181 
have existed and been expressed among philosophers as to the 
interpretation of consciousness, but none have been able to call 
in doubt its reality, or the truth of the witness which it bears 
to the existence of something which is called I. What the 
I is must be learned from consciousness, which teaches us to 
consider it as a self-conscious, feeling, thinking, willing force. 
It is to be admitted that the representatives of positive 
science tend, with increasing unanimity, to reject the concep- 
tion of force, as an hypostatized abstraction, to which no 
physical reality corresponds ; and it is true that able philo- 
sophical analysts (Trendelenburg, for one) are unable to find 
in it anything but motion. The truth of these conclusions, 
from the stand-point of physics, will at a later stage in this 
discussion, be formally admitted; and if, in here using the 
term force, I employ a term, burdened with what might bo 
falsely suggestive of physical associations, it is for the want 
of a better one to express what I read in consciousness, 
namely, the efficient agency of the will. 
So much direct knowledge of the real, then, is to be claimed, 
viz. the knowledge of our own ideal existence and efficient 
agency. The former is perforce universally admitted, in some 
form ; the latter has been questioned. But the testimony of 
consciousness on this point is apparently so explicit, and the 
interpretation placed upon it by the general consent of man- 
kind has been so nearly uniform (not to speak of the accordant 
opinions of noted thinkers), that the burden of proof seems 
clearly to lie with those who deny free efficient agency to man. 
Their arguments are directed, generally, against what is termed 
the freedom of the will. It is enough to remark here that 
these arguments are mostly of the kind, of which men of 
science disapprove : they are deductive inferences from apparent 
or real generalizations, by which it is attempted to decide what 
must be true in the particular. By an inductive appeal to our 
own consciousness and to that of others — i.e. by direct per- 
sonal observation and experience — we arrive at the assertion 
of freedom. The denier of freedom, on the contrary, proceeds 
from some such general truth as that of law in human actions, 
whence he deduces a conclusion in conflict with our induction. 
But all questions of fact must be settled, when this is possible, 
inductively ; such is the dictum of scientific practice and of 
correct logical theory. Hence we need not longer concern 
ourselves with a theory contrary to inductively established 
fact. 
All other knowledge of the real than that which pertains to 
ourselves is indirect and analogical. The basis of analogy is 
that direct and most certain knowledge which we have of our- 
