ON FREE-WILL, AND MAN'S AUTOMATISM. 139 



served and saved the world, although the best of them 

 knew and felt how little in truth was their own merit or 

 desert, that they but did what it was in their nature and 

 given impulse to do, and what on the whole they were 

 obliged by the forces within them to do. They felt 

 that they acted from forces lent to them, and that they 

 deserved little credit for so doing. But the further reason 

 why we on our part are inclined to attribute real and 

 extraordinary merit to the great servers of their species 

 is, that we know there was a war of motives, a conflict 

 between good and evil, going on within the breast, and 

 we persist in representing the good man, the Socrates or 

 Buddha, as having arbitrarily made election for the good 

 by his own free-will and choice, as having closed once for 

 all with the right side, and determined to follow it, though 

 it brought his own extinction from the world. We 

 represent it thus, and in a general way not erroneously. 

 The great man did all this, and so far as to justly excite 

 the admiration and reverence, the love and gratitude, of 

 his fellows and of posterity ; but when we speak scientifi- 

 cally, and from the result of psychological analysis, we 

 see that even the hero or martyr made his memorable 

 decisions by the strength of the motives resident in his 

 breast, as he kept to them by the continuing strength of 

 these same inner moral forces, which were only a happy 

 and glorious grace of Nature or God vouchsafed to him. 

 He felt as Luther this he must do and no other ; from 

 the strength of the motive within, but not from the 

 strength of his own free-will. This he felt, though we, 

 on the other hand, cannot help having feelings of rever- 

 ence, gratitude, admiration, which implicitly acknowledge 

 a merit in him ; feelings which, however, are ennobling 

 to the possessor, as they were part of the sustaining 

 motives to the hero's action itself. 



