says, the idea of a personal soul or spirit is that of a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow, the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates.* When this conception appears, people speak, much as children do among us, of a second nature within originating all their voluntary actions, and so seem to satisfy the early developed craving for a cause or source of things. It seems indeed very probable that, even if Mr. Tylor's ingenious explanation of the genesis of this crude conception be correct, still the early developed curiosity of mankind in seeking for a cause for every obvious phenomenon helped to confirm and sustain the idea of an indwelling substance capable of producing all the manifold actions of human life. Mr. Tylor shows, too, how among uncivilized nations this idea of soul is extended to the lower animals, to plants, and even to inanimate objects. When this universal fetishism prevails, the mind is inclined to look on every movement in the organic or inorganic world as the product of soul. Conscious actions, instinctive movements, and others in inanimate nature, which spring apparently from no outer influence, are said to be prompted by the indwelling soul of the individual animal or object. When, on the other hand, men, brutes, or inanimate objects act on one another, as when a tyrant coerces a slave, a warrior brandishes his weapon, an arrow kills the prey, and so on, it is supposed that the soul of the one object acts on that of the other.

Of course this very crude fetishism must have undergone many modifications before men began to think distinctly about voluntary action. There is reason to believe, however, that the modes of thought thus engendered were transmitted to the first inquirers into the nature of the will. Thus, after men had ceased to look on plants, dead stocks, and weapons, as tenanted by a filmy material substance, they still supposed the bodies of men and the higher animals to be so endowed. One may conceive that after these early learners had arrived at the purely objective distinctions, roughly shadowed forth in the preceding paragraphs, between the spontaneous and complex actions of a conscious and free man or other intelligent animal, and the limited and dependent movements of lower nature, including even the effects of coercion on the will, they imported into this antithesis the surviving conception of an internal spirit. Thus they would come to speak of intelligent and deliberate actions as originating in the rational soul. In contrast to these, inflexible habits and sudden

* Primitive Culture, Vol. I., p. 387.

effects of passion would be attributed, not to this rational principle, but, like the instincts of the lower animals, to some lower " vegetal soul" incapable of thought and choice. Indeed passionate acts were probably referred to some extraneous influence, analogous to coercion, as may still be seen in such expressions as "to be mastered by passion," "to be carried away by rage," and so on. Thus all intelligent action was traced to a mysterious spiritual substancewhich afterwards came to be conceived as a congeries of faculties, of which the will was one-invested with all the dignified prerogatives of freedom, mysterious superiority to prediction, and infinite variety of selection. And just because this highly endowed soul was regarded as the direct cause of conscious actions, it was impossible to think of any particular action as the result of definite motives.

The survival of this primitive mode of thought may be frequently traced in Greek speculations on the nature of material movements and the constitution of the human will. Even with Aristotle, the mode of conceiving nature, the division of movements into those which are self-caused or spontaneous, and those which are produced by extraneous objects, the notions of substance, etc., appear in places to be tinctured with the ancient conception of a second shadowy object residing within the visible object and constituting its soul or essence. Aristotle does not directly confront the speculative question of moral freedom, and his theory of volition in the Third Book of the Nicomachean Ethics is an excellent contribution to the science of the subject. Yet though his mode of investigation did not lead him to construct a distinct idea of an indeterminate will, his curious conception of cause, on the other hand, did not permit him to regard rational action as caused by motives, in the phenomenal sense of causation. Indeed, his view of the soul as the évreλéxeia of the body, its formal and final cause, and at the same time its principle of motion (De Anima II., 1), and of the voŪS TOINTIKós as formal principle (ibid. III., 4 and 5), appears to contain implicitly the great leading idea of all modern doctrines of free-will: namely, the existence of a spiritual substance, power, or faculty within the body, which is the occult source of action as of thought. And this idea is nothing but a highly refined transformation into a metaphysical conception of the primitive fancy respecting a second corporeal substance.*

* Mr. Bain has traced out this affinity of the metaphysical and the primitive conception of the soul in the interesting historical résumé which closes his work, Mind and Body.

Such was probably the common view of the will and voluntary action which existed in more or less distinct shape before speculation on the nature of the human mind began to assume stability and a definite progressiveness. One great motive force to this speculation was the theological interest. The principal reason for noticing here the theological aspect of the controversy on freedom, so far as it can be separated from the metaphysical, is to show how it confirms the above hypothesis respecting the first crude conceptions of voluntary action. Upon the acceptance of a religious system, teaching that a supreme being controls the destinies of mankind, there were three supposable ways in which this divine government could be viewed. Either it would be assimilated to the influence one man exerts over another through his reason and will by argument or inducement; or it would be regarded as analogous to the coercive powers exerted by human rulers over their subjects; or, finally, it might be conceived as a perfect prescience of all events, and a deliberate arrangement of human conditions so as to bring about a given effect, men being constituted nevertheless to deliberate and choose within those conditions. But, in fact, we see that the two parties in this theological dispute inclined constantly to either the first or the second view, the last not yet presenting itself as a possible solution. Whereas the Christian apologists of the second century (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, etc.) tended to lay stress upon the freedom of choice left to man by the Deity, and the adaptation of the Christian religion to this state of things, their opponents of the next centuries (St. Augustine, Aquinas, etc.), who insisted on the dogma of predestination, continually spoke of the divine decrees as certain irresistible laws, and so brought the divine rule into closest conformity with the coercive powers exercisable by human governors over their subjects. The reason of this may easily be found, one thinks, in the pre-existing conceptions of volition. Up to this time no clear idea of invariable sequence between motive and act had been constructed, and consequently the theologians were unable to conceive foreknowledge except as a case of external coercion. That is to say, the ideas of individual choice and of pre-arrangement by some supremely intelligent being could not yet coalesce with any degree of stability; and in point of fact even modern Calvinists will often be found drifting into language borrowed from law and coercion. And while many accepted the legal view in its grossest form, the more refined and humane, appalled at the consequences of making the divine Being the constrainer of man's sinful impulses, resorted

