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ling, but some action in our power, it is there the will terminates and reaches no farther.-It is not a fault, bnt a perfection in our nature, to desire, will, and act, according to the last result of a fair examination.-A man's will, in every determination, follows his own judgment."

Here again the will is interposed between judgment and action, though choosing and perceiving, are defined to be but "several modes of thinking," both of which, are made necessary to a single action. His definition is altogether unintelligible. At one moment, thought itself moves the man, at the next, it moves the will to move the man. Some→ times, only one mode of thinking produces action, then, two are necessary, judgment and volition. In the latter case, a traveller who thinks it safer to go by land than by water, can not stir a muscle, until he varies his mode of thinking, although the second thought, which is usually the best, bet altogether useless, since it must obey the first. If his judg ment, when once formed, be the real cause of action, that is enough; it is most unreasonable that any other "mode of thinking," or faculty, or effort of the mind, should intervene between the cause and its effect.

Hume, in his treatise on Human Nature, defines this faculty thus: "I desire it may be observed, that by the will, I mean nothing but the internal power we feel and are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body, or new perception to the mind."

By a new perception, the author could not have meant a simple idea that had not entered at the senses, otherwise the blind might have a knowledge of colors, they had not seen, and the deaf, of sounds, they had never heard. He must have supposed that the will could give rise to new combinations of thought, independently of those laws of associa tion he so happily defines. If such be his meaning, then all discoveries in the arts might have been made in the beginning, and those to be made hereafter, might be forthwith brought into being, merely by an effort of the will. But it is now admitted by the best writers, that the mind cannot originate a thought for itself; nay, that this unintelligible will, cannot even help the memory to the name of a friend, unless it be aroused from without, or enter in a train of associations, appointed to the mind, as the blood to the veins, by laws it did not make and cannot control.

Reid considers the will as a distinct faculty, and with

Locke thinks it differs from desire, while Edwards, as we have seen, identifies volition with every affection of the soul. Drs. Brown, Payne and Young, deny to the mind any such process as volition, and insist that all actions spring direc ly from desires, implanted by nature in the constitution of man.

Dr. Clarke is of opinion, "that the last dictate of the understanding is not different from the will," and Hobbes before him had said, "the will is the last act of deliberation." Gall says, "motives must be compared, weighed and judged; the decision resulting from their operation is called the will." Spurzheim, following in his footsteps, affirms that "the will is the decision of the understanding."

These sentiments are just; will and judgment are two names for the same thing, the perception of the greatest apparent good. But the prejudices of thirty centuries were too strong for the truth: they soon relapsed into the common error, and treat the will as a separate faculty throughout their entire works.

Aimè Martin, a late writer on education, has revived the Greek notion of two wills in the same man, one spiritual and the other material, that contend for supremacy whenever a choice is to be made.

"Lorsque les deux volontès se recontrent, il y a lutte, et alors suivante que l'une ou l'antre l'emporte, vous voyez apparaitre, Epaminondas ou Cæsar, Socrate ou Sylla, Washington ou Bonaparte, la sagessa ou l'ambition, avec toutes leur suites. Lorsque la volonté de l'âme, est la plus forte, elle fait servir les facultès de l'intelligence à son triomphe; est lorsque au contraire, il y a volontè animale à la dessus, toutes les facultès de l'âme, s'effacent en leur obeissant."

But no writer has had such a struggle with his will, as M. Cousin, the living oracle of French metaphysics: every effort at definition has but increased his perplexity. He affirms truly that the judgments of the understanding are independent of the will. "At the moment it judges that a proposition is true or false, an action good or bad, a form beautiful or ugly, at that moment it is not in the power of the intellect, to pass any other judgment than it passes; it obeys laws it did not make; it obeys motives which determine it independently of the will."

He then proceeds to identify the will with attention,-"Now what is attention? It is not a reaction of the organs against the impressions received; it is nothing less than the

will itself, for no body is attentive without willing to be so, and attention at last resolves itself into the will."

It next becomes the foundation of consciousness,-"The first event of which we have a consciousness is a volition, and the will is the foundation of consciousness."

Then it is equivalent to succession-"The first succession then is a voluntary act; the element of succession is volition."

It is next made the measure of time-"The will is the primitive measure of time; now a moment is nothing else, in itself, but a simple act of the will."

It is then the test of existence and personal identity,-"It is the will then, attested by consciousness, which suggests to us the conviction of our existence, and it is the continuity of the will, attested by memory, which suggests to us to the conviction of our personal identity."

Having shewn the will to be any and every thing, he proceeds to display its powers.

