feel
the wish in life, as they now give thanks at death, to be
delivered from the burden of the flesh and from the miseries
of this sinful world. Those are the fervent thanks that they
solemnly give to Almighty God when death has removed one
of them from a life which at the same time they eagerly
pretend to consider a blessing. Solomon, the wisest and
wealthiest man that ever lived, who exhausted the poten-
tialities of enjoyment, and Job, the most afflicted and most
patient of men, who exhausted the potentialities of suffering,
came to much the same conclusion with regard to the vexa-
tion, vanity, and littleness of human life. To the same
conclusion, explicit or implicit, must the human race come

328 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

too in the end. And a sad and sadly significant thing it
will be when the entertainment and adoration of the ideal
are extinguished in the mind.

To point out in a clear exposition tha.t each of the tokens
I have mentioned has the meaning which I have ascribed to
it would carry me far beyond the proper scope of this essay.
From among other instances of distempered self-conscious-
ness that might be meditated upon, consider for a moment
the frequent degeneration of sound sentiment into shrieking
sentimentality. Instead of deep, calm, restrained, and
massive feeling, fusing intelligence and activity into whole
and wholesome unity, than which nothing can be more
excellent and beautiful, there is everywhere the shrill outcry
of thin sentimentalities, which are the outcome of exagge-
rated egoisms — a true egoistic hypersesthesia — and actually
disintegrant in their effects. Do you require a particular
instance of repulsive sentimentalisms that are no better than
a shameless and indecent exposure of feelings ? Take one
which the awe of its subject cannot help lending a certain
dignity to — the howling displays of self-consciousness that
are shown nowadays with respect to the event and the circum-
stances of death, notwithstanding that to die is as natural
and common as to be born. Nobody of the least note dies
but we are told with clamour of grief and convulsive sobs
which might be thought to express the deepest distress —
though they really are the luxury of incontinent feeling — that
the most amiable, the most accomplished, the most witty,
the most wise, the best of men has been taken from us, and
that the loss is an irreparable calamity to mankind. And
this though he may have been eighty years old and almost
in his dotage ! As if anybody ever dies of whom it can be
truly said that it is of the least consequence to mankind in
the long run when he dies ; or as if his resurrection a few
months after his death would not be a most embarrassing
and unwelcome event. Contrast this modern incontinence
of emotion with the calm, chaste, and manly simplicity of
Homer, as we observe it, for example, in his description of
the death of Achilles : —

WHAT WILL BE THE END THEREOP? 329

The grey dawn glimmered, and tlie ebbing tide

Slipped from the naked sands about the ships,

And drained Scamander of its full-fed life.

But in the Grecian Camp was life and stir,

Neighing of full-fed steeds, and clank of arms,

And trumpet-calls and marshalling of men ;

For that this day the Master of the War,

Pelides' self, should take the field, and sweep

The Trojan battle from the plains of Troy.

So men, unknowing, spake ; and from his tents.

With godhke step and godlike in his face,

Achilles came. And all about his limbs

The wondrous armour which the Fire-God wrought,

Helmet and cuirass, cuisses, and the shield

Sevenfold, and shapely greaves, that shot their light

Down on the naked marble of his feet.

His look was as of one who knew not care,

Nor memory of the past, nor things to come ;

Not the dead comrade, nor the fell revenge.

Nor shame of slaughtered warriors at the pyre.

Nor lust of ravished maid, nor sullen strife,

Nor the short span, and swiftly-severed thread, —

But only present triumph.

To the front
He strode ; and shading with an upraised hand
His level glance, gazed at the Trojan Unes,
Which, thrice as far as bowmen shoot the bow.
Were clustering, thick as ants in harvest-time
Cluster around their harried nest, and brave
With weak defence the ruin that impends.
But one was in their van, who seemed in shape,
In grace, and nimbleness, and fatal gift
Of beauty, like the shepherd-prince who lured
The love of Spartan Helen from her lord.
No man was near him, none seemed 'ware of him ;
Alone he stood, unhelmed, and round his head
The rising sim, smiting the rising mist,
Broke in a sudden glory ; and behind.
High up, the towers of angry Pallas frowned.
No armour had he, save that in his hand
A golden bow was bended to the fuU ;
And as Achilles turned, with curving lip,
Contemptuous, to his men, an arrow sang,

330 THE PATHOLOGY OF "WILL.

And cleft the middle air, and dipped, and plunged

EuU on the naked marble of his foot.

Through high-arched instep, ankle, and the strings

That bind the straining heel, it sped, and nailed

The wolf-skin sandal to the crimson sand.

Slow on one knee he sank, his strong, right hand

Staying his fall, and watched with steady eye

The fuU life draining from the wound, and spake, —

' Mother, thy word was true. The end is come.'

Nor ever spake again.

