ON FREE-WILL, AND MAN'S AUTOMATISM. 119 



metaphysical snares and perplexities; the bottomless 

 vortices into which the mind was formerly sucked, may 

 now be avoided, thanks to the light thrown upon man's 

 nature by the modern sciences of psychology and 

 physiology, which enable us to clear the issues and 

 to ascertain the facts really pertinent to the question. 



2. There has been an old theory of man lately 

 brought forward by certain eminent physicists and 

 naturalists, notably by Professor Huxley, which, if 

 satisfactorily established, would finally and effectually 

 close the free-will controversy. We mean the theory of 

 man's automatism, according to which man, equally with 

 all animals lower in the scale of being, is merely a 

 machine, though a most skilfully constructed one ; a 

 machine in which all mental as well as bodily actions 

 and states, all volitions, emotions, thoughts, as well as 

 bodily movements and functions, are really determined 

 by mechanical forces, irrespective of an imaginary ruling 

 and directing entity called Self, or of any exercise of a 

 supposed independent faculty called Will, which last, so 

 far as it has a real existence in the shape of conscious 

 volitions, merely registers and assents to a decision 

 already reached by the other and only powers at work 

 the physical merely symbolizes a state of the cerebral 

 atoms, a condition of the physical and chemical energies, 

 the only real and all-sufficient causative forces. 



A volition is not the product of a " masterful ego," or of 

 an independent faculty called will, according to Professor 

 Huxley. The volition is caused by hidden mechanical 

 forces, by cerebral molecular movements, just as, when 

 the volition is carried into outward visible effect, the 

 resulting action is obviously due to muscular or mechan- 

 ical forces. Conscious volition, thought, or emotion is 

 always produced by unconscious physico-chemical energies. 



