THE FEELING OF EFFORT. 29 



Now the question whether this appearance of ambiguity is illusory or real, is the 

 question of the freerlom of the will. Many subtle considerations may be brought to prove 

 that the amount of effort which a moral motive comports as its ally, is a fixed function of 

 the motive itself, and like it, determined in advance. On the other hand, there is the 

 notion of an absolute ambiguity in the being of this thing, and its amount, sun-clear to 

 the consciousness of each of us. He who loves to balance nice doubts and probabilities, 

 need be in no hurry to decide. Lil^e Mephistopheles to Faust, he can say to himself, 

 " dazu hast du noch eine Icmr/e Frist," for from generation to generation the evidence for 

 both sides will grow more voluminous, and the question more exquisitely refined. But 

 if his speculative delight is less keen, if the love of a parti jjris outweighs that 

 of keeping questions open, or if, as a French philosopher of genius' says, "T amour de la 

 vie qui s'indigne de tant de discours," awakens in him, craving the sense of either peace 

 or power; then taking the risk of error on his head, he must project upon one of the 

 alternatives in his mind, the attribute of reality for him. The present writer does 

 this for the alternative of freedom. May the reader derive no less contentment if he 

 prefer to take the opposite course ! 



Only one further point remains, but that is an important one philosophically. There is 

 no commoner remark than this, that resistance to our muscular effort is the only sense 

 which makes us aware of a reality indejjendent of ourselves. The reality revealed to us 

 in this experience takes the form of a force like the force of effort which we ourselves 

 exert, and the latter after a certain fashion serves to measure.^ This force we do 

 not similarly exei't when we receive tactile, auditory, visual and other impressions, so the 

 same reality cannot be revealed by those passive senses. 



Of course if the foregoing analysis be true, such reasoning falls to the ground. The 

 "muscular sense" being a sum of afferent feelings is no more a "force-sense" than any 

 other sense. It reveals to us hardness and pressure as they do colour, taste, smell, 

 sonority, and the other attributes of the phenomenal woi'ld. To the 7iaive consciousness 

 all these attributes are equally objective. To the critical all equally subjective. The 

 physicist knows nothing whatever of force in a non-phenomenal sense. Force is for him 

 only a generic name for all those things which will cause motion. A falling stone, a 

 magnet, a cylinder of steam, a man, 'just as they appear to sense, are forces. There is 

 no supersensible force m or behind them. Their force is just their sensible pull or push, 

 if we take them naturally, and just their positions and motions if we take them 

 scientifically. If we aspire to strip off from Nature all anthropomorphic qualities, there 

 is none we should get rid of quicker than its " Force." How illusory our spontaneous 

 notions of force grow when projected into the outer world becomes evident as soon as we 

 reflect upon the phenomenon of muscular contraction. In pure objective dynamic terms 

 (i. e., terms of position and motion), it is the relaxed state of the muscle which is the 

 state of stress and tension. In the act of contraction, on the contrary, the tension 



1 J. Lequier: La Recherche d'une Premiere Verite, 1865. on "the Force behind Nature," by Dr. Carpenter, reprinted 



p. 90. in the Pop. Sc. Monthly for March, 1880; Martineau's lleview 



^ See for example, Psychology, Part VII, Chaps. XVI and of Bain; Mansel's Metaphysics, pp. 105, 346. 

 VII; Herschel's Familiar Lectures, Lecture XII ; an article 



