Freedom of Will Empirically Considered. Ill 



the resistance is great, the labor must be great, but so also 

 may be the results. 



Now the individual and the race encounter in the exercise 

 of freedom two lines of resistance: that offered by matter 

 and that offered by the mind itself. The first of these is, in 

 the strictest sense, the coherence and firmness of material. 

 It is the office of mind, availing itself of inorganic and 

 organic laws, to permeate matter and hold it to fixed and 

 extended service. The most complete illustration of this is 

 the human body, penetrated in every part with nerves of 

 sensation and action, and so becoming not itself merely an 

 arena of mind, but a powerful instrument of mind, operating 

 by means of it freely in the physical world. To complete 

 this mastery of mind over matter, to establish it as a settled 

 intellectual dynasty, is what wise men are about in the world. 

 Now material laws are sufficiently pliant to thought to make 

 this labor possible, and sufficiently resistful to make the 

 gains of infinite worth when secured. Men soon learn that 

 mere vaporing accomplishes nothing, but they also learn that 

 skill and patience are surprisingly effective, The stream 

 does not flow like water, but it flows like a glacier. It can 

 hardly be said that the physical material offered the hand of 

 man is so intractable as to waste liberty; it has rather that 

 degree of tractability which stores liberty. 



But the second line of resistance is one of equal interest — 

 the restraints which the laws of mind offer to mind. It has 

 been found a universal social law, that if freedom is to grow, 

 wisdom and virtue must grow with it. It is the same truth 

 we are contemplating in the limitations of liberty within 

 the mind itself. The agency slips away from the agent un- 

 less the agent masters himself also. While man is held 

 back from the control of the physical world by laws within 

 that world, he is equally held back by laws within himself, 

 and the two sets of laws must be handled together and 

 mastered together; otherwise the movement will soon find 

 arrest. When the mind stagnates within itself its external 

 force is lost also. 



What do the limitations of freedom which we have found 

 arising within the mind itself signify but this, that thegroAv- 



