mpatible as they
are with the theory of powerlessness, are mere mistakes
arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary
facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous
sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by
habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by
logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof
that it is not a real power of perceiving real things,
than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power.
The perceptions of worth and worthlessness are not
conclusions of reasoning, but immediate sensations like
those of seeing and hearing; and although, like the
other senses, they may be mistaken sometimes in the
accounts they render to us, the fact of the existence of
such feelings at all proves that there is something
which corresponds to them. If there be any such
things as "true ideas," or clear distinct perceptions at
all, this of praise and blame is one of them, and according
to Spinoza's own rule we must accept what it
involves. And it involves that somewhere or other the
influence of causes ceases to operate, and that some
degree of power there is in men of self-determination,
by the amount of which, and not by their specific
actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured.
Speculative difficulties remain in abundance. It will
be said in a case, e.g. of moral trial, that there may
have been power; but was there power enough to resist
the temptation? If there was, then it was resisted. If
there was not, there was no responsibility. We must
answer again from a practical instinct. We refuse to
allow men to be considered all equally guilty who
have committed the same faults; and we insist that
their actions must be measured against their opportunities.
But a similar conviction assures us that there is
somewhere a point of freedom. Where that point is,
where other influences terminate, and responsibility
begins, will always be of intricate and often impossible
solution. But if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to
necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto
supposed to be--an exception in the order of nature,
with a power not differing in degree but differing in
kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all
life, is a mystery; and as to dissect the body will not
reveal the secret of animation, so with the actions of
the moral man. The spiritual life, which alone gives
them meaning and being, glides away before the logical
diss