st, or not.

Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to
keep free from all speculative complications. Nevertheless, I do not
wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore
say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count
myself a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness
can possibly be _produced_ by a nervous machinery, though I can
perfectly well see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the
machinery, the _order_ of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
_order_ of the machine's operations. Our habitual associations of ideas,
trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences
of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible
stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from
might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain.
If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I
sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by
brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws.

But, after what we have just seen,--namely, the part played by voluntary
attention in volition,--a belief in free will and purely spiritual
causation is still open to us. The duration and amount of this attention
_seem_ within certain limits indeterminate. We _feel_ as if we could
make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard
were a genuine critical point in nature,--a point on which our destiny
and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the
appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?"

It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes
the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an
illusion. I myself hold with the free-willists,--not because I cannot
conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand
its plausibility, but simply because, if free will _were_ true, it would
be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the
very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the
belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my
freedom; I do so