160 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. i. 



"consciousness of effort," but we should have known it 

 merely as "a feeling of uneasiness, accompanying our feel- 

 ings of desire." As Sir William Hamilton acutely observes, 

 the Volitional Theory " is refuted by the consideration, that 

 between the overt act of corporeal movement of which we are 

 cognizant, and the internal act of mental determination of 

 which we are also cognizant, there intervenes a numerous 

 series of intermediate agencies of which we have no [direct] 

 knowledge; and, consequently, that we can have no con- 

 sciousness of any causal connection between the extreme 

 links of this chain, the volition to move and the limb moving, 

 as this hypothesis asserts. No one is immediately conscious, for 

 example, of moving his arm through his volition. Previously 

 to this ultimate movement, muscles, nerves, a multitude of 

 solid and fluid parts, must be set in motion by the will, but 

 of this motion, we know, from consciousness, absolutely 

 nothing. A person struck with paralysis is conscious of no 

 inability in his limb to fulfil the determinations of his will ; 

 and it is only after having willed, and finding that his limbs 

 do not obey his volition, that he learns by this experience, 

 that the external movement does not follow the internal act. 

 But as the paralytic 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." * 



To this crushing refutation it may be added that even if 

 volition were the efficient cause of our own movements, as we 

 admit it to be the phenomenal cause, it would not follow that 

 it is the cause of anything else. As the passage just cited 

 from Hamilton shows, the only direct effect which volition can 

 be known to produce, is nervo-muscular action, — a very excep- 

 tional, peculiarly animal, phenomenon. And yet, " because 

 this is the only cause of which we are conscious, being the 



1 Lectures on Metaphysics, Lect. 39 ; see also Dissertations to Reid, pp. 866, 

 867. 



