power? On the contrary it is of the essence of will that it is rational power or energizing reason which determines its own end and exertions; and its choice is in its essence an elective preference and not an action in indifference. In fact determination under the influence of motives is characteristic of rationality. Action without motives or contrary to all motives would be irrational action. Instead of being free action it would be more like the convulsions of epilepsy.

VI. The common formulas or laws of the uniform influence of motives on the determination of the will are ambiguous and worthless. One formula supposed to enunciate the law of the uniform action. of motives is this: The determination of the will is always as the strongest motive. If this means that the determination is always as the motive, the object of which reason approves as of the highest worth, it is notoriously untrue. All sin is determination contrary to the mandate of reason. If it means that the determination is always accordant with the motive which is in the consciousness strongest in intensity, it is not true. A man who has been enslaved by an appetite for tobacco or opium or alcoholic drink may resist it in obedience to reason and conscience, and yet in his desperate struggle he is vividly conscious that the appetite is strong and the impulse to duty weak. If it were true that man always determines according to the motive which is in this sense the strongest, he would be controlled as the brutes are by nature and would have no free-will. If the formula implies that we ascertain which the strongest motive was by observing to which the will consented, the formula has no significance and is equivalent to the identical proposition, "The will always determines as it does determine."

A second form of stating the law is this: The determination of the will is always as the greatest apparent good. This springs from the Hedonistic ethics and assumes that happiness is the ultimate motive of all action. And it involves just the same ambiguity as was found in the first statement. If it means that men always choose that which in the light of intelligence they estimate as the greatest good, it is not true. If it means that they always choose that which seems to insure the greatest present gratification, it is not true; and if it were true man would not be a free agent. And if we ascertain what seemed the greatest good by observing the determination, the law has no significance further than the identical proposition that a man always determines as he does determine.

A third form of stating the law is this: The determination of the will is always as the last dictate of the understanding. This leaves out altogether the sensibilities which are the only real motives, and connects the determinations immediately with the intellect. It is also

untrue because men often determine contrary to the dictate of the understanding and in accordance with the incitation of feeling.

VII. The uniformity of human action cannot be explained by any law of the uniform influence of motives on the will. Another factor is concerned in this uniformity; it is the character in the will. By its choice the will forms in itself a character; and by action in accordance with the choice, it confirms and develops the character. This must be recognized in explaining the uniformity of human action. The attempt to explain it by some law of the uniform influence of motives assumes that the will is always characterless. Writers on the will who attempt to explain the uniformity of human action in this way, have much to say about the necessity of finding the laws of the will. But in fact they are seeking for a law of the will which shall be only a necessary uniform sequence of nature; should they succeed they would only prove that the determinations of the will are a part of the course of nature and subject to the dictum necessitatis. This would prove that personal beings do not exist and that nature is all. The real law to the determinations of the will is the moral law which declares the ends to which rational beings ought to direct their energies and the principles which ought to guide them in their actions. If personal beings exist they must at some point rise above the fixed course and uniform sequences of nature and find themselves under obligation to conform their free action to the truths, laws, ideals and ends of reason.

72. Character in the Will.

I. A choice being an abiding determination of the end or object of action, constitutes character in the will. A will that has made a choice therein has a character. As an abiding elective preference of the end or object of action it is character. As choice it is always active and free. It is not nature; it is not sensibility stimulated involuntarily from without. It is elective preference or choice. It may not always be present in consciousness. But whenever it comes to the person's attention he is conscious that it is his choice and conscious that in it he is free.

II. The determination of the will exerts an influence on subsequent determinations.

A choice exerts an influence on subsequent choices. For example, in choosing learning as an object of pursuit in life in preference to wealth, that choice carries in it an influence on a multitude of subordinate choices. So Agassiz, when asked to turn aside to a lucrative use of his knowledge in the service of a great business establishment, declined, saying that he had not time to get rich.

The resolutions or immanent volitions to act exert forwards a similar but less powerful influence. A man plans his day's work; resolves what he will do in each hour of the day. He may become a slave to his plan, or be entangled and hindered by its too great minuteness or its imperfect adjustments to time and strength and unanticipated avocations. But by a resolution or plan he may determine his course of action for the next day or for a series of days.

Even the executive or exertive volitions influence the subsequent determinations. They confirm the choice. By persisting under all temptations in honest action one confirms his honest character. And the repetition of action forms habit which is a facility of action and a proclivity to perform it. The acquired facility is exemplified in learning to handle tools or to play on an instrument. The acquired proclivity is exemplified in the difficulty of breaking up a habit. The action sometimes becomes secondarily automatic and is done unconsciously. Hence it is said, at first a man carries his habits, afterwards his habits carry him.

