Moral Consequences of Heredity. 341 



a good respiration and a good digestion .... that what carbon 

 in a state of combustion is to a steam-engine, food and airare to 

 the living organism, and that consciousness, which is produced by 

 the expenditure of power, is no more the cause of this power than 

 the light from the furnace is the source of the movement of the 

 engine.' Nor is it easy to believe that this spontaneity does not 

 itself come under mechanical laws. Nerve-force can be only the 

 transformation of some prior physical force. The inequality of its 

 distribution over the body must also depend on physical or 

 mechanical causes. Hence we do not see what becomes of this 

 ' spontaneity,' acted on as it is on all sides by mechanical laws. 



Wundt, in a very remarkable and important work, full of facts 

 and ideas, which unites to the experimental and positive method 

 of English psychology a certain German boldness without rashness, 

 puts the question of free-will under a different form. We have 

 already seen that he protests against conclusions drawn from 

 statistics, showing that in human acts there is a variable element 

 which statistical science may rightly enough overlook, but which 

 the psychologist must endeavour to reassert; that, moreover, if 

 statistics disclose to us the external causes of voluntary activity, 

 they leave us in absolute ignorance of its internal causes. These 

 internal causes constitute what Wundt very well denominates the 

 personal factor (der persb'nliche Factor}. 



External factors, he says, we denominate motives, but not 

 causes of will. { Between motive and cause there exists an essen- 

 tial difference. A cause necessarily produces its effect, not so a 

 motive. It is true that a cause may be neutralized by another 

 cause, or transformed into its effect, but in this transformation we 

 can always track the effect of the prior cause and even measure it. 

 A motive, on the other hand, can only either determine or not 

 determine the will ; in the latter case, we have no means of know- 

 ing its effect. The uncertainty of this connection between the 

 motive and the will is based solely on the existence of the personal 

 factor.' * 



1 Vorlesungen iiber die Memchen und Thierseele, vol. ii. pp. 414, seq. See 

 also, Annalise Fisiologica del Libero Arbitrio Umano, by Dr. Herzen, Florence. 

 1870. 



