101 
Again lie says : — 
“ When the automatic actions become so involved, so varied in kind, and 
severally so infrequent, as no longer to be performed with unhesitating pre- 
cision, — when, after the reception of one of the more complex impressions, 
the appropriate motor changes become nascent, but are prevented from 
passing into immediate action by the antagonism of certain other nascent 
motor changes appropriate to some nearly allied impression ; there is consti- 
tuted a state of consciousness which, when it finally issues in action, displays 
what we term volition.”* 
Again he says : — 
“ An immense number of psychical states are partially aroused, some of 
which unite with the original impression in exciting the action, while the 
rest combine as exciters of an opposite action ; and when, eventually, from 
their greater number or intensity, the first outbalance the others, the inter- 
pretation is that, as an accumulated stimulus, they become sufficiently strong 
to make the nascent motor changes pass into actual motor changes.” f 
But, in order to show what is Mr. Spencer’s reasoning on 
the subject, I must trouble you with a long quotation. He 
says : — 
“ Long before reaching this point, most readers must have perceived that 
the doctrines developed in the last two parts of this work are at variance 
with the current tenets respecting the freedom of the Will. That every one 
is at liberty to do what he desires to do (supposing there are no external 
hindrances) all admit, though people of confused ideas commonly suppose 
this to be the thing denied. But that every one is at liberty to desire or 
not to desire, which is the real proposition involved in the dogma of free- 
will, is negatived as much by the analysis of consciousness as by the contents 
of the preceding chapters. From the universal law that, other things equal, 
the cohesion of psychical states is proportionate to the frequency with which 
they have followed one another in experience, it is an inevitable corollary 
that all actions whatever must be determined by those psychical connexions 
which experience has generated, either in the life of the individual, or in 
that general antecedent life of which the accumulated results are organised 
in his constitution. 
“ To go at length into this long-standing controversy respecting the Will 
would be alike useless and out of place. I can but brie% indicate what 
seems to me the nature of the current illusion, as interpreted from the point 
of view at which we have arrived. 
“ Considered as an internal perception, the illusion consists in supposing 
that at each moment the ego is something more than the aggregate of feelings 
and ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists. A man who, after being 
subject to an impulse consisting of a group of psychical states, real and ideal, 
performs a certain action, usually asserts that he determined to perform the 
action ; and by speaking of his conscious self as having been something 
separate from the group of psychical states constituting the impulse, is led 
into the error of supposing that it was not the impulse alone which deter- 
mined the action. But the entire group of psychical states which constituted 
the antecedent of the action, also constituted himself at that moment — 
constituted his psychical self, that is, as distinguished from his physical self. 
* Principles of Psychology, vol. i. p. 496. 
t Ibid. vol. i. p. 498. 
