UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
choose, and our constitutions are complexes of 
forces that date from the past as much as, or more 
than, they date from the present. 
Determinism is only a name; free will is only a 
name; the reality is our joyful and conscious obedi- 
ence to the promptings of our own natures. That 
our individual natures are a part of the general na- 
ture, and subject to its laws, is the fact above all. 
At times we are conscious of struggling against a 
tendency in us, but this struggle also has its natural 
history. We are pulled two ways, and the stronger 
pull wins. We yield to it because it is the strongest. 
Freedom of will means freedom to lift the arm, to 
open the eyes, to close the mouth, but not freedom 
to lift the hair, or to close the nose or the ears, or to 
abolish hunger, or any of the other things we might 
enumerate as against nature. All the little but fun- 
damental acts of our lives, all the movements of our 
bodies, are immediately under the control of what 
we call our wills. But the movements of our spirits, 
the promptings of our character, our temper, our 
dispositions, are not in the same sense under the 
control of our wills. 
Only so much of a man knows itself and is under 
the control of the conscious will as is necessary to 
his dealing successfully with outward things. By 
far the larger part of every one of us is the subcon- 
scious self. The body runs itself. Our minds have 
but little to say about it. All the physical functions 
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