what confidence we had altogether vanishes. And proceeding to inquire into the determination of the will by ‘motives,’ we find every term and phrase has a meaning not until we import into the consideration of ourselves the coarsest and crassest mechanical metaphors of pulls and pushes, drawings and thrustings, which we believed to exist not anywhere except in the lowest phenomena of the natural world. Just as in reading Locke and so many of the friends of Locke, we have nothing before our understanding, until, as it were, we call up before our eyes solid things in space, denting, and punching, and printing another thing called a mind, and this other thing in like manner (how, heaven knows) making marks and prints on itself also—so, in reading our determinists, the one chance of their terms bringing anything at all before the intellect, is for us to keep in sight a thing called a will, pushed and pulled by things called motives; or else certain ‘forces’ called motives, acting within a given space called self, and, by their ‘composition,’ resulting in no movement at all or a movement called ‘will;’ uncertain whether such movement is a movement of the whole ‘collection’ in the space called self, or a movement only of part of that collection.
If now we can bring these objects before our minds, and know that the will is a thing ‘in a bag’ called self, and is moved by other things out of or in the bag; or (more refinedly) that states of mind, called motives, stand to the mind, of which they are the states, as forces stand to the space they meet in,—then Determinism is intelligible enough, and considered as an intellectual amusement is perhaps a pleasing theory. But when such a theory is brought into relation with the actions of ourselves, then, speaking not merely for ourselves alone, we can say little more than that we really can see no connection between the theory and the facts we know. The phrases of one sphere lose all their meaning when applied to the other sphere. That the self in desire should have gone beyond itself, and yet not be beside itself; that the many desires should all be the desires of the self; that the self should be divided against itself in desire; that the self should from all its desires distinguish itself; that it should confront them, and taking some one of them into itself, should free itself so from all other attractions, and spend its whole being in that one direction; that
