they have followed each other in experience, it is an inevitable 

 corollary that all actions whatever must be determined by 

 those psychical. connexions which experience has generated." 

 Now what, I ask, is the argument in this sentence save an 

 assumption of the very point at issue ? 



It is contended, as Mr. Spencer surely knows, by those who 

 hold the Freedom of the Will, that, be the connexion of psy- 

 chical states what it may, be the organisation what it may, 

 there is still, in every sane man, a power of bearing back the 

 force of the organisation, and of going clean contrary to it. 

 Such assert that there is a free element in the Will which 

 makes it unlike to, and higher than, anything elsewhere to be 

 found in the whole domain of consciousness. They declare 

 that the chain of causation which obtains even in the majority 

 of our mental operations, does not obtain in the region of the 

 Will, that it stands solitary and unique the organ of a free 

 and responsible Personality surrounded by a universe held 

 in the chains of Law. That is the position taken up by the 

 ablest advocates of Freedom. What argument does Mr. 

 Spencer advance against this position ? None whatever ; he 

 simply assumes that the will is ruled by the same unvarying 

 law, and has the same definite succession of necessary states 

 as those which obtain in other parts of the universe ; which is 

 the very thing advocates of its freedom say it has not. Mr. 

 Spencer, therefore, does not meet the issue ; he simply evades 

 it. As we saw in our last Paper, he passed per saltum from 

 solar rays to mental, energies, so here, by a similar unwarranted 

 leap, he passes from the admitted conformity to Law which 

 marks other parts of our organisation to that unique Freedom 

 and power of choice which resides in the Will alone. 



3. In the next sentence but one there is the same unwar- 

 ranted assumption of the very point in dispute. He calls it 

 " an illusion " to think " that at each moment the ego is some- 

 thing more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual 

 and nascent, which then exists ! " If this is not confounding 

 the phenomena with the substance in which that phenomena 

 inheres, I am at a loss to understand the meaning of lan- 

 guage. "The aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and 

 nascent," means the various tracts which together cover over 

 the whole area of consciousness they are the various modifi- 

 cations of the substance of mind. Now does Mr. Spencer, 

 the advocate of Kealism, the resolute Iconoclast of all 

 Idealistic theories does he mean, as he here says, that " the 

 aggregate of feelings and ideas " is all that is in the ego ? 

 Does he really deny that there is an ego distinct from these, a 

 substratum on which they repose." If so, shade of Berkeley ! 



