impulses, this brain and nervous system, may be influenced and modified, hence that a person may be educated into morality; (3) that what a man will be, must depend, to some extent, upon what he is, that is, upon his native disposition.

A man may have been endowed by nature with bountiful intellectual and physical gifts, but the absence of favorable conditions or the presence of unfavorable ones may hinder these capacities from being realized. A person who might have become an athlete, had he been born in a certain climate and had he received the proper training, may turn out to be physically deficient. So, too, a man who might have become a great artist may find his natural powers weakening from lack of exercise.

In order, then, to form a moral character, we need a natural capacity for goodness, so to speak, and favorable life conditions. We have just seen that the absence of the latter is bound to show its effects. But the former also, the native endowment, is needed. A man with a dwarfed brain can never become an intellectual prodigy. But there are many gradations from a diseased brain and organism to a perfectly healthy and well-developed system, and consequently many gradations in physical excellence. Some persons seem to be utterly devoid of moral impulses, and consequently bound to turn out bad. Some criminals are criminals by nature. They are what has been called by alienists morally insane. Such individuals are usually without the impulses

upon which morality is based. "Modern reformatories have testified to the possibility of the redemption of a large number of criminals from their evil life, but they have shown, nevertheless, that there is a lust of cupidity, a love of meanness, and an animality from which rescue is almost if not quite impossible. The reaction of men whose past opportunities have been about equal, upon effort for their reform, exhibits also very different degrees of readiness. The testimony of reformatories for the young is especially of worth on this point; and I once heard Mrs. Mary Livermore describe the faces of many of the children to be found in a certain institution of this sort as bearing fearful witness to the fact that they had been 'mortgaged to the devil before they were born.' I remember a number of cases cited by the matron of a certain orphan asylum, showing that children taken from their home at too early an age to have learned the sins of their parents by imitation may yet repeat those sins. Out of three children of the same parents, the one of whom was a drunkard and prostitute, the other a thief, one developed, at a very early age, a tendency to dishonesty, another an extreme morbid eroticism, and the third child appeared to have escaped the evil inheritance; but he was still very young when I last heard of him.”1 "Whoever is destitute of moral feeling is, to that extent, a defective being; he marks the beginning of race-degeneracy; and if propitious influence do

1 Williams, Evolutional Ethics, Part II, pp. 405 f.

not chance to check or to neutralize the morbid tendency, his children will exhibit a further degree of degeneracy, and be actual morbid varieties. Whether the particular outcome of the morbid strain shall be vice, or madness, or crime, will depend much on the circumstances of life." "When we make a scientific study of the fundamental meaning of those deviations from the sound type which issue in insanity and crime, by searching inquiry into the laws of their genesis, it appears that these forms of human degeneracy do not lie so far asunder as they are commonly supposed to do. Moreover, theory is here confirmed by observation; for it has been pointed out by those who have made criminals their study that they oftentimes spring from families in which insanity, epilepsy, or some allied neurosis exists, that many of them are weak-minded, epileptic, or actually insane, and that they are apt to die from diseases of the nervous system and from tubercular diseases." 1

3. The Freedom of the Will. - The preceding statements naturally suggest the problem of the freedom of the will, which we shall now consider. Is the will free or is it determined? Before we can answer this question we must understand the terms involved in our discussion.

1 Maudsley, Pathology of Mind, pp. 102 ff., quoted by Williams, loc. cit. See also Lombroso, L'homme criminel; Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatrie, Vol. II, p. 65; Strümpell, Pedagogische Pathologie; Williams, Evolutional Ethics, pp. 402 ff.; Paulsen, Ethics, pp. 373 ff., 475 ff.

Let us see. By the will we may mean the attitude of the ego toward its ideas, i.e., the element of decision, the fiat or veto, will in the narrow sense of the term.1 Or by will we may mean the so-called impulsiveness of consciousness, that is, the tendency of consciousness to act, the so-called self-determination of the soul.2 Thus in attention there is psychic energy. Whether I pay attention to a loud noise or force my attention upon my lesson, I am always putting forth mental energy, I am willing in the broader sense of the term. This psychic energy or conation is present in all states of consciousness; every state of consciousness is impulsive or energetic.

By freedom we may mean unhindered by an external force. A nation or individual is free when not hindered by an outer force; I am free when I can do what I please, that is, when my acts are the expression of my consciousness, the outflow of my own will, not the expression of some consciousness outside of mine. This is what the average man means by freedom when he applies the term to human beings. Man is free to do what he pleases, means that he is not hindered in his willing. In this sense there can be no doubt of the possibility of man's freedom. I am free to get up or sit down, free to teach or not to teach, as I please. If I will to get up, I can get up; if I will to sit down I am free to do that.

1 See chap. viii, § 3 (4).

2 See chap. viii, § 3 (4), p. 215, note 2.

But by freedom I may mean something else. I may mean by free something uncaused, undetermined, having no necessary antecedents, self-caused, causa sui, an uncaused cause. God, we say, is uncaused, not caused by something outside of Himself, causa sui.

If we apply this last conception to the will in the narrow sense of the term, free will means: The will is uncaused, undetermined by antecedents. I will that A be done instead of B, I give my consent, or assent, to A without being determined thereto by anything outside of me or inside of me. I, as will, decide for or against an act absolutely, without being influenced to do so. Not only, then, can I do as I please, but I can please as I please.

If we employ the term will in the broader sense, and accept the second interpretation of freedom, free will means: The energy of the soul, the activity or impulsiveness of consciousness, is an uncaused or indeterminate factor, dependent upon nothing. We can put forth any amount of effort of attention or psychic force at any time. The amount of effort put forth depends upon no antecedents whatever; it is not determined by anything; it is free or indeterminate.1

In short, the libertarian view holds that the will, in whatever sense we take it, is not subject to the

1 See James, Psychology, Vol. II, chap. xxvi; also "The Dilemma of Determinism," in The Will to Believe; Ladd, Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory, chap. xxvi.