BOOKS.

DR. MAIIDSLEY ON BODY AND WILL.*

Ds. MecostEr's book is certainly not one of which an intelli- gent critic of any school would say, as he anticipates in a somewhat contemptuous preface, that it is "a weak intrusion into the high domains of high mental philosophy." There is nothing weak about it, though there is plenty of narrow- ness, and also of that apparent satisfaction in repeating over and over again the very same one-sided statement of facts of which he accuses,—no doubt more or less justly, —his chief opponents. We cordially agree with Dr. Mandsley that it is "not enough to think and talk about abstract minds and their qualities, when you have to do with concrete minds, that must be observed, studied, and managed." But it is precisely of his deficient appreciation of the facts as we know them,—and as we know them not on what he calls "the barren heights of speculation," but in "the places in which men live and move and have their being," that we complain in the treatise before us.

Dr. Mandate), begins almost at once by over-painting and, in- deed, wholly travestying the view of those with whom the battle has really to be fought. It is certainly not to be fought with believers in "freedom as absolute and perfect in man," or with believers in a human will that is "itself an inexhaustible source of self-procreating energy" (page 7), still less with those who contend that freedom, even where freedom exists, must be "motiveless and hap-hazard" (page 9). All these pictures of his opponents' case are, for the purposes of sane controversy, fancy pictures. We do not say that Dr. Mandsley could not find in Body and WiU, teing an Essay concerning Will in its Metaphysical, Phyeiological, and Pathological Aspects. By Binary Mandalay, M.D. Loudon : Regan Paul, Trench, and Co. any of the idealist school expressions which might be construed as meaning ROM ethiog almost as extravagant and absurd. All we say is that persons who use language of that kind are not the foes from whom Dr. hiandsley has anything to fear, and that is, perhaps, the reason why he dwells on such statements—with- out, however, justifying them even by quotation—with so. much obvious pleasure. There is nothing commoner with a controversialist than BO to exaggerate what he sees to be the critical feature of his opponents' case as to make it a glaring caricature of reality. What the true realistic. psychologist says is not that there is any "absolute and perfect freedom" in man, still less "an inexhaustible source of self-procreating energy," or "a motiveless and hap- hazard" power which ignores all reasons for its action. What reasonable psychologists who stick to facts do say is only this,— that in proportion as man's mind becomes healthy and mature,. there is undoubtedly developed in it a certain limited power of free choice between alternative courses of action, a power of which it is impossible to say that you can find the efficient cause of it in the antecedent conditions, seeing that you know the efficient. cause to be independent of the antecedent conditions. Now, this. is not saying that our freedom is "absolute and perfect," but that it is relative and imperfect ; it is not saying that it is "an inexhaustible source of self-procreating energy," but a very ex- haustible source of such energy; and it is not saying that suck freedom as we have is "motiveless and hap-hazard," for it may be, and ought to be, motived and rational. Dr. Maudsloy, with most of his school, confuses two most different things,—the reason for a course of action, and the efficient cause of that course of action. If a man chooses a course of action because it is right, it no more follows that it is the rightness of that course of action which determines his will, than it follows that if he goes to bed because the clock has struck his usual hour of bed-time, the striking of the clock has determined his will. In either ease, it may be so, or may be otherwise. It may be that he is such an automaton that the striking of the clock sends him off to bed,. just in the same way in which it liberates the cuckoo that accompanies the striking of the hour. And it may be that the rightness of a course of action, once seen, takes such immediate and complete possession of the will, that the action is as much determined by its rightness, as the egress of the cuckoo is deter-. mined by the striking of the clock. But the other alternative is quite as possible, and much more probable. The reason why the. man does right need not be,—generally is not, —the efficient cause of his doing right. The rightness in itself may generate no impulse to act. The striking of the hour may generate no. impulse to move. The supply of efficient cause may— though it need not,—come from elsewhere in both cases,. namely, from the man's own volition. He resolves to do right. He resolves to go to bed punctually. And though he acts be- cause it is right, because the fixed hour has arrived, the efficient cause may well be his resolve, and not the reason for his resolve_ Youmight as well say that when you strike a billiard-ball, the efficient cause must be the perception by which you regulate the direction of the blow, as say that when a man does right, the efficient cause must be the sense of rightness. The question is not why a man wills, but it is this,—what determines his will P And the reason why he wills may have little or no operative power in actually putting his will' in motion. It is simply a question of fact where the opera- tive influence comes from. We maintain that a man who knows himself, often knows perfectly what the spontaneous re- sultant of all the influences acting upon him will be unless he intervenes to resist that resultant influence ; but that he. may exert a certain limited, but still efficient amount of " anti- impulsive " effort, as the late Dr. Ward happily termed it, in opposition to that resultant influence. We do not say that a youth brought up in one set of habits can suddenly take up his free-will, break with his past, and so revolu- tionise himself as to make himself a new set of habits. We do, not say that the amount of " anti-impulsive effort" which every man has at his disposal is unlimited. We do fay only that healthy and mature minds undoubtedly find in themselves the power of resisting, up to a certain point, the total set and ten- dency of their hereditary and personal inclinations and habits, and. that it is impossible to ascribe this to a latent tendency of which the man is unconscious, because, if that were the explanation, the latent tendency, however unconscious he might be of it„ would. take its effect on him by inclining him so to act ; whereas,. all he is conscious of in these cases is the utmost disinclination

so to act, and the positive self-assurance that if he does not make a most fatiguing and distressing effort against the grain of all his latent and patent tendencies, judgment will go by default on the wrong side.