"The moment we take a resolution to do an action, we take it with a consciousness of being able to take a contrary resolution. See then a new element, which must not be confounded with the former; this element is the Will."-"This cause, in order to produce its effect has need of no other theatre, no other instrument than itself. It produces directly without intermediate, and without condition; continues, consummates, or suspends and modifies; creates it entire, or annihilates, and at the moment it exerts itself in any special act, we are conscious it might exert itself in a special act, totally contrary, without any obstacle, without being thereby exhausted; so that after having changed its acts an hundred times, the faculty remains integrally the same, inexhaustible and identical amid the perpetual variety of its applications, being always able to do what it does not, and able not to do what it does. Here then in all its plenitude, is the characteristic of liberty."

This is the most startling account of the will, to be found in the annals of mental philosophy. It is not only a distinct faculty, but acts without motive or antecedent, independently of the judgment, a senseless lawless power, that may drive us to the East, when we intend the West, up, instead of down, over a precipice, or drown us in the sea, as the unclean spirits did the herds of swine.

The Will of Professor Tappan, the disciple of M. Cousin, is still more refractory; it can not only create and annihilate, but knows how to act against the cause of action itself. He says

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VOL. XI.-No. 21.

"The will is a cause, contingent and free-is first cause itself. Acts of the will neither require nor admit of antecedent causes to explain their action. What moves the will to go in the direction of reason? Nothing moves it-it is cause per se: it goes in that direction, because it has power to go in that direction. What moves the will to go in the direction of the sensitivity? Nothing moves it-it is cause per se: it goes in that direction, because it has power to go in that direction. It is a power indifferent to the agreeableness or disagreeableness of objects: distinct from reason, it is not conviction or belief."*

Yet neither the master or pupil were ever disturbed by the power they so fearfully describe. They are discreet, orderly men, punctual to their engagements in time and place, and steadily devoted to their well digested plans of education. M. Cousin, was lately entrusted with a mission to Holland, and returned without disaster from dyke or ditch, in a country half submerged with water. Professor Tappan does not preach, barely, because he has the power to preach; walk or ride in any direction, barely, because he has the power to walk or ride in that direction; on the contrary, he preaches, walks, rides and acts on all occasions, from his convictions of the best, and is always able to give a reason for what he says and does.

He

But the Professor, after a long and fruitless effort to uphold his master, abandons him to chance, reduces his own will to its allegiance, and restores reason to its throne. proceeds,-"Now although it is granted that the will can. act without deriving reason or inducement of action from the reason or sensitivity, still the instances in which it does so act, are so rare and trifling, that they may be thrown out of the account. We may therefore assume as a general law, that the will determines according to reason and inducement, from the reason and sensitivity."

This is all that Edwards ever contended for-that volition was the offspring of motive. He imagined the will to be distinct from the understanding, and after a laborious and doubtful struggle with its shadowy form, reduces it to the guidance of reason. Professor Tappan, fought over the the same ground with the same result, and may now shake hands with his great antagonist, with whom it is always dangerous to quarrel Though both argue from premises assumed, yet their conclusions are just, as justice is sometimes administered by the fiction of law. If they could not

• Review of Edwards on the Will.

get rid of the will, they brought it to terms, and left us free to follow the dictates of the understanding, the only rule of conduct vouchsafed to man.

Writers who take upon trust, the existence of such a faculty as they describe the will to be, must of necessity contradict themselves. There can not be one faculty by which the mind judges, and another by which it enforces or resists its own judgments. The mind is not double, nor is it divided against itself. It is integral, without length, breadth or parts, not a half dozen in one, and one in a half dozen. It does not deliver over its jndgments from the right side, to be disposed of by the will on the left side. When we determine to go by land instead of water, this is a judgment, and the hesitations we previously feel, are but the varied perceptions of the two modes of travelling as they rise to the mind; and when at last we act, it is from the judgment itself, and if we call it the Will, it is but another name for the same identical cause of action.

But let us look more closely into the condition of the mind, when a choice is said to be made.

Sugar applied to the tongue, produces a sense of sweetness, not of choice, but by an established law of our being. Sounds, odors, all colors and all sensations from external objects, come of the same law of necessity; the mind is acted upon, without the power to resist.

He

Present a variety of fruit to little children; one seizes upon nuts, another pears, apples, plumbs, cherries: this is called choosing; nothing can be farther from the truth. The sight of the fruit revives in each, the memory of its appropriate sensation: the idea exists and action follows. When a man says he prefers grapes to olives, his preference. implies no effort of the mind; he means only, that grapes affect him more agreeably than olives; nothing more. perceives the difference between the two sensations as necessarily as between two and four, and when he takes the grapes instead of olives, he is impelled by the sense of the most agreeable, as the strong prevails over the weak. It would be just as wise to say, the grapes chose the man, as the man the grapes: they first act upon him and not he upon them. Such is choice as every one can testify who declares what he knows and feels within, and not what he has heard or read.

The necessarians say, that choice follows the judgment

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