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no importance whether he does or no. It is a question into which the latter 
does not enter. He considers us mere machines, unable to direct or control 
oup wills, which are the slaves of mechanical law ; and it is nothing to him 
whether the impelling power is terrestrial or celestial. 
REMARKS RY THE REV. CANON SAUMAREZ SMITH, E.D. 
(Principal of St. Aidan\^ College.) 
Thanks for sending me proof of Mr. Ground’s paper. I wish I could be 
present at the discussion of it. It seems to me most important that the 
tendencies of Determinism current in some of the philosophical and scientific 
literature of the day should be strenuously opposed by philosophical argu- 
ments as well as by theological teaching. 
I think that Mr. Ground has shown, clearly and temperately, the 
thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of Mr. H. Spencer’s reasoning, in the 
extracts quoted. 
Mr. Spencer refuses to take into account one side of the dual deliverance 
of consciousness. He reduces all his calculations to the standard of Matter, 
for, in spite of his language about Mind, he does in effect make Mind a pro- 
duct of Matter. He regards man as a bundle of transitory psychical con- 
ditions with no ego, as the subject of the mental phenomena, and yet he 
regards the phenomena as real. 
He seems to treat of our consciousness as if it were not inseparable from 
8^//-consciousness. He argues, in fiict, that this self-consciousness (by which 
surely we must mean consciousness of a freedom to will in a certain measure) 
is an “ illusion and that instead of an individual powder to choose, or refuse, 
certain lines of action, our “composite psychical state,” in which w'e only 
imagine that we are exercising any personal volition , is a predetermined 
product of an “infinitude of previous experiences registered in (man’s) 
nervous structure, co-operating with the immediate impressions on his 
senses.” 
Mr. Ground has clearly shown how^ Mr. Spencer contradicts himself in 
speaking of “ the subject ” of psychical changes, while he practically denies 
that there is any such subject. 
No one can make a thorough philosophical estimate of human nature who 
ignores the gnrsonal side of the original “ deliverance of consciousness.” The 
“ I am ” of man lies at the root of all conscious exercise of intelligence, 
emotion, choice ; and you cannot theorise away this positive factor into a 
mere mystical zero, any more than you can get rid of the great primal I AM 
by refusing to think of Him as knowable. 
It is by means of volitions that a man is most directly conscious of his 
own personality. He knows that he can resist certain impulses and inclina- 