Further, we press on Dr. Mendsley to explain to us how the illusion of freedom arise; if there be, as he says, "far more necessity in man than in nature, and far more freedom in nature than in man" (p. 127). On his view of the subject, there is really no excuse for the illusion of free will. Everything in our experience, he declares, points to the absolute uniformity of antecedent and consequent, and as the very notion of cause is closely bound up with that absolute uniformity of antecedent and consequent, the conception of a spiritual break in the chain of causation ought to be, in his view, a grotesque perversity of the mind more akin to insanity than sanity. And that, indeed, is his view of it. He uniformly treats the notion of any self-determining power as proper to lunatics, in whom it is very often extravagantly caricatured.

But surely he is bound to account for the origin of what is to him so very mad a notion in the sanest and most practical minds of the day. We have come upon but one hint of such an explan- ation in Dr. Mandaley's book. It is in the section on "What Consciousness tells us Concerning Will," one of the ablest sections in the book, and one on which alone it would be easy to write a treatise. The suggestion is this,—that as consciousness tells us

nothing, except concerning the moment, and as we are dependent on memory—memory, with all its inadequacy and inaccuracy—

for the history of the states which led up to that moment, the notion of freedom probably arises from the comparative shadow and oblivion into which the antecedent and determining con- ditions have fallen. At least, that is how we understand the passage to which we refer. It runs as follows :-

"Consciousness makes known the actual choice or volition, but does not make known the pre-existent order of events ; it does not reveal what has taken place, and is taking place, in the nuillumined region : it is the self-revelation of the moment, and no more. But how infinitely small is that revelation compared with what we learn by observation and experience of self and of others, and by the history of human doings in all time and in all places, needs not be pointed out. The one is the coruscating point of a moment, the other embraces length of time and breadth of space. As the testimony of consciousness, moreover, is immediate—that is to say, is strictly the expression of its present state—it cannot, by the nature of the case, have direct regard to any former state of consciousness ; otherwise, we should have to admit that a present state of consciousness could be itself and a former state of consciousness at the same instant. If it steps beyond the instant, we have no longer to do with the direct deliverance of itself, but with the indirect evidence of memory of antecedent consciousness, not with introspective certainty, but with retrospective fallacy ; staying in the instant, bow can it help falling into the illusion of an undetermined will ?''

Now, the answer to that clever suggestion is that if it were good for anything, it would be good for a great deal more than the illusion of an undetermined will in the form in which we actually find it in man. On that view, we should have "the illusion of an undetermined will" in respect to every act of our live; A man insults me, and I promptly give him a

blow which kills him. Interrogated about that blow, I say that so far as I know, it was involuntary, and due to a burst of passion which I had no more power to prevent at the time (doubtless owing to want of discipline in the past) than I have the power to prevent a start when a report goes off suddenly at my ear. But Dr. Maudsley's theory would make it just as natural to

indulge "the illusion" of freedom in that case, as in the case of a deliberate resolve, taken after much inward debate. It is just as true that the consciousness in that case, too, applies only to the moment; that the consciousness of the past states which determined my impulse of the moment is a mere matter of memory ; and that therefore I am liable to ascribe

to free-will what the "fallacy of memory" prevents me from tracing back to the moral habits of the past. Dr. Mandsley fails to see that his account of the illusion of freedom would explain just as well why we ought to imagine actions to be free which we never for a moment suppose to be free, as why we ought to imagine aztions to be free which we do most imperi-

ously assert to result from our own self-caused volition, and from nothing else. Again, no man thinks that he is at liberty either

to smell or not to smell a powerful odour. But Dr. Maudsley's suggestion as to the limited scope of immediate consciousness would be just as good for explaining why we had,—if we had,— any such illusion of freedom, as it is for explaining why we imagine volitions to be free which, according to him, are quite as deeply rooted in the history of the past as is the sense of a powerful odour in the physical origin of that odour.

One word only as to the physiological side of Dr. 3faudsley'a book. That there is much to be said as to the indisputable physical conditions of free volition, which Dr. 3faudsley says with very great force, we should be the last to deny. But when he asserts (p. 118) "that there is not a single bodily pheno- menon that has not its sufficient determining conditions in an antecedent state of the body," we reply simply that either we cannot agree with him as to what "the body" subject on which, perhaps, he is himself not quite clear,—or that if we do, we challenge his statement of the fact. If the com- mon belief that a number of people by sheer force of united. volition can influence not a few persons, wholly unconscious of what that volition is, to perform some specified and complicated action previously agreed upon without these persons being in • the least able to guess its nature, we call that a bodily phe- nomenon which has no sufficient determining conditions in the antecedent state of the body, as we know it, unless Dr. liaudeley very largely modify his ordinary use of the word " body." And. if, again, it be true,—as a great deal of cumulative evidence goes to show,—that there are many cases in which dying people, and fewer but still indisputable cases in which people in health, can produce on persons at a distance the impression of their presence, and of some special con- dition of their mind at the moment of that visionary presence, then we say that this is a bodily phenomenon of which the determining condition appears to be in the main, not an antecedent state of the body, but an antecedent state of the feelings and the mind. But this is the class of facts which physiological psychology prefers to ignore, rather than to investigate and explain.