Nature and Freedom. 67 



And yet tlie opposite aspect of the truth obtrudes itself once 

 more, under the name of " force," only there is no honest analysis 

 of the meaning of that convenient symbol ; no strict interrogation 

 of consciousness, no straightforward endeavor to ascertaiu what it 

 is, of which we are conscious ; what phenomena, what processes, 

 what results. The belief that our thought, our mental act, the 

 force we exert is free, is itself a phenomenon the most constant of 

 all phenomena ; it requires to be accounted for. If our conscious- 

 ness is false here, it may be false in ^nj thing. "I will," "I will 

 not," a child's word, clearly distinguishable from, " I want to etc," 

 " I do not want to, etc," raises three questions to which Hobbes, 

 gives no answer. 1. What does it mean ? 2. Where did the reality 

 it expresses begin? 3. How, by introspection, do we become 

 aware of it, and try to account for it? While Hobbes fails us 

 here, it may be doubtful whether his method, though developed, 

 has since yielded a better or a different result. 



Locke, with his analysis of power, as " a simple mode, whose 

 idea is derived from choice or determination," evidently seems to 

 be reinstating freedom once more. But the mind is regarded as 

 passive in the formation of ideas, and Hume's subtile criticism 

 causes it to disappear altogether. So the question of its freedom 

 necessarily vanishes with it ; and as for metaphysics, the best 

 synonym for them, is a want of common sense. We owe to two 

 men, it seems to me, deliverance from this excessive preponderance 

 of the phenomenal, the passive, as a factor in thought — to Reid 

 and Kant. The latter, perhaps will give an impulse to thought, 

 in which objective nature will once more disappear, remaining 

 only as modes of the ego^ so that we shall merge the objective in 

 an extreme idealism ; but the sharp distinction in self, of desire, 

 from rational will, the clear discrimination of the empirical, both 

 as object and as method, the domain of the sciences, from the uni- 

 versal ; the domain of philosophy with its own special method of 

 analysis, of institutions and interrogation of consciousne-«s, these, 

 if once grasped, are an anchorage amid these fluctuating waves of 

 thought. 



But to Reid's strong Scotch common sense, albeit somewhat 

 superficial, we owe some principles which we are not likely to lose: 



