Anything but this shallow sciolism!  More philosophical a thousand times than the knowing and facile metaphysic which makes man a thing of springs and pivots and cogs, are the notions of old religionists, which attributed human action in large part to preventing, suggesting, and efficient “grace,” or those of older poets, who gave Pallas Athene for a counsellor to Odysseus, and Krishna for a teacher to the young Aryan warrior,—­which represent human action, that is, as issuing in part out of the Infinite.  A thousand times more philosophical, as well as ten thousand times more inspiring, I say, are the metaphysics of Imagination,—­of scriptures and great poems and the live human heart,—­than the cut-and-dried sciolisms which explain you a man in five minutes, and make everything in him as obvious as the movements of a jumping-jack.

To deny, then, the existence of free-will is, in my judgment, a grave error; but to deny it on the ground of its identity with chance is more than an ordinary error, however grave; it is a poison in the blood of one’s thought, conveying its vice to every part and function of the system.  And herewith we pass to the next head.

2. Consciousness.  It has been the persuasion of wise men in various ages, and is the persuasion of many, as wise, doubtless, as their neighbors, now, that the soul has a native sense of its quality and perpetual relations.  By Plato this sense, in some of its aspects, was named Reminiscence; by modern speakers of English it is denoted as Consciousness.  This, according to its grades and applications, is qualified as personal, moral, intellectual, or, including all its higher functions, as intuitive or spiritual.  Of this high spiritual sense, this self-recognition of soul, all the master-words of the language—­God, Immortality, Life, Love, Duty—­are either wholly, or in all their grander suggestions, the product.  Nothing, indeed, is there which confers dignity upon human life and labor, that is not primarily due to the same source.  In union with popular and unconscious imagination, it generates mythology; in union with imagination and reason, it gives birth to theology and cosmogony; in union with imagination, reason, and experience, it is the source of philosophy; in union with the same, together with the artistic sense and high degrees of imaginative sympathy, it creates epic poetry and art.  Its total outcome, however, may be included under the term Belief.  And it results from an assumed validity of consciousness, that universal belief is always an indication of universal truth.  At the same time, since this master-power finds expression through faculties various in kind and still more various in grade of development, its outcome assumes many shapes and hues,—­just as crystallized alumina becomes here ruby and there sapphire, by minute admixtures of different coloring substances.