were decided beforehand that he will act in this particular way and no other. But as I see the matter, this is a dull thought, a plain absurdity. Predestination is perfectly compatible with self-determination; it in no wise hinders the action of the chooser, because the activity of choice has its ground in the idea of the purposed end and in nothing else; because predestination is not the cause of the willing, and changes nothing therein, but merely agrees with it. True, nothing takes place in the will which is not decided in the predestination; but the idea and value of the purposed end, and not the predestination, are the ground of the will; these alone give the preponderance to pleasure or displeasure, to desire or aversion." (Veber die Seele, in Sämmtl. Werke, Wien, 1838, p. 362.)

The second passage is from a Dialogue, in which one of the persons asks, speaking of Spinoza, "But what could have led him to deny freedom to the Deity?" To which the other, who represents Mendelssohn, replies:

Innocently here if anywhere he fell into error. He regarded the indifferentia æquilibrii as the only real freedom, an error which he shares with innumerable orthodox philosophers. But he had the acumen to perceive, that the choice of an intelligent being is always determined by motives; regarding that indifference therefore as impossible, he denied freedom to all intelligent beings. Leibniz has happily exploded this error, and irrefragably proved that true freedom consists in choice of the best; and that, while motives determine the will and exclude hap-hazard, they can never set up a necessity. But only think of human perversity! That Leibniz should have passed well nigh for a Spinozist, for developing this idea!" (Gespräche, in Werke, as above, p. 487.)

It is plain, then, to send one parting shot into Dr. Ward's ample target, that no Leibnizian or Free-will determinist can possibly use the language which Dr. Ward, by a palpable (though I need hardly say unintentional) misrepresentation, puts into the mouth of his kind-hearted sophist, who is made to say (p. 302), in consoling a friend writhing under the torture of a just remorse, that his self-indulgent conduct was infallibly and inevitably determined for him, by his circumstances external and internal. No! By him as well as for him must be his language. And according to the proportion which the by bears to the for (other things being equal) will be the keenness and pressure of his remorse. No man can plead, because no man can feel, that he and his nature are two.

SHADWORTH H. HODGSON.

ON THE DEFINITION OF INSTINCTIVE ACTION.

One of the questions in Psychology set at the last Second B.A. Examination of the London University was the following: "Give the popular meanings of the term Instinctive Action, and assign it a precise scientific connotation". I was much struck in reading nearly two hundred answers to this question by the want of any common conception of what is included under the term. Thus some answers identified it with reflex action, others with habitual action, others again with the apparently unmotived instincts' of the lower animals. Some said the differentia was the absence of conscious volition, others that it lay rather in the peculiar origin of the actions as antecedent to individual experience. Those who know most about the present condition of psychology are aware that one of its pressing wants is a set of

well-understood clearly defined terms. It may not be amiss then to try to render the meaning of this term more precise.

I would submit that there are good reasons for taking the term instinctive to refer to the origin or history rather than to the present nature of the action. The absence of conscious purpose is not a mark of instinctive origin, but this last is a mark of the former characteristic, and must therefore be viewed as the more fundamental. Where we desire to express the nature of an action as devoid of clear conscious purpose, the expression automatic suffices. At the same time it is plainly necessary to mark off actions known as instinctive from reflex actions which have a similar origin, since the former differ from the latter in the important respect of being accompanied by consciousness, though not conscious purpose. Reflex and Instinctive movements would thus form two species of the genus Primitive or Inherited actions. This distinction, I may observe, is in no way opposed to Mr. Spencer's interesting mode of connecting instinctive with reflex actions, since it makes no assumptions respecting the ultimate origin of these actions.

Having now circumscribed our subject-matter and determined the point of view for observing it, let us proceed with our tentative definition. What marks off instinctive action is priority to (individual) experience and acquisition. We may thus define it after the manner of Prof. Bain as untaught ability'. But a moment's consideration will show us that what is meant by instinct contains more than a substitute for acquired knowledge how to do a thing: it includes as well an equivalent for a purpose or volition to do something based on a memory of past satisfactions. Just as the term habit means both absence of conscious purpose and absence of conscious cognition of means, so the term instinct points to both factors. In other words, instinctive action is antecedent to individual experience in a double sense: it is not only an unlearnt action, but an unmotived one. I should therefore include in the definition the fact of the action being not purposive, though imitating such a voluntary action in being beneficial to the agent. From the point of view of the evolutionist both these aspects of instinct might be connected by means of a biological principle, such as that an organ which has performed a certain kind of function retains a disposition to go on working in that particular way.

