not only of my freedom to act, but also that the assertion of this freedom may be a motive outweighing all other motives together. We are all conscious that we often will not do what we ought, simply because we are commanded : "If you tell me I may, I won't ; if you tell me I must, I will see you hanged first," — that is, egotistical freedom asserts itself by not brooking permission, and by defying command. Mr. Buckle has no right to object to this, that our consciousness may be wrong, for he himself appeals to it in a passage quoted above : "We are all sensible that moral principles do affect nearly the whole of our actions." Sensible means conscious ; he therefore puts himself out of court by producing in his own behalf the witness whose truth he had before impeached. To compare our consciousness of ghosts with our consciousness of our own freedom, is to confound the mind's self-consciousness of itself with its consciousness of a false sensation, or false nervous impression ; one is outward, the other inward. It is to argue that because a blind man cannot see colours, therefore he cannot see the validity of a syllogism. So that Mr. Buckle utterly fails to establish the premiss of his fundamental proposition : "the actions of men, and therefore of societies, are governed by fixed laws, and not by free-will."
Again, why make an "alternative" between fixed laws and free-will ? God is absolutely free and absolutely immutable. Freedom is not instability. The liberty of the children of God does not consist in holding an even balance between obeying and disobeying God, now inclining to one side, now to the other. True liberty is a self-determined, self-chosen perseverance in the way we deliberately think the best. Fixedness, then, is not really opposed to freedom. But further ; let us assume as an hypothesis the existence of an immaterial soul, having perfect and even capricious freedom, — such that there is no fixity in its intentions, no possibility of predicting the changes of its self-determination. Yet as soon as this soul is united with body, as soon as it manifests its acts in time and space, it must follow the laws of time and