to the only alternative left them-the practical exclusion of al divine control by the mystery of its coexistence with a perfectly spontaneous self-determining will. It was reserved for later writers, amongst whom Jonathan Edwards stands conspicuous, to reconcile foreknowledge and human volition freed from external coercion, by the simple expedient of recognising human choice itself as a matter of certainty and of prediction to an omniscient being.*

But the modes of conceiving the will were not destined to remain for ever in this vague condition. Partly through the amount of attention concentrated on the problem in the theological dispute, but chiefly through the progress of science towards a growing apprehension of nature's uniformity, and a clearer conception of mental phenomena, the definite idea that human volitions conform to the great Law of Causation became gradually shaped and submitted for examination. Henceforth if the theory were challenged and disputed, it could only be by means of some clearer conception of an undetermined will than those which had heretofore sufficed. Accordingly, one lights on a new and more scientific form of the hypothesis of free-will, which, emerging out of the old and imperfectly apprehended theory, more distinctly recognised the real issue, and sought to base itself on facts relevant to that issue. We may now proceed to consider the elements entering into this new belief, the doctrine of an undetermined will, properly so-called, which has asserted itself with more or less distinctness for several centuries, and is still held, after varying degrees of independent inquiry and judgment, by a large number of intelligent men.t

The first thing to be noted in this transformed doctrine is that its supporters do not claim the alleged indeterminateness so much

Sir H. Maine has noticed in his Ancient Law, chap. ix. p. 354, that it was the legal manner of viewing actions, so prevalent among the Romans and their successors in the West, which gave rise to the difficulty of free-will; and that no Greek-speaking people, among whom the study of law was comparatively neglected, was ever troubled by the question. These remarks are in entire accordance with the above theory of the genesis of the theological dogma. For it was out of their legal discipline and knowledge that the necessitarians took those ideas of coercion and extraneous necessity which they constantly imported into their representations of divine government.

The first writer who seems to have distinctly argued the question of determinism was the schoolman Buridan (14th century). The conception of determinism was still more clearly elaborated by Bernardino Ochino two centuries later. See an article entitled The Determinist Theory of Volition in the Westminster Review for October, 1873.

for voluntary actions, as for a thing which was looked upon as distinct from and superior to these, namely, the will. They appear to have had present to their minds not concrete actions, either past or future, but the whole field of voluntary action regarded as one existence. To understand this, it should be remembered that the mind has the power of abstracting from a given class of phenomena some element common to them all, leaving out of sight the variable elements with which it is from time to time associated. This capacity, which lies at the foundation of all reasoning and science, has its own peculiar dangers, which have been pointed out by some of the ablest thinkers. There is traceable in the speculations of all times a tendency, after the formation of such abstract conceptions, to look back on the objective facts through the refracting medium of their mental correlates, so as to imagine that these correspond to independent existences instead of to phases of existence always found in conjunction with other phases. This disposition to objectify mere ideas has been a fruitful source of philosophic delusions. It led the earlier Greek speculators to their curious reasonings concerning To ev and to similar projections of pure ideas into the sphere of external existence, and it was the underlying motive to the whole Platonic system of objective Universals. And the same tendency appears to have had much to do with the history of the belief now considered. The contrast between voluntary and all other action is, as it has been shown, of a nature to have very early impressed itself on men's attention. It became necessary to have a word for expressing this seemingly exceptional class of phenomena, and the term "to will" (beλew, velle, wollen, etc.) was framed, agreeably to the view that voluntary action is the product of autonomous spiritual substances. Now this term, used at first by men for the common purposes of life and confined to single acts of volition, must always have conveyed distinctly the idea of a superior motive, although, as has been suggested, such predominance of inducement was never viewed as a cause of the action. A man was said to will something in proportion as he rationally chose the best or the seemingly best of two or more possible courses. When, however, speculation began to touch the phenomena of volition, it was asked what all the actions to which the term "to will" is applicable had in common. But as often happens in first rough generalizations and abstractions, a part

*See especially Mr. Mill's Logic, book v., chap. iii., § 4, Fallacies of Simple Inspection.