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Updated: September 25, 2025
I may ask myself what processes are going on in his mind, what are the real contents of his consciousness, that is, what perceptions and memory pictures and imaginative ideas and feelings and emotions and judgments and volitions are really present in his consciousness.
But the theory which supposes the soul to be extended and divisible, and its ideas, feelings, and volitions to be extended and divisible also, has given place to another, which does not represent the mental qualities as inhering in every particle of the matter with which they are associated, but rather as the products of organization, the results, not of the atomic elements, but of the form, or figure, into which they are cast.
The results of such "natural agencies" as these are very like the effects produced by the volitions of a wise and thinking being. It happens that we are not obliged to grant to our author an indefinite lapse of ages for the sake of bringing all his higher principles into action.
Like the analogous maxim concerning temporal contiguity, it rests upon the assumption that causes "operate," i.e. that they are in some obscure way analogous to volitions. And, as in the case of temporal contiguity, the inferences drawn from this maxim are wholly groundless. I return now to the question, What law or laws can be found to take the place of the supposed law of causality?
What but that effects must follow their causes, and causes precede their effects, as plainly they must, unless cause and effect be utterly unmeaning expletives. Of course we must on all occasions be affected by surrounding circumstances, in modes exactly accordant with our idiosyncracies, moral and physical. Of course, too, our volitions must exactly correspond with our contemporaneous affections.
But this only shows, as M. Maury remarks in the work already referred to, that our volitions are frustrated through the inertia of our bodily organs, not that these volitions do not take place. In point of fact, the dreamer, not to speak of the somnambulist, is often conscious of voluntarily going through a series of actions.
Every society, great or small, resembles such a complex molecule, in which the atoms are represented by men, possessed of all those multifarious attractions and repulsions which are manifested in their desires and volitions, the unlimited power of satisfying which, we call freedom. The social molecule exists in virtue of the renunciation of more or less of this freedom by every individual.
How can the Father of Lights, by an operation of his will, contribute to our sinful volitions, without prejudice to his holiness? This is the problem which Leibnitz has promised to solve; and we shall, with all patience, listen to his solution.
Until we know a man's motives, we do not really know the man; and until we know the man, our efforts to influence him must be rather blind. The search for motives appears to carry us in the direction of the systematization and simplification of the embarrassing wealth of objects which are actually the goal of human desires and volitions. Man may desire a boundless variety of objects.
What though we know by experience that whatever, within certain limits, our will appoints, our bodily organs or mental faculties will ordinarily perform; that our limbs will move as we wish them, and our memory, reason, or imagination bring forward ideas which we desire to contemplate, what knowledge have we here beyond that of certain volitions and certain other acts taking place in succession?
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