dinary man has a moderate share of both. The performance of duty is secured in part by the self-regarding motives, and in part by the sympathetic or generous impulses, which prompt a certain amount of abstinence from injury and of selfsacrifice.

3. The supporting adjuncts of prudence are also applicable to strengthening the motives of Duty.

The arts of moral discipline and moral suasion, in other words, the means of inculcating the conduct prescribed by society as binding on all citizens, are numerous and well known. Early inculcation, and example, together with the use of punishment; the force of the public sentiment concurring with the power of the magistrate; the systematic reminders of the religious and moral teacher; the insinuating lessons of polite literature; and, not least, the mind's own habits of reflection upon duty;-are efficacious in bringing forward both the sympathetic and the self-regarding motives to abstain from the conduct forbidden by the social authority.

4. MORAL INABILITY expresses the insufficiency of ordinary motives, but not of all motives.

The child that cannot resist the temptation of sweets, the confirmed drunkard, the incorrigible thief, are spoken of as labouring under moral inability to comply with the behests of prudence and of duty. The meaning is, that the motives on one side are not adequately encountered by motives on the other side. It is not implied that motives might not be found strong enough to change the conduct in all cases. Still less is it implied that the link of uniform causation in the case of motive and action is irregular and uncertain.

There are states of mind, wherein all motives lose their power. An inability to remember or realize the consequences of actions; or a morbid delusion such as to pervert the trains of thought, will render a human being no longer amenable to the strongest motives; the inability then ceases to be moral. This is the state of insanity, and irresponsibility.

There is a middle condition between the sane and the properly insane, where motives have not lost their force, but where the severest sanctions of society, although present to the mind, are unequal to the passion of the moment. Such passionate fits may occur, under extraordinary circumstances, to persons accounted sane and responsible for their actions; if

they occur to any one frequently, and under slight provocation, they constitute a degree of moral inability verging on the irresponsible.

In criminal procedure, a man is accounted responsible, if motives still continue to have power over him. There is no other general rule. It is requisite, in order to sustain the plea of irresponsibility or insanity, that the accused should not only be, but appear to the world generally to be, beyond the influence of motives.

CHAPTER XI.

LIBERTY AND NECESSITY.

1. THE exposition of the Will has proceeded on the Uniformity of Sequence between motive and action.

Throughout the foregoing chapters, it is either openly affirmed or tacitly supposed, that the same motive, in the same circumstances, will be followed by the same action. The uniformity of sequence, admitted to prevail in the physical world, is held to exist in the mental world, although the terms of the sequence are of a different character, as involving states of the subjective consciousness. Without this assumption, the whole superstructure of the theory of volition would be the baseless fabric of a vision. In so far as that theory has appeared to tally with the known facts and experience of human conduct, it vouches for the existence of law in the department of voluntary action.

Apart from the speculations and inductions of mental science, the practice of mankind, in the furtherance of their interests, assumes the principle of uniformity. No one ever supposes, either that human actions arise without motive, or that the same motives operate differently in the same circumstances. Hunger always impels to the search for food; tender

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feeling seeks objects of affection; anger leads to acts of revenge. If there be any interruption to these sequences, it is not put down to failure of the motives, but to the coexistence of others more powerful.

The operations of trade, of government, of human intercourse generally, would be impracticable without a reign of law in the actions of human beings. The master has to assume that wages will secure service; the sovereign power would have no basis but for the deterring operation of punishment. Such a thing as character, or the prediction of a man's future conduct from the past, would be unknown. We could no more subsist upon uncertainty in the moral world, than we could live on a planet where gravitation was liable to fits of intermission.

If it be true that by the side of all mental phenomena there runs a line of physical causation, the interruption of the mental sequences would imply irregularity in the physical. The two worlds must stand or fall together.

The prediction of human conduct is not less sure than the prediction of physical phenomena. The training of the mind is subject to no more uncertainty than the training of the body. The difficulty in both cases is the same, the complication and obscurity of the agents at work; and there are many instances where the mental is the more predicable of the two.

The universality of the law of causation has been denied both in ancient and in modern times; but the denial has not been restricted to the domain of mind. Sokrates divided knowledge into the divine and the human. Under the divine, he ranked Astronomy and Physical Philosophy generally, a department that was beyond the reach of human study, and reserved by the gods for their own special control, it being a profanity on the part of human beings to enquire by what laws, or on what principles, the department was regulated. The only course permitted was to approach the deities, and to ascertain their will and pleasure, by oracles and sacrifices. The human department included the peculiarly Sokratic enquiries respecting just and unjust, honourable and base, piety and impiety, sobriety, temperance, courage, the government of a state, and such like matters; on all these things, it was proper and imperative to make observations and enquiries, and to be guided in our conduct by the conclusions of our own intelligence.

