The savage, as is well known, does, without any scientific authority whatever, assume straight off an entire uniformity of nature with human nature. He jumps at conclusions: he takes it for granted that everything which moves has a will of its own, like himself. But though the savage shares with the savant the impulse to believe in an essential continuity binding together man and nature, that impulse is about all they have in common. In the savage it expresses itself in an absolute identification, entirely ignoring all differences, between the two: the tree or the river has to be a conscious, rational creature, though its behaviour bears more difference from than resemblance to that of a human being. In the savant, the same impulse is trained to fertility by being constantly subjected to the guidance of observed facts: man as an animal organism is subject to the same physiological laws as other similar organisms; as an organic compound, to the same chemical changes; as a body possessing inertia, to the same physical laws. The savant's belief, however, in the continuity of nature and human nature is consistent with or rather implies points of difference between the two; _e.g._ man possesses a consciousness which the river does not, man is, the river is not, a conscious cause. Great though these differences be, still they are not in the eyes of science and from the point of view of evolution great enough to constitute a breach of continuity, for human actions are with the growth of science increasingly seen to be part of the uniformity of nature: the human cause only produces its effect provided that all the requisite conditions are forthcoming. Indeed, there is a danger, in some tendencies of modern thought, of ignoring the differences and of confounding continuity with identity. The distinction between the animate and the inanimate, which was hardly reached by the savage, is in danger of being overlooked by the modern materialist--an error which would be paralleled in religion by a relapse from monotheism into nature-worship. And as in the pathology of religion there is a constant tendency to substitute for religious faith a trust in the automatic efficacy of rites and ceremonies, which is a falling away into mere magic, so in metaphysic there is a tendency, in the name of science falsely invoked, to substitute for the actions of agents consciously free the operation of an automatic and magical necessity. Freedom of the will is constantly taken, or rather mistaken, both by its supporters and opponents, to mean the power of acting without a motive, and to imply that from identically the same combination of conditions one result can ensue at one time and quite a different one at another; and freedom of the will in this sense, and with this implication, is rightly rejected as inconsistent with the uniformity of nature. Freedom, however, means not the absence of motive, but the presence of more motives than one,