Positive vocabulary, but some other word is generally inserted before it, to prejudice the common understanding of it, or to impart some element of meaning which can with more plausibility be denounced. Thus the Will which is denied in Nature is often described as an "arbitrary" Will or a "capricious" Will. But surely these qualifying epithets do but add to the confusion. It is true, indeed, that the Will we see in Nature is not a capricious Will. But this is not the question. The question is, whether there is, or is not, such a thing possible as caprice in Will. If there be such a thing as caprice, then the existence of it, and the power of it "to control phenomena," cannot be denied. If there be no such thing, then "capricious" is of no meaning as an epithet applied to Will. Caprice implies not only changeableness, but, so to speak, a double degree of changeableness a changeableness which has no rule or reason in its shiftings. It is a fact that there are human Wills of this character, and the mischief they have done in the world arises from the power they possess, in common with all other Wills, of changing phenomena after

their own unreasonable nature. The truth is, that if the human Will can be described as unchangeable, then there is no such thing as changeability even conceivable in thought. There is no contrast so absolute between any two different forms of Matter, as there is between two different states of the same Mind. There is no transition in Nature from one physical condition to another so absolute or so radical as the transition to which Human Character is subject when it passes under the power of new convictions. There is no change like the change from hatred to

to virtue, from evil to good.

affection, from vice

And this change in

Mind is the efficient cause of a whole cycle of other changes among the phenomena which the human Will can and does alter, regulate, and control.

There is, then, not much real difficulty after all in disengaging the great facts of our Own Free Will from the verbal confusions of the Positive Philosophy. Nor will the same methods of solution fail us when we apply them to the further question,-How far, and in what sense, are our own volitions themselves subject to Law —that is, to the influence of Adjusted Forces ?

For as one great consequence of the Reign of Law over material things is the necessity of resorting to the use of appropriate means for the accomplishment of Purpose, so does the same necessity arise out of the same conditions among the phenomena of Mind. If we wish to operate upon human action, we must go to work by presenting to the Will some motive tending to produce the action we desire. Above all, if we seek to operate not merely on individual actions, but upon that which mainly determines conduct, viz., human character, we must direct our efforts to place that character under outward conditions which we know to have a favourable effect upon it. In the material world we should be powerless to control any event if we did not know it to be subject to Laws-that is, to Forces which, though not liable to change in essence, are subject to endless change in combination and in use. The same impotency would affect us, if in the moral world also definite conditions had not always an invariable tendency to produce certain definite results. It is a mere confusion of thought and of language which confounds the "in

variability" of "Laws," either moral or material, with the denial of the power of Will to vary, alter, and modify in infinite degrees the course of things. It is the fixedness of all Forces in one sense which constitutes their infinite pliability in another. It is the unchanging relation which they bear to those mental faculties by which we discover them and recognise them, that renders them capable of becoming the supple instruments of those other faculties of Will, of Reason, and of Contrivance by which we can work them for altered and

better purposes.

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CHAPTER VII.

LAW IN POLITICS.

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T first sight it may be thought that the means

by which we can operate on the Wills of individual men, and of communities of men, are contained within a narrow compass, and are such as to be all, if not within easy reach, at least within easy recognition. And it is true that some methods of operating on the minds of men we do know instinctively, just as in the material world we know by the first rudiments of intelligence how to accomplish a few physical results. But experience and observation teach us, although they teach us very slowly, that direct appeals to the reason, or direct appeals to the feelings of men, are entirely useless when those faculties have not been placed