FREE-WILL OBSERVATIONS AND INFERENCES. 407 will merely mention the chief, to show that they have not been overlooked. All that depends upon constitutional tenacity of purpose is to be suspected of automatism. A man in whom this quality is conspicuous, is spoken of as obstinate. He is frequently likened to some brute animal, which shows that tenacity of purpose is not popularly considered to be of a high order of psychical activity. Thus an obstinate man is vulgarly said to be as obsti- nate as a mule or a donkey, or, more vulgarly still, as a pig. It is more proper to consider tenacity of purpose as antagonistic to freedom of will, as in a madman who is constrained by his mono- mania. A block of wood or stone gravitates obstinately, and if it were conscious of the act might be said to have tenacity of purpose. The appetites are among the motives that automatically direct the Will, for it is proverbial that they make men their slaves. I did not trouble myself with any acts that were determined wholly by them. Lastly, I did not care to trouble myself with cases in which two motives of the same kind were in conflict and the greater prevailed. There is no more anomaly in these than there is in the heavier scale-pan of a balance descending. The events with which I did concern myself were those in which feelings of different quality had been in opposition, as when the appetites or passions had been thwarted by alien in- fluences, and I endeavoured to infer from a comparison with past experiences, how far the issue of each contest had really at any time been doubtful. I began my observations under the belief that I should be seriously embarrassed by their number and frequency, and I spent much preliminary thought over different methods of dealing with otherwise overwhelming multitudes of data. I was also pre- pared to find that the origin of the motives by which my Will 1 was determined, lay usually too deep to be reached without ! severe and persistent effort. Great then was my surprise in j discovering, after I had fairly entered upon my observations, that the occasions were rare in which there seemed room for the exercise of Free-will. I ultimately reckoned that the rate of occurrence of such interesting cases, during the somewhat un- eventful but pleasant months of a summer spent in the country, was less than one a day. All the rest of my actions seemed clearly to lie within the province of normal cause and consequence. It will of course be understood that I do not commit myself to the absurd assertion that I was able in any one case to record every convergent motive and the history of each of them, how it was induced by such and such circumstances, and these again by others, and so on ad infinitum ; but I mean that, in whatever one direction I cared to follow the track backwards, I found it to be continuous and orderly until it led to a tangle of familiar paths
