ON FREE-WILL, AND MAN'S AUTOMATISM. 125 



health of the system. Such considerations show that 

 there are physical causes at work in the production and 

 alteration of mental phenomena ; but whether these are 

 the sole and ultimate causes is quite another question, 

 and one which, even if the materialist's answer be the 

 true one, need not further concern us here.* We contend, 

 so far as regards this question of moral freedom, that to 

 argue that the will cannot be free because all volitions 

 are determined by molecular changes, is to bring this 

 very old controversy into a darker and more hopeless 

 region of discussion than ever. It is to leave light just 

 when the science of psychology (assisted, no doubt, by 

 biology) had given it to us, after infinite vain wrangling 

 and logomachy, prosecuted in the dark. 



4. Science, at least psychological science, is not 

 committed to the theory of man's automatism ; a theory 

 which is only a fresh and exaggerated instance of the 

 strong tendency in men and philosophers in all ages to 

 try to explain all phenomena, however different; by the 

 particular class of phenomena . with which they are 

 habitually conversant ; an instance of the same kind as 

 that of the musical philosopher who explained the soul 

 as a species of harmony, as that of the Pythagorean, 

 whose mathematical meditations allowed him only to 

 discern number as the essential fact and principle in all 

 things. Man is, indeed, a machine, moreover a living 

 and moving one ; but he is also something more, and 

 this additional something, an accident merely, according 

 to the true automatonist philosopher, constitutes, in 

 fact, man's differential feature and his true human nature ; 



* For a full consideration of the materialism resting on the doctrine 

 of the conservation of energy, from which the theory of man's auto- 

 matism is considered to be a corollary, the reader is referred to Book 

 III. ch. i. 



