Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/324

312 and "necessary connection." These doctrines of the people give rise, among the men of leisure, or thinkers, to two corresponding doctrines of the learned — free-will and predestination ; founded one on a metaphysical, the other on a theological hypothesis. Mr. Buckle rejects both doctrines : the second, as unproved, and if proved only a barren hypothesis ; the first, free-will, as "in reality resting on the metaphysical dogma of the supremacy of the human consciousness. Every man, it is alleged, feels and knows that he is a free agent ; nor can any subtleties of argument do away with our consciousness of possessing a free-will." This supremacy of consciousness he denies : first, because we cannot prove that consciousness is a faculty ; secondly, because if a faculty it is fallible, or, as he explains in a note, infallible as to the fact, but fallible as to the truth ; infallible in testifying the presence of a phenomenon to the mind, fallible in affirming the substantial reality of the phenomenon. Now the consciousness is often deceived in affirming the existence of ghosts and the like, therefore it may be deceived in affirming the existence of free-will. This is literally the whole proof which Mr. Buckle deigns to give us of the premiss of the fundamental proposition of his book.

It is almost too absurd to controvert. He foists the unnecessary word supremacy into his adversary's statement, in order that he may object that, consciousness not being a faculty, there is no supremacy. Possibly not. Yet consciousness being the mind's knowledge of its own acts, and of the motives upon which it acts, either consciousness is true, or all our knowledge of our own thoughts is possibly false — i.e. possibly I am thinking exactly the contrary of that which I know I am thinking. Next, the mind may be infallibly conscious of its acts and motives, and, among the rest, of its own freedom. Put the case of every imaginable motive of interest and pleasure, temporal and eternal, being offered me to determine me to a certain act : I know that if I choose, I may do exactly the reverse, simply to prove my freedom. I am conscious