Choices and volitions also react on the sensibilities and either stimulate or deaden them. The appetite for alcoholic liquors or opium is strengthened by gratifying and deadened by resisting it. Ruskin says the highest happiness is found in seeing the corn grow. He means that a man realizes the greatest happiness when he keeps himself fresh to the enjoyment of simple pleasures. A passion for gambling, for excitement of any kind, grows by gratification and necessitates stronger and stronger stimulus, till the fevered soul becomes incapable of the common joys of healthy life. Men can educate themselves even to the ferocity of enjoying cock-fights, the prize-fights of pugilistic bullies, bull-fights and gladiatorial shows. In like manner by right action they can increase the delicacy of their moral discernment, their sensitiveness to good impulses, and the power of all motives to

virtue.

In this reaction of the voluntary determinations on the sensibilities a man indirectly modifies the motives under which he acts. Thus the motives which influence a person of mature age are largely the product of his own previous action.

III. Voluntary action is a continual formation or modification of character. We have seen that volitional action is an expression of character. We now see that it is also continuously a forming or modifying of character. Every subordinate choice and volitional act confirms or in some way modifies the existing character. hews his own statue; builds himself." Every act is a mallet on the shaping chisel. Thus man's life is a unity. now is the outgrowth of what he has been.

Every man blow of the

What he is

"The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be

Linked each to each in natural piety."

IV. Since character is in the will and is primarily the supreme choice, man is always free to change his character by a new and contrary supreme choice. If his supreme choice is of self he is free to choose God and his neighbor as the supreme object of trust and service. If he chooses thus, the new choice is the primary element of a new character; but it is not a new character fully developed and confirmed. There still remains in him all which he has builded into himself by his action in accordance with his former supreme choice: the training and storing of his intellect well or ill; the morbid excitability or deadness of his sensibilities; the motives that influence his determinations now constituted as all his life long he has been forming and modifying them by his own action; and the habits, some of them masterful habits, which he has himself created. Under the sway of his

new choice he must by continuous right action build himself up in a character of Christian faith and love, and in so doing tear out all the evil which he had built into the whole structure of his character in his previous life.

It is evident, also, that, although while his former character remained he was free to choose God, yet that character itself being the dominant choice of his will and having with the influence of continuous action formed the intellect and sensibilities into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to a fundamental change by a new and contrary choice, and gives small ground to expect that the man left to himself will ever make the change.

V. After the will has acquired a character by choice, its determinations are not transitions from complete indetermination or indifference, but are more or less the expressions of character already formed and of choices and determinations already made. A person who goes to his business at a stated hour every morning does not make a new complete determination every time, but acts according to choices and purposes of long standing. Nor does he determine anew every day the manner in which he does his business, whether honorably or dishonorably, cour teously or rudely, carefully or carelessly, energetically or lazily. In his manner of acting he expresses a character already formed by previous voluntary action. Some acts seem less closely connected with the prevailing bent of the character than others. But it would be difficult to find an act of any person after infancy, not influenced in some degree, directly or indirectly, by previous determinations of will.

It is sometimes objected to free-will that a person often follows impulse thoughtlessly. It is asked how in that case there can have

been comparison and choice. It is sufficient to answer that he is not divested of his rationality at any moment, and, if he follows impulse without deliberation, it is by the free determination of his will not to deliberate. It is his free refusal to consider what reason would require. The same is implied in common language when it is said that the man has given himself up to the control of appetite or passion. But there is also another answer, that the spontaneous action without deliberation is often simply the expression of a choice or purpose already made and of a character already formed.

The theory that indifference is essential to freedom necessarily implies that the will never acquires a character; that voluntary action is atomistic, every act disintegrated from every other; and that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom, because it would be essential to freedom that the will be always indifferent. A man may have been scrupulously honest fifty years, and yet, if he is a free agent, his will is in indifference, and the determination to cheat or steal is at every moment just as easy as to determine to do right. Persistence of choice and of character in the will is thus made incompatible with freedom; and God who is eternally love cannot be free. And this conclusion not a few advocates of this false theory of freedom have avowed and defended. But in truth the persistence and strength of a choice has nothing to do with the freedom of the will. The freedom lies in the constitution of a personal being and the essential quality of determination, whether the determination persist but for a moment or through endless existence. A choice, however long it persists, is always a choice of the will, not an involuntary excitement of the sensibilities; it is always the free and active determination by the will of the end or object of action. And under the influence of all sensibilities, however modified by previous voluntary action, the will determines.

73. The Uniformity of Human Action.

I. There is a uniformity in human action and a consequent possibility of foreseeing it, sufficient to be the basis of confidence and the determination of action between man and man. No one expects that a friend whom he has known for years will betray him to-morrow, or that a person long known to be honest will all at once steal a watch or defraud a widow of funds in his hands as her trustee. Foresight of human action is the prerequisite of far-reaching statesmanship and wise legislation. The uniformity of human action is the basis of the confidence of man in man which makes the transaction of business and indeed all domestic and social life possible. The homeliest and commonest transactions with men every day imply the confidence that they will act in the immediate future as they have been acting in the past.