Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/191

 178 A. BAIN : terial soul, they possess nothing in common with the senses and laws of passive association, although the associating forces are their essential tool or instrument. The logical stimuli direct the forces to the production of reasoned truths, the aesthetic to art, and the ethical to right conduct. It is in this region alone that free-will possesses any meaning, There is a determinism in the lower region which is as mechanical as you please : the determinism of the higher or apperceptive region is a psychical determinism ; in it there is no constant relation between energy of motive and energy of action. The laws of apperception are thus very peculiar, and the mode of discovering them is peculiar. Ordinary introspection is unequal to the research. Without excluding this means of knowledge, we must devote ourselves to a study of man's history and institutions, which are the fruit of his highest elaborations, and the measure and test of his superior motives. Anthropology at large, comprising social progress, literature, language, mythology, religion, will fur- nish the laws of our highest motives, being the resultant of their operation during the ages that have passed. Of the questions raised by the foregoing speculation, there are two that I must pass without discussion. The one is the immateriality of the mind in certain of its functions, a position maintained in all its nakedness, and without any attempt to get it out of the difficulties that were felt no less by Aristotle than by ourselves. How an immaterial mind can be allied with a material organism, which is the essential instrument of certain very important mental functions ; how the parti- tion of functions is made ; how it is that there can be so much difference of opinion as to what is grounded in the material organs, and what subsists in the immaterial sphere, all this is left without any palliation and need not be coun- terargued until something is done to surmount such obvious and weighty objections. The other point is Free-will, which is presented in a some- what novel shape. It has its exclusive habitat in the upper sphere, where the principle of proportionality of cause and effect is suspended, the smallest causes producing, if need be, the largest effects. Here too there are difficulties to be explained away. It would be requisite to adduce some unequivocal examples of this inversion of mechanical uniformity, as well as to show that in the great institutions of mankind, as society, language, religion, such inequality of cause and effect is unequivocally present. We are well acquainted, even in the mechanical sphere, with the occur-