18 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts and Letters. 



ing points of intelligence and virtue must be carefully main- 

 tained? If these are lost, freedom is lost. The mind settles 

 down under fixed opinions, becomes subject to an unbroken 

 sequence of feelings, and accepts the social sentiments that 

 prevail about it. 



The one condition of freedom is to maintain unimpaired 

 intellectual activity in all directions of action. This alters 

 the horizon, varies the grounds of effort, breaks up and sub- 

 ordinates habit, and holds in arrest the aggression of other 

 minds. The mind that ceases on any topic — for instance, 

 on that of religion — from fresh intellectual activity has 

 turned down the light by which it should be guided, and it 

 is only fortunate, therefore, that it begins to fall into a cal- 

 culable routine of action, that it does not go plunging on 

 with nothing to direct it. When the buds of a tree cease to 

 shoot the leaves may come and go for awhile with the sea- 

 sons, but the constructive life is arrested. The limitations of 

 liberty do not show the power of man to be nothing, but only 

 that there are moments, places, and ways of its skilful ap- 

 plication. 



We are not to conceive liberty in men as a gigantic power, 

 easily executing its purposes and holding fast results with a 

 firm grasp. We all start under conditions alien to ourselves, 

 organic influences, educational influences, social influences. 

 Here is a young man brought up on a farm to hard labor, 

 close economy, and a limited intellectual horizon. External 

 circumstances and parental precept and example have con- 

 curred in deepening the ruts in which he is slowly moving 

 onward. None the less it is possible that some new activity 

 shall come to his thoughts, that he shall of a sudden 

 say to his astonished father, on the occasion of some new 

 exaction, " I do not think so." From that moment he may 

 begin to break the cords that have bound him, and, in the 

 progress of years, get to liimself new incentives with a new 

 outlook. Motives have force, not in themselves, but in rela- 

 tion to the mind to which they appeal. Change the mind 

 and you change the motive. When a man thinks to some 

 some new purpose the chains of custom drop off him. Ev- 

 ery man, in his experience, is liable to share the astonishment 



