Nature and Freedom. 71 



its intelligent will, to this wonderful world of phenomena ; con- 

 scious that itself chooses to regard, now this one, now that one of 

 its own passive sensations and feelings ; that it actively moves 

 from within to meet influences which it does not produce, and in- 

 telligently applying rational laws to their investigation. The free 

 soul is conscious, indeed, of motives to ends which it cannot help 

 desiring ; but it intelligently chooses means to reach those ends. 

 In concrete application, it were folly to deny this. It is only 

 the abstract and universal form of it which the student of nature 

 may ignore or oppose. Here there are facts of a different order 

 from those phenomena, from even those phenomena of sensibility, 

 which also consciouness reveals to the attending mind for its scien- 

 tific inductions, inductions which themselves are based on those 

 higher truths. 



To develop this point may delay us a moment. And avoiding 

 as far as I may, any metaphysical question connected with the 

 will, I offer, as a test of the distinction between nature and self- 

 freedom, our intelligent consciousness of motives and of purposes 

 in our mental action. It is evidently possible to overlook the 

 very starting point of investigation, which is that, in mind, as a 

 unit are the willing, the motive, and the purpose. While even 

 so subtle a thinker as Edwards, analyzing what is essentially one, 

 may put motives on the one side, the ego on the other, and calcu- 

 late the force which one part of an indivisible entity exerts on 

 another, as if he had a problem in mechanics to solve, and may 

 easily prove that the movable part is moved in the direction of 

 least resistance, or strongest repulsive force. But " determin- 

 ism" is not our subject. The facts given in consciousness are 

 these. We know what end we seek, i. e., we know .our motive ; 

 we choose the means with deliberation, in our own purposes look 

 forward to the future, and determine our future acts. Language 

 informs us that other men do the same. 



But pass to the sphere of nature, of objective phenomena, and 

 internal, passive states. It is necessarily present. Its past is in 

 memory, in our mind. Its future only prophetically there. There 

 is no possible induction which can put motives or purposes there, 

 until we introduce the notion of an intelligent being ruling na- 



