572 PSYCHOLOGY. 



days and weeks until at last they culminate in some par- 

 ticularly dirty or cowardly or cruel act, it is hard to per- 

 suade him, in the midst of his remorse, that he might not 

 have reined them in ; hard to make him believe that this 

 whole goodly universe (which his act so jars upon) required 

 and exacted it of him at that fatal moment, and from eternity 

 made aught else impossible. But, on the other hand, there 

 is the certainty that all his effortless volitions are resultants 

 of interests and associations whose strength and sequence are 

 mechanically determined by the structure of that physical 

 mass, his brain ; and the general continuity of things and 

 the monistic conception of the world may lead one irresist- 

 ibly to postulate that a little fact like effort can form no 

 real exception to the overwhelming reign of deterministic 

 law. Even in eflbrtless volition we have the consciousness 

 of the alternative being also possible. This is surely a de- 

 lusion here ; why is it not a delusion everywhere ? 



My own belief is that the question of free-will is in- 

 soluble on strictly psychologic grounds. After a certain 

 amount of effort of attention has been given to an idea, it 

 is manifestly impossible to tell whether either more or less 

 of it might have been given or not. To tell that, we should 

 have to ascend to the antecedents of the effort, and defin- 

 ing them with mathematical exactitude, prove, by laws of 

 ■which we have not at present even an inkling, that the 

 only amount of sequent effort which could 'possibly comport 

 with them was the precise amount which actually came. 

 Measurements, whether of psychic or of neural quantities, 

 and deductive reasonings such as this method of proof im- 

 plies, will surely be forever beyond human reach. No seri- 

 ous psychologist or physiologist Avill venture even to sug- 

 gest a notion of how they might be practically made. We 

 are thrown back therefore upon the crude evidences of in- 

 trospection on the one hand, with all its liabilities to de- 

 ■ception, and, on the other hand, upon a priori postulates 

 and probabilities. He who loves to balance nice doubts 

 need be in no hurry to decide the point. Like Mephis- 

 topheles to Faust, he can say to himself, " dazu hast du noch 

 eine lange Frist,'' for from generation to generation the 

 reasons adduced on both sides will grow more voluminous, 



