FREE-WILL OBSERVATIONS AND INFERENCES. 411 should invariably get the better of apparently strong motives of another class, lies wholly in the -word ' apparently '. In short, that the appearances of their relative strength are deceptive. The remaining difficulty connected with Free-will seems also to depend on the word ' apparently '. It is the start ling spontaneity with which some of those ideas that determine the Will seem to arise. These sudden presentations belong to a large category of cases of which hallucinations are the most striking examples. These ordinary accompaniments of insanity occa- sionally occur also among the sane, and may consist of voices denouncing, exhorting, or conversing in grammatical and well- turned sentences, or else of apparitions ^indistinguishable from real objects. A similar spontaneity, though in a far less marked degree, characterises all our thoughts. Most of our ideas are partially shaped when they are first consciously perceived, and frequently they are fully shaped. Thus, a versifier, having the jingle and run of a just completed line in his head, may produce a second line at a single birth, that shall rhyme, scan and make sense. I have elsewhere 1 pointed out a close and instructive analog}- between the process by which completely shaped ideas probably arise, and that by which " fire-faces," as they are some- times named, are certainly formed. I mean by that word those well defined faces, landscapes or other pictures, that most persons are apt to trace in the red hot coals of the fire, in the clouds, or in the patterns of wall paper. A part of the mind, unconsciously, and frequently against subsequent judgment and will, is found to have been struck by some chance-lines or sequence of points that serve to suggest a picture. It has ignored everything that does not conform to the unconsciously suggested image and has fanci- fully supplied whatever is deficient. Sometimes this imaginative process is slow and may be watched in operation, sometimes it halts and we wait for it, but usually it is quicker than thought, and the face, or whatever it may be, starts before our conscious- ness in its perfected shape, just as an hallucination. This curious property of the imagination to be set a-going by a trifle and to run on by itself in fanciful directions to extravagant lengths, and to end by forming pictures that are complete even to minute details, must be accepted as a fact, for which it is not difficult dimly to see a rational interpretation. Even a kaleido- scope, which consists of only two small strips of mirrors, is adequate to compose an indefinite number of tasteful and compli- cated patterns out of glimpses of bits of coloured glass, tossed into haphazard arrangements. Much more may we suppose that the brain, whose structure is enormously complicated and acted on by organic memories as well as by present stimuli, should be capable of doing a vast deal more and something of the same 1 Inquiries into Human Faculty, p. 170. Macmillan & Co., 1883. .
