policy of Bismarck and the king, and to moderate the opposition against the military policy. The following words by Schmidt, written in his "History of German Literature," immediately after the victory of Königgrätz, show the spirit in which the national triumph was received by the literary men of Prussia :

"We stand again at a great turning-point in the history of our literature. For more than a hundred years the ideal striving of our poets and thinkers, consciously or unconsciously, has been to lead out the people from the contracted condition of small-citizenship, to emancipate the popular consciousness, crushed by spiritless Courts and by the contempt of other nations, to inspire into them self-respect, and to introduce them into the ranks of European nations. As far as the literary world is concerned this has been already done; for here, Goethe's poetry was our patent of nobility. But the proud spirit of poets and philosophers proved impotent when the problem was, how could real life be reduced to the rules of Idealism? Sometimes it was an indistinct view of the goal, sometimes infirm purpose, which led to the failure. The past war has put an end to this melancholy position of affairs. It was not the collective will of the nation, but one great and powerful will, which brought about the change. If this thought brings with it a momentary feeling of disappointment, this reflection may bring comfort that, without the co-operation of the nation, the completion of the edifice is impossible, and that the nation wants neither the power nor the capacity for the undertaking is evidenced alike by its past history and its present condition."

The conclusion to which all that we have advanced in this paper inevitably leads is, that while the Prussian State has been a great and beneficent influence with regard to science and literature, it has not been by direct intermeddlings with these concerns, which have often been unfortunate, but by wise government and by the general elevation of the people that it has done its work. We should not therefore be surprised if King William and the "blood and iron' Count, by the victories of 1870, and the consequent revival of all the glorious traditions which a united Germany is calculated to recall, have won for themselves a title to be regarded as great benefactors of their country, even in respect of its literary interests.

JOHN GIBB.

VOL. XV.

F F

KNOWING AND FEELING.

PART II.-SOME FURTHER DISCUSSION OF THE WILL.`

CONSCIOUSNESS, I endeavoured to show,* is, from its first to its

last stage of development, a combination of knowing and feeling. The two elements, sensation and judgment (apprehension of relations), are inextricably blended in our simplest perceptions; sensations arising to us in the relations of space and time. The unit of consciousness, if this expression is permissible, is a combination of sensations and a judgment, or apprehension of relations. I say if this expression is permissible, because I have always felt the difficulty there is in speaking of one definite state of consciousness, seeing that the consciousness itself is an arena of perpetual change and flux, and that what we should call the movement of thought appears necessary to thought itself. When, in the further evolution of mind, cognition seems to separate itself most distinctly from feeling, as in the labours of the mathematician or man of science, the cognitions with which their thinking is concerned were originally due in part to sensations; and a desire of some kind, curiosity if no other, presides over all that movement of thought which we here call reasoning or acquisition of knowledge. A perception, in becoming a memory, if it is stripped of its sensational character, assumes an emotional character. To think of a past pleasure or pain becomes a present passion. In short, look into the

See Contemporary Review for June, 1870.

consciousness at any moment you will, you find an inextricable complication of the intellectual and the emotional, of passions that grow out of cognitions, of cognitions again that have passions and other feelings for the objects of discrimination and comparison. All our moral truths have pain and pleasure, love and hate, for the very terms of the cognitions they deal with.

He consists of body, as

But consciousness is not the whole man. well as mind, or in a union of physical and psychical properties. The connection between these properties, in one remarkable instance, gives us voluntary motion, gives us will. Will, as voluntary motion, is plainly neither exclusively a physical nor psychical property, but a result of their combination. Movement and the force by which one body moves or breaks up another body, are physical properties, thought and feeling are psychical properties; the connection between the two constitutes the will, as matter of fact; the knowledge of such connection gives us our sentiment of power, our self-confidence, our belief that to a certain extent we have a command over the future. It converts thought into a purpose, anticipation into a resolve.

Two great facts encounter us on the threshold of life,-the action. of the external world on our sensitive bodies, and the reaction of those sensitive bodies on surrounding objects. These two great facts, or speaking from a psychological point of view, these two cognitions enter together into the consciousness. I know my own body and its movements, at the same time that I know the external object and its movement, or its resistance to movement. The two cognitions are needful to each other. I know furthermore that the movements of my limbs follow, to a certain extent, my desires. I know this as a matter of experience, and have learned to trust to it as the invariable order. I know nothing more; or if physiology and metaphysical reasoning have given me any insight into the nature of this connection between desire and movement, it is plain that I am here dealing with some additional cognitions. In psychology, the will is nothing else than a special cognition accompanied by its special class of sensations and emotions.