A modern doctrine, qualifying the law of universal causation, is seen in the theory of a particular providence expounded by Thomas Chalmers and others. It is maintained that the Deity, while observing a strict regularity in all the phenomena that are

patent and understood, as the motions of the planets, the flow of the tides, the descent of rivers, may in the unexplained mysteries introduce deviations, as in the vicissitudes of the weather, the recovery of a sick man, or in turning the scale of a complicated deliberation of the mind.

In such theories, it is to be observed, that the exception to law is not confined to the mental world, but embraces, to an equal, if not to a greater, extent, the physical world.

2. The perplexity of the question of Free-will is mainly owing to the inaptness of the terms to express the facts.

The idea of 'freedom' as attaching to the human will appears as early as the writings of the Stoics. The virtuous man was said to be free, and the vicious man a slave; the intention of the metaphor being not to explain voluntary action, but to attach an elevating and ennobling attribute to virtue. Sokrates had used the same figure to contrast the inquirers into what he considered the proper departments of human study (justice, piety, &c.), with those that knew nothing of such subjects.

The epithets 'free' and 'slave,' as applied the one to the virtuous, the other to the vicious man, occur largely in the writings of Philo Judæus, through whom they probably extended to Christian Theology. As regards appropriateness in everything but the associations of dignity and indignity, no metaphors could have been more unhappy. So far as the idea of subjection is concerned, the virtuous man is the greater slave of the two; the more virtuous he is, the more he submits himself to authority and restraints of every description; while the thoroughly vicious man emancipates himself from every obligation, and is only rendered a slave at last when his fellows will tolerate him no longer. The true type of freedom is an unpunished villain, or a successful usurper.

The modern doctrine of Free-will, as opposed to Necessity, first assumed prominence and importance in connexion with the theory of Original Sin, and the Predestinarian views of St. Augustin. In a later age, it was disputed between

Arminians and Calvinists.

The capital objection to Free-will, is the unsuitability, irrelevance, or impropriety of the metaphor freedom' in the question of the sequence of motive and act in volition. The proper meaning of 'free' is the absence of external compulsion; every sentient being, under a motive to act, and not interfered with by any other being, is to all intents free; the fox impelled

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by hunger, and proceeding unmolested to a poultry yard, is a free agent. Free trade, free soil, free press, have all intelligible significations; but the question whether, without any reference to outward compulsion, a man in following the bent of his own motives, is free, or is necessitated by his motives, has no relevance. If necessity means that every time a wish arises in the mind, it is gratified without fail; that there is no bar whatever to the realizing of every conceived pleasure, and the extinction of every nascent pain; such necessity is also the acme of freedom. The unfaltering sequence of motive and act, of desire and fulfilment, may be called necessity, but it is also perfect bliss; what we term freedom is but a means to such a consummation.

The speciality of voluntary action, as compared with the powers of the inanimate world, is that the antecedent and the consequent are conscious or mental states (coupled of course with bodily states). When a sentient creature is conscious of a pleasure or pain, real or ideal, and follows that up with a conscious exercise of its muscles, we have the fact of volition; a fact very different from the motion of running water, or of a shooting star, and requiring to be described in phraseology embodying mental facts as well as physical. But neither 'freedom nor 'necessity' is the word for expressing what happens. There are always present two distinct phenomena, which have to be represented for what they are, a phenomenon of mind conjoined with a fact of body. The two phenomena are successive in time; the feeling first, the movement second. Our mental life contains a great many of these successions-pleasures followed by actions, and pains followed by actions. Not unfrequently two, three, or four feelings occur together, conspiring or conflicting with one another; and then the action is not what was wont to follow one feeling by itself, but is a resultant of the several feelings. Practically, this is a puzzle to the spectator, who cannot make due allowances for the plurality of impulses; but it makes no more difference to the phenomenon, than the difference between a stone falling perpendicular under the one force of the earth's gravity, and the moon impelled by a concurrence of forces calculable only by high mathematics.

We do not convert mental sequences into pure material laws, by calling them sequences, and maintaining them (on evidence of fact) to be uniform in their working. Even, if we did make this blundering conversion, the remedy would not lie in the use of the word 'free.' We might with equal