Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/218

 2OO PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

it is even more difficult to convince ourselves that there is any freedom ; in the third we attribute freedom by what I shall venture to call instinctive inference, by reading our own consciousness of freedom into the similar actions of others, unless we assume an immediate, intuitive knowledge of other minds. In other words, the further removed from our immediate cognition the inner principle or cause of change is, the more it assumes the appearance of mechanical necessity.

It would seem that the obvious fact just stated would excite suspicion of the correctness of our interpretation of the changes in the external world, of which we have only an external, mediate and remote knowledge at best; rather than weaken our confidence in the testimony of our con sciousness as to those changes of which we have an internal and immediate knowledge. To read into the changes we observe in external objects a necessity which certainly may be only an appearance due to the limitation of our knowl edge, and then in defiance of the persistent witness of our own consciousness to cast the shadow of that necessity back upon our subjective experiences, of which we do have first hand knowledge, is a procedure which cannot be justified in reason. We simply cannot divest ourselves of the con sciousness that when we choose one of two or more alterna tives we are free and might have chosen otherwise. It is easy, of course, to say that this consciousness is an illusion due to the fact that we are ignorant of all the nervous processes involved ; but it is far from convincing. The fact is that our ignorance of mechanical process and of the nature of that which we call mechanical energy is very much greater, and our notion of it is much more likely to be mis taken. The science of natural processes, instead of present ing facts which authorize this discrediting of common sense, points clearly towards the confirmation of its testimony; and philosophy throws the weight of its most serious consid erations in the same side of the scale. We are justified in affirming confidently that the ethical life has a real founda-

�� �