Our definition would include the familiar animal instincts and also certain human actions or germs of action. Thus the impulse to move the lower limbs alternately (which one can observe in a child of two months by letting it gently touch one's lap with one foot) is the instinctive element in walking. On the other hand, spontaneous random actions, supposing such to exist, would, in opposition to Prof. Bain's view, be excluded from instinctive actions, and this not because they are spontuneous—for I have intentionally left open the question whether instinetive actions properly so called require an external stimulus or may not in some cases be wholly due to the force of an internal impulse working strongly at the moment-but because they are random. So far as a movement is the mere overflow of stored-up nervous energy, and has

no definite quasi-purposive character, it is best regarded as a mechanical result of present conditions merely. It is only when the apparently spontaneous movement manifestly takes the direction of some organised disposition that it betrays the instinctive character. Thus it is quite easy to distinguish, in the movements of the arms of a child of two months old, vague spasmodic movements 'knowing no law,' and others which approximate to the direction of one of the most deeply organised varieties of muscular action, namely, the raising of the hand to the mouth. I should call the latter, in so far as they are independent of individual experience, instinctive, but not the former. Of course, it is not easy to draw the line between certain kinds of instinctive and random movements, especially as it may be contended that the latter must in every case correspond to some of the habitual actions of the race. Yet I think that the distinction is worth preserving.

I may just add that instinctive actions need not show themselves at the very beginning of life. To adopt a distinction of German physiologists we may speak of them as inherited, though not necessarily innate.

With respect to feeling and its expression and to intellectual actions (perceptions, &c.), the term instinctive if retained should, I think, similarly point to origin and not to present nature.

JAMES SULLY.

THE DOCTRINE OF MIND-STUFF.

Mr. F. W. Frankland (now of the Registrar-General's Office, Wellington, New Zealand) has recently read before the Wellington Philosophical Society a paper "On the Doctrine of Mind-stuff," in which, besides claiming that it was arrived at by himself and other persons as far back as 1870 independently of the late Professor Clifford, and giving a short exposition of it in accordance with part of Clifford's article in MIND IX., "On the Nature of Things-in-themselves," he thus attempts to carry out the doctrine farther :

"In what relation does the doctrine of Omnisentiency or Mind-Stuff stand to the various theories which have been propounded for explaining, on the principles of rational mechanics, the phenomena of the physical universe? In what relation does it stand to the theories of atoms, ether, ultramundane corpuscles, ring-vortices, and the like? Now, in the first place, it does not either exclude or supersede them. There is nothing in the doctrine of Mind-Stuff incompatible with any of these mechanical theories. The theories in question are one and all of them statements of quantitative relations among possibilities of feeling, and are not in any way concerned with the noumenal realities on which these possibilities depend. The universe of matter is a complex of possibilities of feeling, and these possibilities are found to stand in certain quantitative relations to one another. These relations are of two orders,-relations of sequence and relations of co-existence. The former are believed to depend, without exception, on causal relations-relations spoken of as the laws of nature ;— the latter are space-relations, and may be described as facts of structure.

All the mechanical theories I have alluded to, therefore, and indeed all mechanical theories that can be framed, are affirmations either of mechanical laws or facts of structure, or both. Setting out from the relations of sequence and facts of structure which we observe to exist among the possibilities of sensation which constitute the material world, the physical investigator does one of two things. He either infers, by a complete induction, the existence of such and such causal relations, and then deduces facts of structure which are not capable of being observed; or, he assumes the existence of certain facts of structure, and perhaps also of certain causal relations, and shows that by known causal relations these will lead to the observed facts of structure. In the former case, his process is one of scientific demonstration, in the latter he constructs a scientific hypothesis. To the former category belongs the reasoning by which we infer that matter consists of molecules (in other words, that its structure is discontinuous), and that there is an ether; to the latter, belong such hypotheses as those of ring-vortices and ultra-mundane corpuscles. But now, observe, we are throughout dealing with quantitative relations among abstract possibilities. The whole of mechanical science deals with such relations. It is in no way concerned with the inner qualitative nature of the real existences on which these possibilities depend. These real existences are aggregations of Mind-Stuff. Psychology is the only science which deals with them; and even that deals only with the most complex of them. Therefore the Doctrine of Mind-Stuff can in no way supersede the necessity of, still less can it exclude, these mechanical explanations of the

universe.

