It may be true that we can act as we choose, but can we choose?  Is not our choice determined for us?  We cannot determine from the fact, because we always have chosen as soon as we act, and we cannot replace the conditions in such a way as to discover whether we could have chosen anything else.  The stronger motive may have determined our volition without our perceiving it; and if we desire to prove our independence of motive, by showing that we can choose something different from that which we should naturally have chosen, we still cannot escape from the circle, this very desire becoming, as Mr. Hume observes, itself a motive.  Again, consciousness of the possession of any power may easily be delusive; we can properly judge what our powers are only by what they have actually accomplished; we know what we have done, and we may infer from having done it, that our power was equal to what it achieved; but it is easy for us to overrate ourselves if we try to measure our abilities in themselves.  A man who can leap five yards may think that he can leap six; yet he may try and fail.  A man who can write prose may only learn that he cannot write poetry from the badness of the verses which he produces.  To the appeal to consciousness of power there is always an answer:—­that we may believe ourselves to possess it, but that experience proves that we may be deceived.

There are, however, another set of feelings which cannot be set aside in this way, which do prove that, in some sense or other, in some degree or other, we are the authors of our own actions,—­that there is a point fit which we begin to be responsible for them.  It is one of the clearest of all inward phenomena, that, where two or more courses involving moral issues are before us, whether we have a consciousness of power to choose between them or not, we have a consciousness that we ought to choose between them; a sense of duty hoti dei touto prattein, as Aristotle expresses it, which we cannot shake off.  Whatever this involves (and some measure of freedom it must involve or it is nonsense), the feeling exists within us, and refuses to yield before all the batteries of logic.  It is not that of the two courses we know that one is in the long run the best, and the other more immediately tempting.  We have a sense of obligation irrespective of consequence, the violation of which is followed again by a sense of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame.  In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mere mistakes arising out of a false philosophy.  They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power.  The perceptions of worth