64 Wisconsm Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



some new discovery in nature, and to the eagerness of a child is 

 added the prompt grasp, the far-reaching vision of the scientist of 

 our day. But try him with some philosophical theorem, the very 

 one, it may be, which he himself is unconsciously assuming ; it 

 glides off from the surface of his mind, making no impression 

 there ; or, if he venture on philosophical statement at all, it is of 

 the crudest, most disjointed, or even inconsistent nature. He 

 would not be the true scientist, which he is, if he were equally 

 prompt and clear in the sphere of metaphysics. On the other 

 hand, there have been certain periods when men would have found 

 these remarkable facts about the moons of Mars, or the fossils of 

 the far West, the most barren or trifling topics for a rational man's 

 interest, and viewed with a smile or with pity the busy triflers who 

 so wasted their time. Instead of the fact, they could have de- 

 manded the universal, the idea. Until they had found that, they 

 would seem to themselves to have no place on which to plant 

 their feet, and would totter as on quicksands. We must willingly 

 accept these differences, cheerfully grant to each class its sphere 

 and only desire that each should kindly recognize the other. Let 

 the scientist, like the shoemaker, "stick to his last," see where 

 the limits of his science are, wide enough, indeed, for any mortal 

 man, but that outside of them lies a " science of the sciences," 

 which criticises, regulates, judges his conclusions, so far as they 

 can be abstracted from the particular facts where he alone is su- 

 preme. 



I begin with a brief 



HISTORICAL EETEOSPECT. 



In the Nicomachean ethics the profoundest thinker of antiquity 

 only incidentally touches the question before us, while seeking to 

 ground the principles of virtue and vice, of responsibility, of re- 

 wards and punishments, on the free, active principles in man, 

 because the passive, i. e., impressions, sensitiveness, " nervous 

 shocks," as Spencer calls them, are not in our own power, and 

 they therefore contain no foundation for responsibility. With 

 his strong, good sense, Aristotle simply regards as voluntary what 

 we know in consciousness to have an intrinsic principle of action, 



