122 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. V. 



of true voluntary action and that they have such persuasion, 

 the terms in all languages of moral reprobation or praise 

 is sufficient to demonstrate. When a man has notoriously 

 lost his power of self-control, and become an automaton, 

 dominated by external or internal attractions and repulsions, 

 we say he is not &quot; an accountable being.&quot; Nevertheless, it 

 may here be remarked by the way, that fatalists, like Herbert 

 Spencer and the late John Stuart Mill, when they assert that 

 all men s actions are determined, assert that which it is im 

 possible even for them to pretend to prove, and which can 

 only be maintained on speculative and a priori grounds, yet 

 inasmuch as they contradict the common voice of mankind, 

 and what so many affirm to be the declaration of their con 

 sciousness, they are clearly bound to prove their position. 

 Assertors of &quot; free-will &quot; do not, of course, maintain that they 

 are conscious of what is external to their consciousness, as if 

 they could see, as a spectator, that external and internal in 

 fluences do not in all cases determine their actions ; but what 

 they do assert is, that they are conscious that they themselves, 

 in the very act of deciding, exercise occasionally a free power 

 of choice, for which choice they are justly responsible. Just 

 as a blind man pushing his way through a thicket in one 

 direction, but suddenly taking another, because on recon 

 sidering his past footsteps he is convinced he was wrong, 

 knows that his change of path was due to his own thoughts, 

 arid not to any rocks, pits, or other external impediments, 

 though he cannot affirm that such were not close to him 

 when he turned. Fatalists who try to build up on their 

 principles a representation of what we do when we exercise 

 a power of choice, devise a representation which does not 

 answer to, and fully resemble the process made known to us 

 by our consciousness, but is an incomplete representation * of 

 that process. 



In closest relation with our power of will is that power 



* See an article in the North British Eeview, April July, vol. lii. 1870, 

 p. 93. 



