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sciousness or it is not. If it is not present in consciousness, 
it is something of which we are unconscious, — something of 
whose existence we neither have nor can have any evidence. 
If it is present in consciousness, then, as it is ever present, it 
can be at each moment nothing else than the state of con- 
sciousness, simple or compound, passing at that moment. 
Obviously here is again only assertion, and no proof. 
7. In the next sentence he makes the same unsupported 
assertion, saying, ^Hhis composite psychical state which 
excites the action, is at the same time the ego which is said to 
will the action.'’^ 
8. The next sentence is very suggestive and self-revealing, 
but it contains only assertion, and no proof. He continues : 
Naturally enough, then, the subject of such psychical 
changes (it is passing strange how, if these psychical changes 
are the man himself, as we have so often been told, there can 
be a subject of them — subject is what underlies phenomena, 
and if there are only the phenomena, the subject thereof is 
only a sort of hypos tatised zero) the subject of such psychical 
changes says that he wills the action, since psychically con- 
sidered he is at that moment (the same round assertion as 
before) nothing more than the composite state of conscious- 
ness by which the action is. excited.'’^ This seems to me to be on 
the whole one of the most remarkable sentences in the whole 
compass of Philosophy. The poor subject is made to do 
duty in many aspects. In the first clause he is a being who 
alone makes possible all the psychical changes,^^ for a 
psychical change cannot take place save in a, p^yclve, of which 
it is a change; in the second clause he is alive and active 
indeed, but under an illusion in thinking he wills the change ; 
in the next clause he is reduced to nothing more than the 
composite state of consciousness by which the change was 
effected. Mr. Spencer must be pressed indeed for argument 
before he could put on paper such hollow reasoning. 
9. In the next sentence we have the old assertion, but no 
proof. But to say that the performance of the action is 
therefore the result of his free-will is to say that he deter- 
mines the cohesion of the psychical states which arouse the 
action — and as these psychical states constitute himself at that 
moment'’^ — (asserted and not proved once more) ^Hhis is to 
say that these psychical states determine their own cohesions, 
which is absmM.'’-’ 
10. In the next sentence he says, their cohesions (cohe- 
sions of these psychical states) ^‘^have been determined by 
experiences."’^ But this is the very statement which the advo- 
cates of Freedom deny. They say that the cohesions made 