As to the theories we form of the nature of mind and matter, or of the connection between them, I repeat that we are plainly here on the high road of reasoning or conjecture. To some, the transition from a state of consciousness to bodily movement seems best represented by supposing that the same substance puts forth in succession these two different modes of activity. Others prefer to assign these two modes of activity to different substances, and they represent the one of these substances stimulating and determining the movements of the other. We hear some maintain that all force

is essentially will, that is, it emanates from mind, from the mind of Deity, matter being only the passive recipient of such forces. This last theory claims our respect; all these theories claim our examination; but they are evidently at present in the state of conjecture. What we really know, what every man, woman, and child born into the world really knows, is that desire is followed by movement.

Here some reader may object-But we do not say my desire moves my arm, or desire moves the arm; we say I desire, and I move. Does not the I move remit the power at once to the ego, whatever the ego may be? To me it seems that the I move is equivalent to this man moves; and this man is just the union of the several properties, physical and psychical, that go to the formation of this whole. Both the desire and the movement belong to the man, but the man is nothing but the combination of desire and movement and other properties. His heart, his limbs, his lungs belong to the man ; that is, they are parts of the whole we call a man. In no other sense do they belong to him. This mode of speaking and thinking follows us everywhere, for everywhere we encounter individualities which are but combinations of parts forming a new or specific whole. We say of a dog that it has a head, has four legs. Abstract the head, or the legs, where is the dog? The dog is a certain whole of many parts and properties, and each one is in its turn referred to that whole. In the I think, I desire, I move, of human speech there is a reference of each of these properties to that whole which constitutes the conception of man, or to so much of that whole as is necessary to give a meaning to the expression I, or this man. And when we say I will, this is a reference to the same whole of that connection between the properties of desire or movement which enters so conspicuously into the composition or individuality of man.

I observed in my last paper that the term will was often applied exclusively to the purpose itself, to the thought or consciousness that precedes motion, and I added that this application to the mental resolve had given rise to a class of questions I could not then stay to examine. I alluded especially to the question we ask about the will, whether it is free or not? If I may venture to trespass so far on the patience of the readers of the Contemporary, I would continue somewhat further my discussion of the will, and carry the discussion into this old debate.

I.

It is not difficult of explanation how the term Will comes to be used as synonymous with Purpose; how it happens that we speak indifferently of a man of indomitable resolve, or indomitable will. The purpose of the man is the important element in every human

C

action. It is to this our blame or praise attaches. The actual movement of body or limb that follows the resolution may often be of the most trivial description, or, through the wonderful education which resides in habit, it may be performed, as we are accustomed to say, almost automatically. If the child at first moves for the very pleasure of movement, from the desire to reproduce the sensations of touch and muscular contraction (the memory and anticipation of such muscular sensations acting, it is supposed, as a repetition of the original stimulus that passed from the nerves of sense to the nerves of motion), it very soon has ulterior objects for its various movements. It clutches at some object of desire, and so well has habit done its office, that the eye seems to direct the hand without a thought being bestowed on the muscle, or on the individual movements of the arm and the fingers. And again, the motives that induce either the child or the man to clutch at an object may be very different. The outward action may be the same where the purposes are in flagrant contrast. A child grasps the neck of the decanter to help itself to some tempting liquid, the nurse grasps the same decanter to prevent the child from drinking what would be deleterious to it. The meaning and nature of the action comes to depend on the thought behind it. A bridge has been carefully, laboriously, slowly built by the subtle power of habit, between the consciousness of the man and the physical world, and now what processions are marshalled on the other side of the bridge! The bridge itself is scarcely considered.

A school-boy moves a pen over a copy-book and produces his array of letters, good or bad. With very much the same action of his hand, an emperor may abdicate his throne. Vastly different actions, and the same trivial, customary movement. Very often the movement that follows a long deliberation or important resolve, has no peculiar relation to the thought or purpose. To a mere spectator, it would be quite insignificant. To descend from our imperial altitude -and to descend gently-let us suppose a member of parliament receiving an offer to join the ministry, to take office as we say, how gravely he might deliberate, with what emotion he might resolve! Yet the resolution made, what does he do? Perhaps he rises gently from his seat, touches a bell, and despatches a message, which has no apparent connection with the acceptance or refusal of office. The resolution is all, the ability to act on it is implied, and, therefore, it takes to itself the name of will, which primarily embraced not only the purpose but the external act itself.

More especially to him who has the purpose is the ability to act in uniformity with it implied. Purpose includes some anticipated action. It includes the confidence that this bridge lies open