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IV. EESEAECH AND DISCUSSION. FREE-WILLOBSERVATIONS AND INFERENCES. By FBANCIS GALTON, F.E.S. The cases appear rare in which any of the numerous writers on Free-will have steadily, and for a long time together, watched the operations of their own minds, whenever it was engaged in such an act, and discussions on Free-will have certainly been much more frequent than systematic observations of it. 1 Consequently, for my own information, I undertook a course of introspective inquiry last year : it was carried on almost continuously during six weeks, and has been proceeded with, off and on, for many subsequent months. As the results were not what I expected and as they were very distinct, I publish them, of course on the understanding that I profess to speak only of the operations of my own mind. If others will do the same, we shall be hereafter in a position to generalise. My course of observation was that, whenever I caught myself engaged in a feat of what might fairly be called Free-will, I checked myself, and recalled the antecedents and noted any cir- cumstances that might have influenced my decision, and forth- with wrote down an account of the whole transaction. After I had collated several notes I found that the variety of processes to be observed was small ; I therefore discontinued my notes but maintained the observations, until I felt satisfied that I could describe as much of what goes on in my own mind as falls within the ken of its consciousness. I may say that, after some preliminary maladroitness had been overcome, I did not find the task difficult, nor even irksome ; not nearly so much as in other introspective inquiries I have made. It is true that facility in any kind of introspection is difficult to acquire ; it depends on the establishment of a habit something like that of writing in the midst of avocations. AVhen the latter has once been attained, the writer recovers the thread of thought that had been dropped at each interruption, and rarely finds it broken. So it is with introspection. The word ' Will ' is of course applicable to more acts than the word ' Free- will,' as it accompanies "many that are obviously automatic. I did not occupy myself about these, of which I I 1 only know of one such course, by Mr. Henry Travis, in MIND V. I did not read that article until after my own inquiries were finished. We do not cover exactly the same ground, and so far as we do our results differ.