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with a personal and individual will, influenced by motives and subject to caprices 

 similar to those of humanity, and operating sometimes for the benefit, and 

 sometimes for the destruction of man. 



It has not been until comparatively modern times, and even now, I fear, 

 but over a small part of the human family, that scientific knowledge has 

 triumphed over popular credulity ; and that the realm of nature is presented 

 to us in every part, as subject to immutable law, from which the idea of choice 

 or will, of object or design, residing in matter itself or in the" powers of nature, 

 is absolutely excluded. 



When, however, we pass from the phenomena of nature, to those con- 

 nected with man, a new scene opens to our view. We stand face to face with 

 free will ; with a new creative power at work in the midst of the vast and 

 complex machinery of nature. If you take two seeds from the same plant, 

 apparently, so far as you can judge, similar in all respects, and plant them in 

 the same soil, and in the same climate, there shall grow from them two trees 

 widely differing from each other, in size, and strength, and character. Yet we 

 do not suppose for a moment that any act of choice or will on the part of the 

 tree has modified its form or its growth ; but rather that the unknown incidents 

 of nourishment and of atmosphere, of sunlight and of moisture, have dictated 

 the development of every leaf and every fibre. But if you take two human beings, 

 apparently similar in the cradle, subject them to the same education and 

 the same influences, and observe them at successive periods of life, you are 

 compelled to admit, that the result in each has not been arrived at solely by 

 the operation of natural and mechanical laws, but by those laws modified, 

 controlled, interfered with, by the operation of an independent force residing 

 in the man himself, — -by his power to choose or to refuse — by his free will. 



At what exact point this free will first enters into the scale of nature, is 

 perhaps the most insoluble of all the mysteries by which we are suxrounded. 

 Does it appear first with locomotion 1 Is the cow absolutely free to turn to 

 the right hand or to the left, to crop the wholesome, and reject the poisonous 

 herbage as she pleases 1 Or are all animals like plants, only more delicate and 

 complicated parts in the one vast mechanism of nature 1 Or if we admit a 

 certain degree of free will to the higher animals, shall we apply the same law 

 to the oyster and the polypus 1 Or what shall we say of that large portion of 

 animated nature, which lies in the border land between the animal and 

 vegetable kingdoms 1 In truth it would appear as if not only the will, but 

 most, if not all, the mental powers of man had their latent germs in the lower 

 animals ; and that these germs are more perfectly developed as we rise in the 

 scale of creation. Thus we can trace in animals the emotions of courage and 

 fear, memory and hope, love and hatred, gratitude and revenge, joy and sorrow, 

 and a distinct though imperfect power of reason, connecting cause with effect 

 and governing the actions accordingly. Of the creative power of imagination 

 I am not aware that any trace has been discovered except in man. 



To whatever extent, then, if to any, we may consider animals as governed 

 by a personal will under the influence of moral emotions, superimposed upon 

 mechanical law, it is certain that the evidence of such an independent will in 

 man is infinitely greater than in any lower order of beings ; and that, so far as 

 we know, he stands alone amidst creation as possessing a creative power of 

 imagination. And there is no reason, because impenetrable mist obscures the 

 boundary line between matter subjected to mechanical law alone, and matter 

 subjected, not only to such law, but to the operation of external and indepen- 

 dent will, that we should therefore ignore the broad and unmistakable 

 difference between the two classes of facts which present themselves at the 

 opposite ends of the scale ; between, on the one hand, such facts as are 

 presented to us by chemical experiments, the result of which we can confidently 



