sensitive to register every manifestation of the will, yet the will is regarded as operative, even though he is unconscious that it is so. Every step taken in walking is attributable to the will, though the consciousness does not indicate the direction taken by it upon this or that muscle. Nevertheless, we know that, were the will to be arrested, the power to walk would simultaneously fail. Volition being ordinarily considered as in itself a force, it is also regarded as free. Man supposes that his will is free, and that his actions are directly attributable to this independent power. "It is a sort of doing violence to his own instinctive belief, when he tries to persuade himself that his own acts of will are mere passive effects of remoter causes. He can only train himself into this belief by a somewhat severe logical process.'

In the material world, man is a spectator of changes taking place among objects destitute of intelligent volition. He recognises movements which he has not set in motion, and results brought about through no instrumentality of his own. He is constrained to acknowledge the presence of power over which he can exercise no control, which did not originate with himself, and which is mightier than himself.

In man, mind operates upon matter. Where matter is set in motion independently of man, he looks for a cause, and expects to discover it, in a force outside of himself similar to that working within him. That force must be seated either in the object moved, or it must be outside and, as it were, behind it, operating through it. A low intelligence or inaccurate observation may be arrested at inferior causes; but as reason lightens and enlarges, and as observation acquires sharpness by use, the understanding pierces beyond the mediate to the immediate, and along a 1 Lowndes, p. 191.

series of subsidiary causes stretches towards the self-generating spring of movement.

Sight is a sense wherewith the vast majority of men have been endowed by nature; but all do not possess the faculty in an equal degree of delicacy and power. To see correctly is rather the result of education than of superior organization of the eye. It is the same with the mental powers of vision. Some see through effects to causes with greater penetration than others, but to be able to shell off inferior causes till the core of primary force is reached can only be performed by an educated intellect.

It was a legitimate inference from the known to the unknown drawn by man, when he attributed the force in nature to a will like in kind to that he was conscious existed in himself. A power of free volition within or outside all matter in motion was a rational solution to the problem of effects of which man could not account himself the cause. Such is the origin of the idea of God;-of God, whether many, inhabiting each brook, and plant, and breeze, and planet, or as being a world-soul, or as a supreme cause, the creator and sustainer of the universe.

The common consent of mankind has been adduced as a proof of a tradition of a revelation in past times; but the fact that most races of men believe in one or more deities proves nothing more than that all men have drawn the same inference from the same premises. It is idle to speak of a Sensus Numinis as existing as a primary conviction in man, when the conception may be reduced to more rudimentary ideas. The Revelation is in man's being, in his conviction of the truth of the principle of Causation, and thus it is a revelation made to every rational being.

M. Boucher de Perthes' testimony is remarkable: "It is impossible for man to extinguish in himself his conviction

that there is a God. Doubtless the insane form very false ideas of the Divinity; some believe themselves to be God, others declare war against Him; but I have never heard of a case in which madness consisted in disbelief in Him: the insane are not materialists. It has been said that children derive their idea of God from the instruction of others, and that it is never original. I am convinced of the contrary. The smallest, before one has told them a word about Him, have an instinctive feeling of a mysterious power, which they personify without defining, and from which they expect something good, and sometimes also something evil. They are subject to hallucinations, they fear the dark, they do not like to be alone, they are superstitious, without knowing what superstition is: Croquemitaine was not revealed to them, they invented him. I myself was a child at a period when religion was proscribed, in which one did not even venture to allude to it: the churches were shut, and the priests were persecuted. Nevertheless, I remember that the aspect of the sky made me dream; I always saw in it something that was not of the world. When I spoke stammeringly about it—for I expressed myself with difficulty-I was silenced, but my mind recurred to the idea. I searched there above for something that I did not see, but whose existence I divined. Yes! the intuition of God was in me. Since then I have questioned many little children on this intuition, and I have discovered it in nearly all. The child that thinks itself abandoned or threatened, and has vainly called its mother, has recourse to this invisible power which its instinct reveals to it. It invokes this with tears and cries. In those moments of anguish, let a light appear, and it is instantly calm; it is God who appears to it." 1

1 Boucher de Perthes : Des Idées Innées. p. 15; Paris, 1867.

We pass now to the instinct impelling man to pursue an ideal of perfection. The different stages of life in the world may be expressed by the difference in selective power. In the phenomena of chemical affinity, the material substance chooses, among the atomic elements, those which will concur to form a certain compound. In all organic life a similar process prevails; the substance chooses among the elements surrounding it those which will concur to form and preserve a definite type to which its vegetative force instinctively tends. In the higher forms of animal life, this substance, already trenching on individualization, selects among the elements of its intellectual determinations those which concur with the pleasure and conservation of the material self. In human life there is a substance, immaterial, which selects, among the elements of its determinations, those which tend to enhance the pleasures and develop the faculties of the immaterial self. But in this case, because man has got at once a material and an immaterial self, his selection is constantly oscillating betwixt those objects which conduce to material, and those conducing to immaterial pleasures. Man's course being an ellipse around two foci, there is a constant tendency of each focus to counteract the attraction of the other, and make life revolve around that one alone.

Nothing is more striking than the antagonism in man's nature between the material and immaterial impulses. The animal life has its definite aim, and its instincts all tend towards the accomplishment of this aim. But besides the centripetal force, there is a strong centrifugal force, which impels him to burst through the ring of sensual pleasure, and fly away into unexplored regions where fresh pleasures are constantly opening out upon his perception.

Material and immaterial life have their parallel stages, the one parasitic, the other independent.

The first stage of material life-the parasitic mode-is the plant.

The second stage of material life-the independent mode --is the animal.

The first stage of immaterial life-the parasitic modeis the intelligence of the being reduced to animal instinct. The second stage of immaterial life-the independent mode is the intelligence of man.

This intelligence determines the growth of the immaterial life by selection; and that not arbitrarily, but according to an instinct of what is good, and conducive to the aim of the spiritual life, just as selection made by the instinct governing the material life conduces to the aim of the animal life.

The selection is formed by representing before the mind's eye a number of, objects or sensations, and choosing from among them those which instinct or experience points out to be best. The imagination then combines all that is most conducive to pleasure, and forms of this combination an ideal of perfection which it presents to the affections, and by engaging them starts the will in the pursuit of this ideal.

In the animal the imagination plays but an inconspicuous part. It only produces before the beast's interior vision the animal-self tasting pleasure and shrinking from danger, and it surrounds that self with images representing the circumstances leading to pleasure or danger. All the brute's mental pictures are on one or the other model, and a slight modification of circumstances is all that distinguishes the different images raised by this faculty. In the animal, the imagination has little or no educative