"But although the principles of rational mechanics, and the hypotheses by which, in conjunction with the former, it is sought to explain the observed phenomena and structure of the material world, are in no way in conflict with our doctrine, we shall presently see that they may come to have a very important bearing on the determination of the particular form which that doctrine ought to assume. For the doctrine asserts that the possibilities of sensation which constitute a material object, correspond to, and depend for their existence on, some reality outside us or 'eject' of which Mind-Stuff units are the elementary constituents. Hence every conception of mechanical science must denote what would be called in mathematics some function of Mind-Stuff. Matter, defined as that which has mass or inertia, must be a function of Mind-Stuff. Motion, force, and energy, must be functions of Mind-Stuff. The interesting question then suggests itself: What functions, severally, are mass, momentum, energy, &c., of the noumenal reality which we have designated Mind-Stuff? This question has been touched upon in a profound passage of the late Professor Clifford's review of a work entitled The Unseen Universe. Professor Clifford there indicates that the answer to the question, if it can be answered, must depend on the knowledge we can gain respecting MindStuff itself-knowledge which can only be acquired within the domain of psychology. Our feelings, he points out, have certain relations of contiguity or nextness in space, exemplified by contiguous elements of a visual image, and certain relations of sequence in time, exemplified by all feelings whatever. Out of these two relations the future theorist must build up the world as best he may. Two things may, perhaps, help him: there are several lines of mathematical thought which seem to indicate that distance and quantity may come to be expressed in terms of position, in the wide sense of an analysis situs, while the theory of the curvature of space hints at a possibility that matter and motion may be expressed in terms of extension only.' 71

1 "I take this to mean, that if we admit as a possibility that the properties of

"Now it is my ambition to follow out the line of thought here indicated. It would be impossible to do so fully within the limits of a single paper, but a beginning may be made. In the first place I desire to supply what I conceive to be a serious omission in Professor Clifford's enumeration of the data respecting Mind-Stuff which the 'future theorist' has at his disposal. Feelings not only have relations of contiguity or nextness in space, and of sequence in time, but they also have two other quantitative aspects of very great importance, namely degrees of intensity and differences of volume. We are conscious that sensations differ in intensity; thus an acute pain is felt to be a more intense sensation than a faint smell. Also, we are conscious that sensations of about equal intensity differ in something we call volume or massiveness: thus a sensation of general weariness, though perhaps felt to be of about equal intensity with a particular ache, is distinguished (apart from its qualitative difference) as possessing greater mass or volume. Lastly, we know that there exist causal relations among our feelings. Thus the group of ideas1 characterised as the realisation of a danger is followed by the emotion of terror, and the constancy of the sequence indicates that we have here to deal with a causal relation. Hence the data we possess are these a complex of feelings perpetually undergoing transformations, causal relations between successive feelings, relations of contiguity or nextness among a few of the synchronous ones (though this appears to be an exceptional phase of psychic structure, only to be found, as far as I am aware, among simultaneous visual impressions which co-exist in a space or manifoldness of two dimensions), qualitative resemblances and differences, variations in intensity, and variations in volume or mass. These are the materials from which we must construct our conception, save as to certain spots necessarily a very dim one, of the noumenal world. And these are the materials which we must connect, in the best way we can, with the elementary factors of our conception of the world of phenomena. We must endeavour to establish a correspondence between feelings, their causal and topical relations, their intensities and volumes, on the one hand, and the dynamical conceptions of mass, momentum, force, energy, &c., on the other. Now, as a preliminary to the working out of this correspondence it will perhaps be advisable to take a brief survey of the ultimate dynamical conceptions, and of their relations to one another.

"Our first step will show us how thoroughly interdependent all these conceptions are. Matter can only be defined as that which possesses inertia -as that which requires a force proportional to its amount (designated its mass) to effect a given change in its motion (either a change in velocity, or a change in direction, or both) in a given time. Force, again, can only be defined as that which causes a change in the velocity or direction of the

space may show a sensible divergence from the Euclidean standard, if we consider very small parts of it-we get at a way of defining matter in terms of the space which it occupies. An ultimate atom of matter (perhaps infinitesimal as compared with the chemical atom) would on that view be merely an infinitesimal crumple in space. All physical science would then be reduced to transcendental geometry, and space-elements would be the analogues of Mind-Stuff units.

"The former parts of Professor Clifford's suggestion can only mean, as far as I can see, that space may be not only not homogeneous in ultimate structure, but not even infinitely divisible. It may consist of indivisible units. In that case there would be such a thing as absolute magnitude, and measuring would be reduced to counting. The space-unit would then be the analogue of the MindStuff unit."

1 "An idea is merely a combination of derivative feelings which are severally faint copies of more vivid primary feelings. In the present case there is included also an unique element called belief alluded to in an earlier portion of this paper."