ON FREE-WILL, AND MAN'S AUTOMATISM. 131 



spring and which really determine them. In reality, our 

 actions, in our maturer years, and after our character has 

 acquired fixity, follow with mechanical regularity from it, 

 and in particular from one or other of the bundle of habits 

 which, in great measure, our character has become. Action 

 from habit is economy of force, a saving of conscious 

 reflection and deliberation; but it is mechanical and 

 automatic, there is no intervention of the faculty of will, 

 any more than there is the weighing of motives. And 

 whenever, as occasionally happens in maturer life, in cases 

 of importance, novel action must be taken, wdiere conscious 

 deliberation does actually precede the decision of the best 

 course of action, our decisions, our volitions, as well as 

 our actions, follow from the motives which are strongest, 

 which are no others than those which promise on the 

 whole the most satisfactory results. It is the strongest 

 motive which determines volition ; there is no arbitrary 

 volition made by a free will in the teeth of the strongest 

 motives or in total disregard of them. Or, if there ever 

 seems to be a case of this description, as where a man 

 affirms that he will act in a particular manner, be the 

 motives on the other side what they may, the fact is that 

 the adverse conscious motives visible or possible, are 

 dominated by the strength of the rival ones, supplemented 

 by a substratum of unconscious motives ref errable to the 

 general moral character and dispositions, but never to a 

 free. will. The man knows how strong are the motives 

 which influence him ; he does not expect that any so 

 strong can possibly appear on the other side ; and his will 

 seems arbitrarily to decide what his character has really 

 determined. 



The case of mechanical action from habit, the case of 

 conscious deliberation, and the case where we are not able 

 to state precisely the motives really influencing us, exhaust 



