housekeeper because she has mislaid his spectacles, or his night-cap, or, preoccupied with her bible, has not mixed his gruel properly; and his conception of free-will will revert in an instant to the universal type, and the good woman will discern only too plainly that her master’s convictions as to it are precisely the same things as her own.  Everywhere, indeed, in all the life that surrounds us—­in the social and moral judgments on which the fabric of society has reared itself, in the personal judgments on which so much depends in friendship and antipathies—­everywhere, in conduct, in emotion, in art, in language, and in law, we see man’s common belief in will written, broad, and plain, and clear.  There is, perhaps, no belief to which, for practical purposes, he attaches so important and so plain a meaning.

Such is free-will when looked at from a distance.  But let us look at it more closely, and see what happens then.  The result is strange.  Like a path seen at dusk across a moorland, plain and visible from a distance, but fading gradually from us the more near we draw to it, so does the belief in free-will fade before the near inspection of reason.  It at first grows hazy; at last it becomes indistinguishable.  At first we begin to be uncertain of what we mean by it; at last we find ourselves certain that so far as we trust to reason, we cannot possibly have any meaning at all.  Examined in this way, every act of our lives—­all our choices and refusals, seem nothing but the necessary outcome of things that have gone before.  It is true that between some actions the choice hangs at times so evenly, that our will may seem the one thing that at last turns the balance.  But let us analyse the matter a little more carefully, and we shall see that there are a thousand microscopic motives, too small for us to be entirely conscious of, which, according to how they settle on us, will really decide the question.  Nor shall we see only that this is so.  Let us go a little further, and reason will tell us that it must be so.  Were this not the case, there would have been an escape left for us.  Though admitting that what controlled our actions could be nothing but the strongest motive, it might yet be contended that the will could intensify any motive it chose, and that thus motives really were only tools in its hands.  But this does but postpone the difficulty, not solve it.  What is this free-will when it comes to use its tools?  It is a something, we shall find, that our minds cannot give harbour to.  It is a thing contrary to every analogy of nature.  It is a thing which is forever causing, but which is in itself uncaused.

To escape from this difficulty is altogether hopeless.  Age after age has tried to do so, but tried in vain.  There have been always metaphysical experts ready to engage to make free-will a something intellectually conceivable.  But they all either leave the question where they found it, or else they only seem to explain it, by denying covertly the fact that really wants explaining.