be looked to as the only evidence we can have of the matured existence of the will.
44. Shakespeare has a fine description in the following passage of the unsettled state of the mind when the will is hesitating about the perpetration of a great crime, and when the passions are threatening to overpower, and do eventually overpower, the reason and the conscience. Brutus, meditating on the conspiracy by which Julius Cæsar is slain, and in which he was to bear a prominent part, thus expresses himself:—
" Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The Genius and the mortal instruments,
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection."
One might have supposed that Shakespeare knew Plato.
45. I am endeavouring to give you as connected a view as possible of the ethics of Aristotle. The best way, perhaps, of overtaking this end is by presenting to you the system in a series of questions and answers, so couched that each answer calls up into view a new question, until the whole series has been gone through. Before bringing forward the question which arises out of our last answer, I shall recapitulate very shortly the catechism, as I may call it,
