FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 



401 



surdity. In like manner, on the contrary, the schoolboy'may will to get his 

 task, though sorely against his desire or inclination, and the timid female, for 

 the benefit of her health, may will to be plunged into the cold bath, though with 

 as great a reluctance. So, when a kind and indulgent father chastises his 

 son for disobedience, the mind, urged by proper motives, consents, and con- 

 sequently wills it ; it prefers inflictmg the chastisement to abstaining from it : 

 but while it wills or prefers the punishment, it is so far from desiring it, that 

 it probably hates it more than the child itself does. 



It has been said that, in this case, the feeling of desire is still exercised; 

 that the father, though he does not desire the punishment, desires the ultimate 

 good of his child ; that the same power of the mind is therefore still in ac- 

 tivity, though directed to a different object ; and, consequently, that willing is 

 nothing more than desire in a higher range of the scale, or a state of predo- 

 minant exertion. But this is to confound rather than to simphfy the feelings 

 of the mind. Desire is always accompanied with pleasure, and can never be 

 altogether separated from it ; for no man can desire that which is wholly and 

 essentially painful. Now, thougli the father takes a pleasure in the good of 

 his child, he takes no pleasure, but, on the contrary, great and unmixed pain, in 

 his chastisement ; and unless pleasure and pain be one and the same feeling, 

 we cannot apply the simple idea of desire to both, though that of the will is 

 equally applicable. And hence the will and the desire must necessarily be 

 regarded as different faculties of the mind. In like manner, a person labour- 

 ing under a severe fit of toothache may say that he desires to have the tooth 

 taken out; but in saying this he does not desire the pain of its extraction, but 

 only the ease which he hopes will follow upon its removal: for he hates the 

 pain, and would avoid it, and have the tooth removed without it, if possible; 

 but he consents to, or wills it, for the sake of that prospective advantage 

 which alone is the object of his desire, as it is also of his will. So that here 

 again, while the desire is limited to the one state of body, the will applies to 

 both, and affords another proof that tliey are two distinct mental powers. 

 In like manner. Revelation tells us repeatedly, and as strictly as it does em- 

 phatically, that God "hath no pleasure or desire in the death of the wicked;" 

 but it tells us also, that God is, nevertheless, effecting, and, consequently, 

 willing, their death or punishment every day. 



Freedom of mind, then, or an exercise of the will, is a distinct power or 

 attribute from that of desire, and can only respect actions in which there is 

 a condition of choice. A man standing on a cliff, has a power of leaping 

 twenty yards downward into the sea, or of continuing where he is ; and, 

 having this option, he is free, and exercises his will accordingly. But he 

 has no power of leaping twenty yards upwards into the air, and it can never 

 become a question with him — a subject of deliberation or option — whether he 

 shall leap upwards or not ; and, consequently, as this can never become a 

 question with him, the mind can never will it, and its freedom remains un- 

 disturbed. 



Here, then, we rest : the mind is free to do whatever it wills. But the in 

 genuity of man has not been content with letting the subject remain at this 

 point ; it has pushed it still farther, and inquired whether the mind is free to 

 will as well as to act after it has willed 1 and this, after all, is the real drift 

 of the inquiry with which the world has been so long harassed, whether the 

 will itself be free? 



This question is a complex one ; and its complexity has not always been 

 sufficiently traced out and explained. The mind of every intelligent being 

 can only will, or, in other words, be determined to do or forbear an act by a 

 motive or moving power, and in this respect it is subject to a necessity issu- 

 ing from the nature of things ; but if, as I shall endeavour to show, the mind, 

 by a voluntary operation of some one or more of its other faculties, of itself 

 constitutes the motive, annuls it, or changes it for another, it must necessarily 

 follow, that it has all the freedom of willing, as well as of acting, that an in- 

 telligent being is capable of possessing. 



Now, the grand aim of every living, and especially of every intelligent 



