390 



INDUCTION. 



volition, that he learns by this experience, that the external 

 movement does not follow the internal act. But as the para- 

 lytic learns after the volition that his limbs do not obey his 

 mind ; so it is only after volition that the man in health learns, 

 that his limbs do obey the mandates of his will."* 



Those against whom I am contending have never pro- 

 duced, and do not pretend to produce, any positive evidencef 

 that the power of our will to move our bodies would be known 

 to us independently of experience. What they have to say 

 on the subject is, that the production of physical events by a 

 will seems to carry its own explanation with it, while ths 

 action of matter upon matter seems to require something else 

 to explain it ; and is even, according to them, " inconceivable" 



* Lectures on Metaphysics, vol. ii. Lect. xxxix. pp. 391-2. 



I regret that I cannot invoke the authority of Sir William Hamilton in 

 favour of my own opinions on Causation, as I can against the particular 

 theory which I am now combating. But that acute thinker has a theory of 

 Causation peculiar to himself, which has never yet, as far as I know, been 

 analytically examined, but which, I venture to think, admits of as complete 

 refutation as any one of the false or insufficient psychological theories which 

 strew the ground in such numbers under his potent metaphysical scythe. 

 (Since examined and controverted in the sixteenth chapter of An Examination 

 of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy}. 



f Unless we are to consider as such the following statement, by one of the 

 writers quoted in the text : "In the case of mental exertion, the result to be 

 accomplished is preconsidered or meditated, and is therefore known d priori, 

 or before experience." (Bowen's Lowell Lectures on the Application of Meta- 

 physical and Ethical Science to the Evidence of Religion, Boston, 1849.) This is 

 merely saying that when we will a thing we have an idea of it. But to have an 

 idea of what we wish to happen, does not imply a prophetic knowledge that it 

 will happen. Perhaps it will be said that the first time we exerted our will, 

 when we had of course no experience of any of the powers residing in us, we 

 nevertheless must already have known that we possessed them, since we cannot 

 will that which we do not believe to be in our power. But the impossibility is 

 perhaps in the words only, and not in the facts ; for we may desire what we do 

 not know to be in our power ; and finding by experience that our bodies move 

 according to our desire, we may then, and only then, pass into the more com- 

 plicated mental state which is termed will. 



After all, even if we had an instinctive knowledge that our actions would 

 follow our will, this, as Brown remarks, would prove nothing as to the nature 

 of Causation. Our knowing, previous to experience, that an antecedent will be 

 followed by a certain consequent, would not prove the relation between them to 

 be anything more than antecedence and consequence. 



