Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/403

No. 4.] to do. He is the victim of other than deliberative motives. While he may have a degree of freedom it is small compared with that of the man who first "looks before and after," and who holds in check his spontaneous tendencies to volition. On the other hand, there is the contemplative character whose activities are entirely of the ideational sort. In the extreme form he is as if afflicted with muscular paralysis. The muscular indolence of contemplative men is no doubt due to the constant inhibition of the ordinary impulses. If they act at all it must be from internal motives formed by deliberation. The sceptic, again, is a man in whom inhibition is highly developed. He is mainly the antithesis of the impulsive man, and shows a constant disposition to suppress the influences inducing him either to act or to adopt decided opinions. He is always weighing considerations on both sides of a question, and shows the development of inhibition in the higher functions of reason. If he decides to act his motive is a creation of his own mind. Hence all types of character which furnish their own motives to volition as a result of deliberation are free precisely in that proportion.

But without insisting upon or multiplying instances in which the higher intellectual consciousness shows its tendency to interrupt the causal agency of sensation and emotion and to produce deliberation and its internal motives, it is sufficient to know that it is a fact quite as universal as those higher states, and that it is in direct contradiction with the denial of freedom, based upon an immediate and inevitable nexus between the initial stages of consciousness and volition. It will not do to assert that this nexus is the same in character between ideational motives and volition: for we admit this fact. But it is offset by the distinction in kind and source between internal and external motives. Ideational motives are the product of reason, and not of external stimulus. They are final causes before they become efficient, and this external motives never are. The causal efficiency of deliberative impulses originates in an ideational centre and not in the nature of the impression. This is even possible without any measure of deliberation; so that the hesitation involved in this process is only a proof (ratio cognoscendi), not the