truly as to the world of matter. Heredity and Circumstance
make us what we are. Our actions are the inevitable result of the mental
and moral constitutions with which we came into the world, operated on
by external influences.

The supporters of free will, on the other hand, maintain that it is a
fact of consciousness that there is a clear distinction between the Will
and the Desires, and that although they are closely connected no sound
analysis will confuse them. Coleridge ingeniously compared their
relations to 'the co-instantaneous yet reciprocal action of the air and
the vital energy of the lungs in breathing.'[1] If the will is
powerfully acted on by the desires, it has also in its turn a power of
acting upon them, and it is not a mere slave to pleasure and pain. The
supporters of this view maintain that it is a fact of the plainest
consciousness that we can do things which we do not like; that we can
suspend the force of imperious desires, resist the bias of our nature,
pursue for the sake of duty the course which gives least pleasure
without deriving or expecting from it any pleasure, and select at a
given moment between alternate courses. They maintain that when various
motives pass before the mind, the mind retains a power of choosing and
judging, of accepting and rejecting; that it can by force of reason or
by force of imagination bring one motive into prominence, concentrating
its attention on it and thus intensifying its power; that it has a
corresponding power of resisting other motives, driving them into the
background and thus gradually diminishing their force; that the will
itself becomes stronger by exercise, as the desires do by indulgence.
The conflict between the will and the desires, the reality of
self-restraint and the power of Will to modify character, are among the
most familiar facts of moral life. In the words of Burke, 'It is the
prerogative of man to be in a great degree a creature of his own
making.' There are men whose whole lives are spent in willing one thing
and desiring the opposite, and all morality depends upon the supposition
that we have at least some freedom of choice between good and evil. 'I
ought,' as Kant says, necessarily implies 'I can.' The feeling of moral
responsibility is an essential part of healthy and developed human
nature, and it inevitably presupposes free will. The best argument in
its favour is that it is impossible really to disbelieve it. No human
being can p