Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/546

 530 J. D. LOGAN : sciously to the future, and becomes now the idea of some end or future good. And the causal nexus between stimulus and volition having been thus broken by inhibition and again qualified or modified by the conception or idea of an end or future good, " the motive to action must come from the ideational centre, and may or may not conform with the original inclination. It must be observed, however, that this motive is not contributed by the external impression or the sensation, although they are instrumental in its occur- rence, but is an original and creative product of the idea- tional centre, so far as its form and matter are concerned. This motive is an efficient cause precisely as any motive may be supposed to be, . . . but its efficient power does not appear until it first occurs as a final cause. . . . The end is a pure contribution of the ideational centre, and as the efficiency of this end as a motive awaits ideational activity to decide what shall be the final cause or ratio agendi, the cause of the volition comes wholly from within." 1 Ideas of ends being, then, so far as their own form and matter go, products of the ideational centre or Reflective Self, these ideational motives, as being, for that matter, both final and efficient causes, differ in kind and source from external causation. They are the products of Reason, and not of external stimulus : they are idealistic and teleological, and are, therefore, absolutely different in nature from the me- chanical causation of external motives, and of reflex and ideo-motor action. And hence the question of Freedom is not a question as to the existence or non-existence of a nexus between motive and volition, but altogether as to the kind and source of the motivation. Just "to sustain a representation, to think, is, in short, the only moral act ". 2 To sustain a representation is enough to guarantee non- compulsion ab extra, spiritual motivation. Freedom of the Will really and fundamentally consists in sustaining a repre- sentation, in the spiritual- or self-initiation of a process, whether there be choice of alternatives or not. And " if at any time we are able to choose otherwise than we do, the fact proves our Freedom, but it is not the condition of it. But it is the condition of our Responsibility." 3 Let the present Form of the Will be, therefore, what it may, the product of experience, of heredity, or, possibly, a new creation, and though the Form of the Will determines its Motive, and the Motive, in turn, the Will, and the agent thus seems to have no choice, nay, though man himself is 1 J. Hyslop, op. cit. sup., p. 385. 2 James, op. cit. sup., ii., p. 566.
 * Hyslop, op. cit. sup., p. 388.