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In strict consistency, however, we cannot hold fast to causation, since the link of force, like the link of liberty, is one supplied wholly by the mind, is one of its notions; and no verification falls to a single idea which is not common to them all. Nothing can be affirmed of causation as proof which can not also be asserted of liberty.

By the disappearance, therefore, of liberty, not only are all the social, civil, moral, and religious facts of the world dissolved, the coherence of thought also disappears, every connection is illusory, and every joint dislocated. We are in a world of films and shadows. Our moral actions first shake off responsibility; then our thoughts slip their logical connections and pass into shadows; last of all the visible world becomes a dream. We dream that we dream, and there is no awaking. To come to ourselves, is the very pregnant phrase of all right-mindedness. When we possess in confidence our own powers, then we comprehend other things. Will is germinant, the only germinant thing in the universe; all else is flow. Is it marvellous, then, that liberty as an idea must be the norm of constructive thought? Liberty is spontaneity exercised in choice. Spontaneity is self-centered power as opposed to transmitted power. On spontaneity rests the potential what may be as opposed to what must be.

We cannot go as far as Martineau and others desire to, and extend this dependence of force on will into an identification of them, making an alleged consciousness of force exercised in volition the source of the notion of causation. The subphenomenal power as truly escapes us in mental experiences as in physical ones. The mind is alike penetrative and constructive in both. What we should learn to do is not to distrust and struggle against our intuitions, but to call them forth and guard them. We shall everywhere lose the substratum of real being, unless we can penetrate to it by special insight.