ON FREE-WILL, AND MAN'S AUTOMATISM. 133 



influences, such as the effect of education or the imperative 

 of society, are withdrawn, as we sometimes witness in 

 certain forms of insanity or other diseases, the nearer we 

 should come, not to the supposed underlying pure self 

 endowed with a power of free-will, but either to a moral 

 chaos or simply to the underlying animal, governed, as 

 other animals, by the most elementary instincts and im- 

 pulses ? We should not find an independent self, because 

 none such exists independent of the several elements of 

 character. And should we attempt to dive, like Kant, 

 beneath the circle of phenomenal motives, we should not 

 come any nearer to the free imperial ego of the transcen- 

 dental philosopher ; we should not find it located out of 

 space, but rather in our attempts we should strike the 

 hard bottom of the material atoms of Professor Huxley, 

 which, though we have not been able to regard them as 

 omnipotent nor yet as first causes, nevertheless do exist, 

 and as experience together with science assures us, do 

 exert a very potent though somewhat occult influence 

 over our lives. 



Still more, if there were this mysterious self lodged at 

 the bottom of our being, endowed with the power of free 

 volition, whether it issues its mandates from out the inde- 

 scribable sphere of the noumenal world, as Kant maintains, 

 or whether it lives and governs amongst the circle of 

 phenomenal motives in our ordinary phenomenal world, 

 as other metaphysicians hold, in either case a consequence 

 very serious for Science would result. The self, or ego, 

 would be a first cause ; its exercise of free-will would be 

 a miracle, and something extremely like the miracle of 

 creation ex nihilo. It would be the production and exer- 

 cise of a force or energy underived from any prior energy 

 or from other source than itself, which, so far as we can 

 attempt to conceive an inconceivable and impossible thing, 



