physical causes, we do not observe the _nisus_ of these causes, but only the phenomena which form the sequents of this _nisus_. But when each one comes to himself, it is all different. He penetrates himself--knows himself. He is himself the cause--he, himself, makes the _nisus_, and is conscious of it; and this _nisus_ to him becomes an effect--a phenomenon, the first phenomenon by which he reveals himself, but a phenomenon by which he reveals himself only to himself. It is by the sequents of this _nisus_,--the effects produced in the external visible world, that he reveals himself to others. Sometimes the _nisus_ or volition expends itself in the will, and gives no external phenomena. I may make an effort to raise my arm, but my arm may be bound or paralyzed, and consequently the effort is in vain, and is not known without. How energetic are the efforts made by the will during a fit of the night-mare! we struggle to resist some dreadful force; we strive to run away from danger but all in vain. It is possible for me to make an effort to remove a mountain: I may place my hand against its side, and tug, and strive: the _nisus_ or volition is the most energetic that I can make, but, save the straining of my muscles, no external expression of the energy of my will is given; I am resisted by a greater power than myself. The most original movement of every cause is, then, this _nisus_ in the bosom of the cause itself, and in man, as a cause, the most original movement is this _nisus_ likewise, which in him we call volition. To deny such a _nisus_ would be to deny the activity, efficiency, and energy of cause. This _nisus_, by its very conception and definition, admits of no antecedent, phenomenon, or movement: it is in the substance of the cause; its first going forth to effects. A first movement or _nisus_ of cause is just as necessary a conception as first cause itself. There is no conception to oppose to this, but that of every cause having its first movement determined by some other cause out of itself--a conception which runs back in endless retrogression without arriving at a first cause, and is, indeed, the annihilation of all cause. The assumption of Edwards, therefore, that if will determine its own volitions, it must determine them by an act of volition, is unsupported alike by the facts of consciousness and a sound logic,--while all the absurdities of an infinite series of causation of acts really fasten upon his own theory, and destroy it by the very weapons with which it assails the opposite system. _In the third place_,--Edwards virtually allows the self-determining power of will.