ose,
but can we choose? Is not our choice determined for
us? We cannot determine from the fact, because we
always have chosen as soon as we act, and we cannot
replace the conditions in such a way as to discover
whether we could have chosen anything else. The
stronger motive may have determined our volition
without our perceiving it; and if we desire to prove
our independence of motive, by showing that we can
choose something different from that which we should
naturally have chosen, we still cannot escape from the
circle, this very desire becoming, as Mr. Hume observes,
itself a motive. Again, consciousness of the possession
of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly
judge what our powers are only by what they have
actually accomplished; we know what we have done,
and we may infer from having done it, that our power
was equal to what it achieved; but it is easy for us to
overrate ourselves if we try to measure our abilities in
themselves. A man who can leap five yards may think
that he can leap six; yet he may try and fail. A man
who can write prose may only learn that he cannot
write poetry from the badness of the verses which he
produces. To the appeal to consciousness of power
there is always an answer:--that we may believe
ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we
may be deceived.

There are, however, another set of feelings which
cannot be set aside in this way, which do prove that, in
some sense or other, in some degree or other, we are
the authors of our own actions,--that there is a point
fit which we begin to be responsible for them. It is
one of the clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where
two or more courses involving moral issues are before
us, whether we have a consciousness of power to choose
between them or not, we have a consciousness that
we ought to choose between them; a sense of duty
hoti dei touto prattein, as Aristotle expresses it, which
we cannot shake off. Whatever this involves (and
some measure of freedom it must involve or it is
nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and refuses to yield
before all the batteries of logic. It is not that of the
two courses we know that one is in the long run the
best, and the other more immediately tempting. We
have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence,
the violation of which is followed again by a sense of
self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will
Spinoza tell us that such feelings, inco