124 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. V. 



mere results of the continuation of that same process which 

 has produced the association of wolves in packs or hornets 

 in a nest. Brutal passions the desire to pursue and prey 

 upon a victim or to escape such pursuit, or the gross 

 appetite of sex, are given to us as the ultimate components 

 at once of our loftiest aspirations and of our tenderest feelings 

 of the most refined human affection and of our sense of awe 

 at the Divine Majesty itself. It cannot in fact be denied 

 that &quot; virtue &quot; and &quot; goodness &quot; are words which can have no 

 rational or logical place in the vocabulary of any one who 

 accepts Mr. Herbert Spencer s views. This is the case since 

 Mr. Spencer explicitly and utterly denies every element of 

 freedom to the human will a fatal but necessary conse 

 quence of his denial of the persistent and substantial ego. 

 He says: * 



&quot;Considered as an internal perception, the illusion&quot; [of human 

 freedom] &quot; consists in supposing that at each moment the ego is some 

 thing more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas actual and nascent, 

 which then exists.&quot; .... &quot;This composite psychical state which 

 excites the action, is at the same time the ego which is said to will the 

 action. Naturally enough, then, the subject of such psychical changes 

 says that he wills the action ; since, psychically considered, he is at 

 that moment nothing more than the composite state of consciousness 

 by which the action is excited. But to say that the performance of the 

 action is, therefore, the result of his free will, is to say that he deter 

 mines the cohesions of the psychical states which arouse the action ; 

 and as these psychical states constitute himself at that moment, this is 

 to say that these psychical states determine their own cohesions, which 

 is absurd. Their cohesions have been determined by experiences the 

 greater part of them, constituting what we call his natural character, 

 by the experiences of antecedent organisms, and the rest by his own 

 experience. The changes which at each moment take place in his 

 consciousness, and among others those which he is said to will, are 

 produced by this infinitude of previous experiences registered in his 

 nervous structure, co-operating with the immediate impressions on his 

 senses : the effects of these combined factors being in every case 

 qualified by the physical state, general or local, of his organism.&quot; 



Our doctrine is that the will indeed necessarily follows the 

 stronger motive, but that the soul has, on certain occasions, 



* Psychology, vol. i. p. 500. 



