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time from the restraints of law, seeking to educate in them a 
righteous principle which shall make them rule themselves 
wisely and well, and as we know that their attainment of this 
principle is worth all the possible slips and^ mischances they 
may make in gaining it, so the Divine Father may see that 
the true valour of righteousness can only be acquired by set- 
ting our spirits free. He may see that the advantages so secured 
far outweigh the disadvantages ; He may recoil from having 
His Throne surrounded by a band of slaves who never had 
any choice as to whom they would serve; He may prefer 
the loyalty of free men ; and to secure this He may launch out 
each human spirit on the ocean of life, — supplying abundance 
of charts and guides, — ^but casting on each the solemn respon- 
sibility of deciding to what port he will steer, what character 
he will have, what he will regard as the supreme good of his 
being. For God so to act is to make Life one grand moral 
test, and, so far we can judge, it is a course eminently worthy 
of the God of Righteousness. 
It must now have been made evident that all through Mr. 
SpenceFs reasoning on the subject of the Will he has got 
into a shallow vein, and never gets down to the depths 
which are found in other places of his philosophy. He 
seems here to have yielded himself to a preconceived notion, 
to have allowed that notion to rule the entire structure of his 
thought, and to have laid aside that habit of careful, dis- 
passionate scrutiny which has, for the most part, characterised 
him. It is difficult to account on any other hypothesis for the 
utterly superficial character of the thought and argument he 
has here presented. If we formed our notion of his Philosophy 
from these few pages, what could we deem him but the very 
chief of empiricists ? What can we gather from these but that 
our consciousness of Personality is a delusion, — that our ego 
is only a bundle of feelings and ideas, — that mind is only 
an aspect of matter, — that the logical laws are only registered 
sensations, — that consciousness is untrustworthy, — that matter 
is only phenomena, — that there is no rock of truth anywhere, 
— that we can be certain of nothing, — that we cannot be 
certain whether we can be certain of nothing, — that the whole 
universe is a quaking body where appearance is mixed with 
reality, and it is quite impossible to tell whether there is 
anything of either ? That is the sorry stuff which may fairly 
be gathered from these unworthy pages. A more thorough- 
going contradiction to the doctrines which Mr. Spencer has 
elsewhere, over and over again, proclaimed to be structural 
and fundamental principles of his Philosophy, it is not easy to 
conceive. Then this mere surface of argument, which is just 
