Let us try to analyse more closely what Will really means, and under what conditions it is manifested. The circuit which connects any one single perception with action, through sensory nerve, sensory centre, motor centre, motor nerve and muscle, is as purely mechanical as that of an electric circuit. Reflex motions such as breathing, and even more complex motions which by repetition have become reflex or instinctive, are also mechanical and involve no exercise of will. But when perceptions become complex, and one primary evokes a number of secondary perceptions—in other words, when the cells of the corresponding portions of grey matter in the cortex of the brain are set vibrating by a variety of complex and conflicting molecular motions, the feeling of free-will inevitably arises. We feel the conviction that there is a something which we call soul, mind, or in the last analysis, ‘I myself I,’ which sits, as Von Moltke might do, in a cabinet receiving conflicting telegraphic messages from different generals, and deciding then and there what order to flash out in reply. What can we say to this? That it is like space and time, one of the categories of thought, or primary moulds in which thought is cast. We do not know what space and time really are in their essence, or why they are the necessary conditions of thought, any more than we do in the case of will. They may be illusions, but we accept them, and of necessity accept them, as facts. For all practical purposes it is the same to us, as if we understood their essence and knew them to be realities. A man can no more doubt that he is an individual being, with a will which, in a great many cases, enables him to decide which of a variety of impulses shall prevail, than he can hesitate, if he is furnishing a room, to regulate his purchase of carpeting and paper by space of three dimensions, without regard to possible speculations as to quaternions. Perhaps the principle of polarity may assist us in understanding that both theories may be true; or rather that matter and spirit, necessity and free-will, may be opposite poles of one fundamental truth which is beyond our comprehension. We cannot shake off this principle of polarity, and arrive at any knowledge, or even conception, of the absolute truth in regard to the atoms, energies, and natural laws, which make up the universe of matter and of all the ordinary and material functions of life; why should we expect to do so in the higher manifestations of the same life, which have been arrived at in the later stages of one unbroken course of evolution from monad to man? This, at any rate, is the theory which best satisfies my own mind and enables me to reduce my own individual chaos into some sort of a cosmos. I draw from it the following conclusions:— For all practical purposes assume that ‘right is right,’ and that the moral instincts, however they have been formed, are imperative laws. Assume also that Man is man and master of his fate,