342 Heredity. 



What, then, is this personal factor which thus mysteriously breaks 

 in on the series of causes and effects ? It is ' the internal essence 

 of the personality, the character.' There we must look for the 

 root of will. * Character is the sole immediate cause of voluntary 

 activity. Motives are always only indirect causes. Betwixt motives 

 and the causality of character there is this great difference, that 

 motives either are or may readily become conscious, whereas this 

 causality is ever absolutely unconscious.' Hence character per- 

 sonality must for ever remain an enigma, so far as its inmost 

 nature is concerned ; it is the indeterminable Ding an sich of 

 Kant. ' The motives which determine the will are a part of the 

 universal concatenation of causes ; but the personal factor, where- 

 with will commences, does not enter into this concatenation. 

 Whether this inmost essence of personality, upon which, in the 

 last resort, rests all the difference between individuals, is itself 

 subject to causality, we can never decide on the ground of 

 direct experience.' 



* When it is asserted that the character of man is a product of 

 air and light, of education and of destiny, of food and climate, 

 and that it is necessarily predetermined by these influences, like 

 every natural phenomenon, the conclusion is absolutely undemon- 

 strable. Education and destiny presuppose a character which de- 

 termines them : that is here taken to be an effect which is partly a 

 cause. But the facts of psychical heredity make it very highly 

 probable that, could we reach the initial point of the individual life, 

 we should there find an independent germ of personality (Selbstan- 

 diger] which cannot be determined from without, inasmuch as it 

 precedes all external determination.' 1 



We readily accept this doctrine of Wundt It possesses the 

 advantage of showing, on the one hand, that free-will, considered 

 in its essence, is a noumenon ; and on the other hand, that on the 

 ground of experience the fatalistic and the ordinary view are not 

 irreconcilable ; but, inasmuch as the ultimate roots of the will 

 repose in the unconscious, we may suspect such a reconciliation, 

 but we cannot establish it We will abide by this conclusion. We 

 have elsewhere endeavoured to show and we will not repeat 



1 Wundt, vol. ii. p. 416. 



