the realized desire is the utterance of the self, and that the act which is that utterance should remain in the self, even as the self went out in the act—all and every one of these sayings become senseless, when translated into the language of mechanism, into motives, and tractions, and compositions of forces. You may name them as you please, if you do not prefer to ignore them altogether; you may call them the ghosts of the delusions of the vulgar, shamelessly walking in the daylight and shrouded in the phrases of a mystical jargon; but you can not get rid of one simple fact, that they represent what to the unphilosophical mind is reality palpable as the noonday sun, and that your philosophy is impotent to explain them.
But not only in the act of ‘I will’ does Determinism entirely lose sight of the ‘I,’ and hence fail to recognize the characteristic of the will; not only does it hold by a will that wills nothing, and misses thereby an element involved in responsibility; but, also, it ignores or denies the identity of the self in all the acts of the self, and without self-sameness we saw there was no possibility of imputation.
On this important point it is simply impossible to state the vulgar belief too strongly. If I am not now the same man, the identical self that I was; if the acts that I did are not the acts of the one and individual I which exists at this moment, then I can not deserve to be punished for that which myself has not done. For imputation it is required that the acts, which were mine, now also are mine; and this is possible only on the supposition that the will, which is now, is the will which was then, so that the contents of the will, which were then, are the contents of the self-same will which is now existing. On this point again repetitions are wearisome, and words are wasted; without personal identity responsibility is sheer nonsense; and to the psychology of our Determinists personal identity (with identity in general) is a word without a vestige of meaning.
And I am far from saying that in the regions of philosophy their doctrines are not right. For on these matters I advance no opinion at present; and, for anything I have to say here, their conclusions may be the correct ones. We are right, it may be, here again to apply to the self the methods, or what are said to be the methods,
