22 
any such volition as constituted the crime in this case. The 
very thoughts and feelings that came next to the volition 
might have all been there, and yet no such volition ; but once 
that, and all else followed. It was the “ absolute commence- 
ment” of the act of crime. 
Writers on the side of true will are often rendered helpless 
by false notions of motive. Mr. P. P. Allexander gives us a 
notable instance of this. When arguing against Mr. Stuart 
Mill in favour of freedom of will, he admits, and even repeat- 
edly insists, that it is an inexplicable mystery ! He does 
worse still. He says, “The motive, considered as an act, 
must depend on some previous motive, by which it in turn was 
determined ; and so through a regressive series, in which 
freedom fleets for ever, or steps back from us, and is never to 
be caught and detained.”* It is surely absurd to speak of a 
motive as an act, and equally so to speak of an act of will as 
determined by anything. The latter is as much a contra- 
diction in terms as “ a free slave.” Motives are simply 
objects of thought. They may be considered externally in 
relation to the soul, or internally. A shilling is a motive to 
a lad, if offered to him, when his “ volitions ” are required for 
a short time. This is neither a feeling nor a thought, if you 
take it externally; it is just a shilling. In the soul of the 
lad, “ psychologically,” it is an object of thought. Professor 
Bain would say that the lad is conscious of the shilling. It 
probably awakens desire, and brings the lad into a favourable 
state of consciousness for the volitions in request, and, as a 
consequence, their muscular results. But it is in the very 
essence of these volitions that they shall be determined by 
nothing but the lad himself. The lad is just as free to will in 
the very opposite direction to the wishes of those who re- 
quire his services, as if the shilling had never been offered. 
Mr. Herbert Spencer says that the “ passing of an ideal 
motor change into a real one is that which we distinguish as 
Will.”t I decidedly object to being included in that “ we.” 
“ An ideal motor change ” are to me words without meaning. 
All ideal states have the nature of thought, not of volition ; 
and thought is just as different from volition as seeing is from 
walking, or indeed as any state can be different from another. 
Ideal movement is like melodious sugar, so far as I can make 
anything of the language. Motor change, too, is muscular — 
not ideal. Volition is not motion, nor is it necessarily con- 
nected with any motor change. The volition which in one 
* Mill and Carlyle, by P. P. Allexander, 1866, pp. 18, 19. 
t Principles of Psychology, p. 612. 
