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after all, the only certain informant to which the Positivist can apply for the facts of mental life. Now if there be any persistent, ineradicable factors in human consciousness they are (i) the sense of our own existence, the sense that I exist as the basis of all my feelings, thoughts, and volitions; and (ii) that I am free to act in accordance with the motives which are pressing upon me, or to act in direct opposition to them, or to abstain from acting at all. But apparently the method of many of the Positivists in dealing with the nature of man's mind has been first to make their theory, and then select their facts. The prospect of framing a philosophy which shall bring everything in the universe under the same laws of invariable sequence was too attractive to be resisted and so they have jumped to the hasty conclusion that these laws must govern the whole realm of mind as well as of external nature; though in their jump they have lost sight of these two persistent facts in consciousness. As Mr. Sidgwick says, the most overwhelming cumulative proof in favour of Determinism seems more than balanced by a single argument on the other side, the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think at such a moment that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it." On what intelligible theory, I would ask, other than that of my freedom can Determinists account for the fact that at this moment, as I stand here, I have the power to direct my mind whither I will; that at my absolute choice I can make it range over a host of the most incongruous ideas, touching on each lightly, or dwelling on it persistently, dismissing it finally, or reverting to it, as I please. I can at this moment call up an event in my childhood, or a line

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of poetry, or an incident in the South African war, or the formula for the square of (a + b), and a thousand such. ideas, simply at my absolute will. What explanation can they give why I should take the war incident third, instead of first or second? And in the face of this power, what justification have these philosophers for representing my consciousness of freedom as an illusion? This is not reverie, in which trains of ideas present themselves by mere association. The brain, it is true, may follow a certain involuntary course of action, and may thus suggest to the mind a train of ideas: and this succession of ideas, while the will is passive, might conceivably be accounted for by a theory of Determinism. But we know, too, that the will has the power to control the cerebral action. "We can interrupt a chain of thought, and start another, and out of a variety of thoughts we can reject those which are most pressing."

A good deal of obscurity has been brought into the question before us by the use of the word "motive." Many of the Positivists are too fond of taking it literally, as though motives acted on man in the same way as force does on matter. Of course, if this use were allowed to them, the theory of Determinism would be the more easily defended. But the word "motive" can only be admitted as a metaphor in questions of mental phenomena. "There is no such analogy," says Dr. Momerie, "as the word motive suggests between the movement of a machine and the action of an ego; between the force of the current which is carrying the swimmer away, and the desire which urges him towards the bank. If a number of forces act on a machine, it must inevitably yield to their resultant. But when a number of motives bear upon an ego, he need not yield to any of them. He can pause and reflect. He can call up other motives." Even when the whirlwind of

temptation is sweeping him away, and moral landmarks are for the moment forgotten, yet by a mighty effort he can right himself, and assert his mastery over the "motives" that a moment before seemed so irresistible.

The difference between physical and psychical motives is well illustrated by Professor Green in his Prolegomena to Ethics. He points out that when Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage, it was not, strictly speaking, his hunger which was his motive. His animal wants conditioned his motive. But the motive itself was his own idea of himself as finding his chief good in the satisfaction of the animal want. If it were not so, he would not have regarded himself as responsible for his action. And this was the true reason of his subsequent remorse. Here is another fact in mental experience for which Determinism fails to account. It is to no purpose that Spinoza tries to explain away remorse as an illusion of the imagination. We are not deceived. We feel, after each lapse from right, that we might have chosen the better part. Even if there was nothing more to be said, there is strong ground for presumption that remorse is not due to mental illusion, in the fact that this sensibility is most poignant in the pure and noble, and is least keen in the grossly ignorant and degraded. As Dr. Martineau finely says, "It is not the most guilty who know most of guilt."

To sum up, then, the common sense of mankind will always revolt against a system of philosophy as narrow and artificial which, while undertaking to explain all phenomena by its neatly-cut theories, yet ignores the facts which every sane man's consciousness reveals. Already the reaction against Positivism is vigorous and decided, and our ablest thinkers admit that no system which ignores the metaphysical, can ever account in all its

fulness for the physical, least of all, for the nature of man. As Prof. Ferrier has well said of the system of philosophy of which we have been speaking, "Philosophers have pondered over man's nature; and what, after all, have they made of it? What sort of a picture have they presented for our imagination? Not the picture of a man, but of an automaton, that is, what it cannot help being; a phantom, dreaming what it cannot but dream; an engine, performing what it must perform; an incarnate reverie; a weathercock, shifting helplessly in the winds of sensibility; an association machine, through which ideas pass linked together by laws over which the machine has no control; anything, in fact, but that free and selfsustained centre of underived activity which we call man."

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ELFRED THE GREAT, KING OF ENGLAND 1000 YEARS AGO.

BY WILLIAM WORTLEY.

THAT eminent ethical writer, philosopher and historian, whose force of character and peculiarly forcible expression of thought led him to inculcate with insistency the doctrine that might is right—energy—will force and work rule the world. That the idle, the weak, the froward, must be disciplined-ruled and governed by the strong and wise in thought and action; and in his Past and Present Carlyle shows us what a poor, low-born friar did in lifting up the lazy, self-indulgent, useless monks of that day, and, as their abbot, leading them on to a useful life, full of virtue, purity and goodness.

In Frederick the Great, this doctrine is further exemplified in the life and work of that hero. Surely Thomas Carlyle was a descendant of some old Wicking; he had such sturdy faith in the old Teutons, defines the German as the guerre-man-fighting-man-the man "wha gars," as our brither Scots say.

Leaders men must have, but right men as leaders; men of might and high morality. A king he defines as Könung-König-a Kenning, or Canning man—a man who can think and do right.

And then, in his fantastically graphic French Revolution, Carlyle shows the awful effects on a whole nation of the selfish, finicking, dilettante rule, or rather misrule, of a supercilious aristocracy and priesthood, and the terrible reaction with its horridly cruel and barbaric anarchy;

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