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they have followed each other in experience, it is an inevitable 
corollary that all actions whatever must be determined by 
those psychical connexions which experience has generated. 
Now what, I ask, is the argument in this sentence save an 
assumption of the very point at issue ? 
It is contended, as Mr. Spencer surely knows, by those who 
hold the Freedom of the Will, that, be the connexion of psy- 
chical states what it may, be the organisation what it may, 
there is still, in every sane man, a power of bearing back the 
force of the organisation, and of going clean contrary to it. 
Such assert that there is a free element in the Will which 
makes it unlike to, and higher than, anything elsewhere to be 
found in the whole domain of consciousness. They declare 
that the chain of causation which obtains even in the majority 
of our mental operations, does not obtain in the region of the 
Will, that it stands solitary and unique — the organ of a free 
and responsible Personality — surrounded by a universe held 
in the chains of Law. That is the position taken up by the 
ablest advocates of Freedom. What argument does Mr. 
Spencer advance against this position ? None whatever ; he 
simply assumes that the will is ruled by the same unvarying 
law, and has the same definite succession of necessary states 
as those which obtain in other parts of the universe ; which is 
the very thing advocates of its freedom say it has not. Mr. 
Spencer, therefore, does not meet the issue ; he simply evades 
it. As we saw in our last Paper, he passed salfum from 
solar rays to mental energies, so here, by a similar unwarranted 
leap, he passes from the admitted conformity to Law which 
marks other parts of our organisation to that unique Freedom 
and power of choice which resides in the Will alone. 
3. In the next sentence but one there is the same unwar- 
ranted assumption of the very point in dispute. He calls it 
an illusion to think that at each moment the ego is some- 
thing more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual 
and nascent, which then exists ! If this is not confounding 
the phenomena with the substance in which that phenomena 
inheres, I am at a loss to understand the meaning of lan- 
guage. ‘'^The aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and 
nascent,^^ means the various tracts which together cover over 
the whole area of consciousness — -they are the various modifi- 
cations of the substance of mind. Now, does Mr. Spencer_j 
the advocate of Realism, the resolute Iconoclast of all 
Idealistic theories — does he mean, as he here says, that the 
aggregate of feelings and ideas is all that is in the ego ? 
Does he really deny that there is an ego distinct from these, a 
substratum on which they repose ? If so, shade of Berkeley ! 
