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Wisco7isi7i Academy of /Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



ture. Anthropomorphicallj, poetically, or philosophically, if you 

 will, it may be affirmed, but no inductive science can inclose con- 

 scious intelligence within a crystal or an art, as certainly as we 

 know our own in considering our motives. For who pretends 

 that when a Colorado beetle lays its eggs on a potato leaf, it has 

 in view the prospective comfort of future larvas ? 



Motives, then, may be regarded as " con-causes," as conditions 

 of natural action, for this intelligent ego of ours acting, but not 

 acting towards anything or for anything, is inconceivable ; it is 

 nonsense. And we know also that we do not create the ends 

 which we seek. But, on the other hand, to consider motives with- 

 out regarding the mind's assent would contradict our continual 

 experience. We may, if we will, ask what causes the assent; 

 but we shall find no answer. To transfer physical associations to 

 the facts of self-consciousness would be unscientific. We can 

 have no induction from phenomena, because the very concept of 

 power of cause is not in them. Experience simply tells us that 

 we will, assent, move mentally, and then something outward 

 follows. But it is a universal experience that when we do not 

 assent, we do respect, when we assent, it is mental motion, when we 

 energetically assent, we act energetically. 



I work, finally, to obviate some possible misapprehension, and 

 anticipate some objections. In the appeal to consciousness, noth- 

 ing is said of the sphere of the unconscious in its relations to 

 mind, because the question belongs to philosophy ; the inductive 

 sciences as such have nothing to do with it. Neither is a dual- 

 ism in the sphere of being either maintained or denied, but only 

 the contrast between inductive sciences based on a series of con- 

 secutive, and, so far as we see, inseparable phenomena, and the 

 philosophy of the free self, its thought, its intelligence, its rela- 

 tions to nature on the one side, and the Infinite and Absolute on 

 the other. 



1. We hear much of the universality of law. But, on find- 

 ing by our analysis, as an ultimate factor of consciousness a free 

 self, energizing from within, we do not find its freedom to be an 

 exemption from law. Biichner, in his " Matter and Force," most 

 unjustifiably assumes this. The error is like that in theology of 



