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our volitions seem to be, what we affirm they are, free. But consciousness does not directly settle this question, for the sufficient reason that freedom is not a phenomenon, but the condition or form of phenomena, and hence it docs not immediately arise in consciousness, but is only suggested from what is there present.

The occasion of this suggestion is found in our moral nature. Laws are constantly imposed on our actions by ourselves, by others, and our moral sense justifies them. The record of history and of individual life everywhere presents them, and hourly, momentarily demands them. Now no law, no command can be imposed on a being that is not free. The only law to which such a being can be subjected is a physical law, working in and through it. A moral law above it, before it, is an absurdity; and, if followed by punishment is most cruel.

Hence those who logically accept the consequences of their own doctrines utterly subvert the phenomena under consideration, the facts of the moral world, and give an entirely new rendering of them as a consequence of their denial of liberty. Says Bain, in The Emotions and The Will; " Under a certain motive, as hunger, I act in a certain way, taking the food that is before me, going where I shall be fed, or performing some other preliminary condition. The sequence is simple and clear when so expressed; bring in the idea of freedom, and there is instantly a chaos, imbroglio, or jumble. What is to be said, therefore, is that this idea ought never to have come into the theoretical explanation of the will, and ought now to be summarily expelled." Again, " the word choice is one of the modes of designating the supposed liberty of voluntary actions. The real meaning, that is to say, the only real fact that can be pointed at in correspondence with it, is the acting out one of several different promptings. When a person purchases