I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind.  I have called it an organism and a machine.  I have spoken of its reaction on the environment as the essential thing about it; and I have referred this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous system.  I have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly whether I am a complete materialist, or not.

Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to keep free from all speculative complications.  Nevertheless, I do not wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count myself a materialist.  I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness can possibly be produced by a nervous machinery, though I can perfectly well see how, if ‘ideas’ do accompany the workings of the machinery, the order of the ideas might very well follow exactly the order of the machine’s operations.  Our habitual associations of ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences of the succession of currents in our nervous systems.  And the possible stock of ideas which a man’s free spirit would have to choose from might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain.  If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I sketched for you but a short while ago.  Our ideas would be determined by brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws.

But, after what we have just seen,—­namely, the part played by voluntary attention in volition,—­a belief in free will and purely spiritual causation is still open to us.  The duration and amount of this attention seem within certain limits indeterminate.  We feel as if we could make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard were a genuine critical point in nature,—­a point on which our destiny and that of others might hinge.  The whole question of free will concentrates itself, then, at this same small point:  “Is or is not the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?”

It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general analogies, and not by accurate observations.  The free-willist believes the appearance to be a reality:  the determinist believes that it is an illusion.  I myself hold with the free-willists,—­not because I cannot conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its plausibility, but simply because, if free will were true, it would be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.  Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself.  I accordingly believe freely in my freedom; I do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such psychological and psychophysical theories as I hold do not necessarily force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist.