436 GHE PENN MONTHLY. [JuNE, 
the will as generally understood ; and Dr. Willis’s assertion of the 
existence of our ability “to yield or abstain as we list,” grants all 
that the advocate of “ the freedom of the will” could desire. 
The modern automatic school only avoid discarding the term 
will altogether, by using it in the sense of Locke’s definition. 
They make it merely the conscious mental activity that precedes 
the act; the direction of that activity being necessary in its char- 
acter; 7. ¢. the result of impinging stimuli. In other words, on the 
automatic theory, the spontaneous activity of the body is directed 
or deflected by stimuli, whose ultimate form depends on the exist 
ing mental machinery through which they pass. There is avowedly 
no room for a self-determination in such a process, and its ex- 
istence is therefore denied by this school. Inasmuch as a faculty 
of self-determination is what is here understood by the term will, 
_and the question in the present article is, whether there be or be 
not such a faculty, the inquiry to which we address ourselves is 
whether a human’will exist or not. Says Dr. Carpenter:? ‘The 
psychologist may throw himself into the deepest waters of specu- 
lative inquiry in regard to the relation between his mind and its 
bodily instrument, provided that he trusts to the inherent buoy- 
ancy of that great fact of consciousness that we have within us a 
self determining power which we call will.” The existence of such 
a faculty is in these words assumed by Dr. Carpenter, but I have 
looked in vain in his writings for a demonstration of the truth of 
this position. The same is true of the works of many other 
metaphysicians. 
Will may be considered in two aspects: first, as a control over 
the origin of mental or bodily movements; and second, as a con- 
trol over the direction which those movements take. The latter 
case is the one chiefly considered here, as the one involved in 
customary definitions of human will. 
It need scarcely be added that the concept will, is an abstraction 
from supposed special exhibitions of it, and represents a supposed 
mental property. 
TJ. THE NATURE OF ACTIONS. 
The discussion between the advocates of the freedom of the will 
on the one hand, and those of the doctrine of necessity on the 
other, has often been obstructed by a petetio principit, which yields 
2Mental Physiology, p. 28. 
