34O Heredity. 



any further. For our part, we are inclined to regard free-will as a 

 noumenon, and therefore an insoluble enigma. Still, taking their 

 stand on the ground of experience, and without any pretensions of 

 penetrating to ultimate principles, the most recent psychologists 

 (of the school which treats psychology as a natural science) have 

 given this question of free-will a new aspect, which enables us 

 better to apprehend its relations with heredity. They all recognize 

 the necessity of admitting in man a proper spontaneity, and this 

 some of them hold to be chiefly physiological, others chiefly psy- 

 chological. In England the chief exponent of these views is Bain, 

 in Germany Wundt. 



According to Bain, 1 the germ of the will is to be found in that 

 spontaneous activity which has its seat in the nerve-centres, and 

 which needs no impressions from without, nor any interior feeling 

 whatever to bring it into play. No psychologist before him had 

 ever spoken of this spontaneous activity, or of its essential connec- 

 tion with voluntary acts. The first mention of it is in Muller. 

 That physiologist observes that the foetus performs movements 

 that evidently cannot depend on the complex causes which deter- 

 mine the movements of the adult The cause of these movements 

 can exist only in the nerve-centres ; and as the nervous force is 

 not equally distributed all over the body, but is accumulated in 

 certain centres, these differences determine the foetus to move in 

 one way rather than in another. Hence the germ of will-power is 

 a spontaneous excitation; it is a primordial fact of our nature; and 

 the stimulus proceeding from our sensations and sentiments does 

 not supply the internal power, but merely determines the mode 

 and the measure of action. 



While we admit the psychological importance of this discovery, 

 and the merit of having clearly put it forward, we do not think 

 that it helps us much. Mr. Bain tells us nothing about the origin 

 of this nervous force, or of the causes which determine its accu- 

 mulation in one place rather than in another. But he elsewhere 

 has asserted, and as strongly as any one, that 'the true source, the 

 true antecedent of all muscular power, is a liberal expenditure of 

 nervous and muscular energy, which in the last resort derives from 



1 Bain, Emotions and Will. 



