are partly due to the organized experiences and habits of our individual life, partly a necessary consequence of our inherited qualities, our bodily and intellectual constitution, and their origin goes back to the far distant past of our species, to the beginnings of life, we may even say to eternity. Our consciousness can tell nothing of these causes. They elude our observation and investigation and remain ever unknown to us. Renouvier is quite right when he says no understanding--and I say without his ambiguity no human understanding of the present time--can foretell the actions of another, nor indeed his own, but not because they come to pass independently of inevitable causes, but simply because these causes cannot be descried by our ignorance. It is vain labour to try and derive the solution of the question of Free Will, or even a contribution towards it, from introspection. It is a method unsuitable for this purpose. The Greek sage well knew what a great and difficult task he set man when he admonished him: "[Greek: gnôthi seauton]." That is easy to say but difficult if not impossible to do. Spinoza very happily characterized the self-deception in which the individual is plunged with regard to the part played in determining his actions by his conscious Will aided by Reason; he says that if a stone, flung by some hand, had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own free will; and in another place he points out without any illustrative metaphor, that a drunk man and a child, who certainly do not act on their own initiative, also believe in the freedom of their will. It has been possible to prove experimentally how ignorant of the real motives of his actions the individual may be. It is suggested to a person who has been hypnotized that on awakening he is to carry out a certain action, something particularly absurd, unjustified and aimless being intentionally chosen. The subject of the experiment on awaking faithfully carries out the suggestion, and as he has no memory of what happened while he was in the hypnotic state, he is convinced that he is yielding to a sudden idea, a whim, but that in any case his action is determined by his own will. But since he must realize the absurdity of what he is doing, he seeks for some sufficient motive to explain it, and always finds one to his own satisfaction. All the efforts of anguished sophists to prove their thesis of the Freedom of the Will from data supplied by introspection have failed miserably. But they were forced to undertake them, for theology cannot give up the contention that man acts with free Will. It is an important part of the religious conception of the universe and of the relation in which, according to this, man stands to God.