Consider again the fact of suicide, whicli is a sort of con-
vulsive climax of pessimism. From a purely psycliological
point of view it must be acknowledged the most momentous
example of freewill on human record. Convinced of a life
after death, and of a life that wiU be a life of unspeakable
joy or of unspeakable woe according to the deeds done in the
flesh, assured that suicide will precipitate him into an abyss
of endless suffering, the unhappy person nevertheless reck-
lessly perpetrates it when . his misery on earth is greater
than that which he believes he is able to bear. Against it
there is every motive that can influence a conscious being, so
that the act is, qua consciousness, the most wonderfully
illogical act of which any one can be guilty : either a stupen-
dous example of freewill or a reductio ad ahsurdum of the
doctrine. Manifestly there is a deeper and more powerful
motive at work than any conscious motives ; for certainly
that which happens in nature cannot be illogical in the logic
of nature ; and without doubt it would be perceived by con-
sciousness to be logical enough could consciousness only
survive to justify it. An instinct deeper and truer than any
conscious belief declares the certainty of relief. The motive
is irresistibly impellent, because it is the total outcome in
consciousness of the failure of vital energies and of the there-
from resulting sufferings of the individual elements of the
tissues. When these energies have been exhausted gradually
by the decay of age, the individual hopes and quietly waits for
the release of death ; when they are deficient naturally, or are
prematurely exhausted either by sudden and overwhelming
prostration or slowly by steadily sapping causes, physical

"WHAT "WILL BE THE END THEEEOF? 331

or moral, he precipitates violently the release that they crave.
For the conscious result is an utter dreariness of feeling, a
loss of interest in and hold on external events, a repugnance
to the vanity of hope, a supreme life-weariness. Those who
have made mental pathology a study know well that there
is no more powerful cause of individual suicide than the pre-
mature loss of the evolutional energy, mental and bodily. If
suicide be not the upshot, there is perhaps an abandonment
to the use of alcohol or opium which, stimulating the flagging
energies, create^ a temporary ideal, or to chloral or similarly
acting drugs that produce a temporary insensibility : a false
refuge, since they inevitably make matters worse in the end.
'Tis a way of making Hell by a mad attempt to find Heaven.

Obviously this is not the best of all possible worlds, since
men have conceived a better in the shape of a Paradise that
has been and is to come ; nor is it the worst of all possible
worlds, since they have conceived a worse in the shape of a
Hell. Meanwhile it is sure to get either better or worse.
Whether it will get better, and, if so, for how long, or whether
it wUl get worse, and, if so, how soon, are questions that it is
signal presumption on our part to imagine we can answer.
That it will get better for a long time to come, bat worse in
the end, is a theory that seems to suit well with the explicit
truths of human thought and with the implicit truths of
human conduct ; for mankind is as optimistic in theory as it
is pessimistic in practice. Visions of golden ages, of extinc-
tions of wars and other calamities, of reigns of righteousness
and universal brotherhood, and the like, are evolved as
excellent ideals to inspire and guide the units in their strug-
gles ; but the acts of practical life are none the less imbued
with the implicit certitude that the respective sums of vice
and virtue will not change, and that the race will be very
much what it has been until its doom is accomplished.
What, then, shall we say ? That it is well to proclaim and
extol the ideal, as M. Eenan does, reserving only the right
to laugh quietly in his sleeve ?

It is almost literally true of social evolution that we know
not what a day may bring forth. Even if civilisation pro-
gresses in the direction of softening characters and abo-

332 THE PATHOLOGY OF WILL.

lishing wars, it does not follow that the result will be a
certain good ; for it may be to dry up the sources of the
Tirtues and to enervate mankind morally. Again, if the pre-
valence of ease, luxury, and self-indulgence be so great in
a nation as to threaten its speedy decadence, an unforeseen
reaction may occur suddenly and issue in the revival of
austerity and asceticism, and so pessimism give place to ideal-
ism ; for the reformer is the proper product of evil times.
We cannot predict that in time to come some new develop-
ment of feeling may not take place which shall be as high
above moral feeling as moral feeling is high above the most
primitive egoistic passion, and of a nature as inconceivable
to us as moral feeling would have been to a primitive savage.
Nor can we predict that a great invention may not be made
any day, which shall change the whole face of the earth and
modify profoundly men's relations to it and to one another.
Suppose that man had lived at a time when the simple ele-
ments had not yet formed their more complex organic
compounds, could he have foretold in the least from the
basis of the then existing organic substances what higher
compounds were to be formed in the future, although they
were on the brink of formation ? Assuredly not ; and yet
in that case he would have had to do with simple elements
and comparatively simple operations of nature, whereas in
the social evolution of the race we have to do with the most
complex elements and the most complex operations in the
world. How idle and presumptuous, then, the pretence to
forecast it 1 What account would a Eoman philosopher of
the time of Augustus, venturing to divine the future of
Europe, have taken of the babe that ' all meanly wrapt in a
rude manger lay ' in a small town of a remote province of the
empire ; and what sort of a business would he have made of
his predictions ? The philosopher of to-day who can tell
us what happened when the foundations of the earth were
laid and the morning stars sang together will no doubt be
ready to tell us exactly what will happen when the founda-
tions of the earth are unlaid and the morning stars shall
cease to sing together; those who have not his confident

"WHAT "WILL BE THE END THEREOF? 333

insight into creations and nncreations will be content to
hold their peace, lest they should speak without knowledge
words that are without wisdom. But be the words spoken
the words of folly or of wisdom, they are in the end alike
vanity. ' All that which is past is as a Dream ; and he
that hopes or depends upon Time coming, dreams waking.'

WORKS OF HENRY MADDSLEY, M. D,

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