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time from the restraints of law, seeking to educate in them a 

 righteous principle which shall make them rule themselves 

 wisely and well, and as we know that their attainment of this 

 principle is worth all the possible slips and mischances they 

 may make in gaining it, so the Divine Father may see that 

 the true valour of righteousness can only be acquired by set- 

 ting our spirits free, He may see that the advantages so secured 

 far outweigh the disadvantages ; He may recoil from having 

 His Throne surrounded by a band of slaves who never had 

 any choice as to whom they would serve ; He may prefer 

 the loyalty of free men ; and to secure this He may launch out 

 each human spirit on the ocean of life, supplying abundance 

 of charts and guides, but casting on each the solemn respon- 

 sibility of deciding to what port he will steer, what character 

 he will have, what he will regard as the supreme good of his 

 being. For God so to act is to make Life one grand moral 

 test, and, so far we can judge, it is a course eminently worthy 

 of the God of Righteousness. 



It must now have been made evident that all through Mr. 

 Spencer's reasoning on the subject of the Will he has got 

 into a shallow vein, and never gets down to the depths 

 which are found in other places of his philosophy. He 

 seems here to have yielded himself to a preconceived notion, 

 to have allowed that notion to rule the entire structure of his 

 thought, and to have laid aside that habit of careful, dis- 

 passionate scrutiny which has, for the most part, characterised 

 him. It is difficult to account on any other hypothesis for the 

 utterly superficial character of the thought and argument he 

 has here presented. If we formed our notion of his Philosophy 

 from these few pages, what could we deem him but the very 

 chief of empiricists ? What can we gather from these but that 

 our consciousness of Personality is a delusion, that our ego 

 is only a bundle of feelings and ideas, that mind is only 

 an aspect of matter, that the logical laws are only registered 

 sensations, that consciousness is untrustworthy, that matter 

 is only phenomena, that there is no rock of truth anywhere, 

 that we can be certain of nothing, that we cannot be 

 certain whether we can be certain of nothing, that the whole 

 universe is a quaking body where appearance is mixed with 

 reality, and it is quite impossible to tell whether there is 

 anything of either ? That is the sorry stuff which may fairly 

 be gathered from these unworthy pages. A more thorough- 

 going contradiction to the doctrines which Mr. Spencer has 

 elsewhere, over and over again, proclaimed to be structural 

 and fundamental principles of his Philosophy, it is not easy to 

 conceive. Then this mere surface of argument, which is just 



