We shall find that while the statement of the Determinist position is quite easy and simple, the statement of Free Will, the explanation of what we really mean when we talk of the will being ‘free,’ is, when we look closely into it, a matter of much intricacy. Believers in Free Will, says J. S. Mill in his essay ‘On Social Freedom,’ are those who “believe, in fact, that they themselves can, within certain limits, do what they please.”[127] This is, indeed, the answer which comes at once to the lips of the average man when Socratically interrogated as to what he means by Free Will. But the nature of the limits is just the critical part of the question. I cannot fly because I please. I cannot write a line of poetry because I please. Can I live a saintly life because I please? Perhaps not, it may be replied; but after all Free Will does not essentially mean the external fact of doing, it means the internal act of choosing—let us substitute the word ‘choose’ for the word ‘do’ and see what we arrive at. Very well, then; I can choose what I please: let us try this formula. But at once we perceive that this is a tautological expression, for what I ‘please’ to do is simply what I choose. So the formula is finally stripped to this bare expression, ‘I can choose.’ But now the Determinist will say, ‘Who denies it?’ The psychological process known as ‘choosing’ is within every one’s experience. The question as to what governs the choice remains untouched. The core of the problem, then, has been found to lie not in the word ‘do,’ not in the word ‘please,’ not in the word ‘choose.’ Where is it then? It is not in ‘can,’ for ‘I can choose’ adds nothing philosophically to the contents of ‘I choose.’ _The core of the problem is the word ‘I.’_ And until we have settled what ‘I’ am, we shall not reach a clear issue between Free Will and Determinism. So the test which we have applied to human actions with a view to finding out whether they conform to law as do physical phenomena or not—the test, namely, whether they always come out the same under the same circumstances or not—breaks down. The ‘circumstances’ include the man himself, and the question ‘What is a man?’ turns out to be the real point at issue. The Determinist usually belongs to a school which has a clear and simple answer to this question. Man, for him, is a complex of vessels, nerves, ganglia, and molecular configurations of brain matter responding to external stimuli as uniformly and inevitably as a plant. Consciousness is merely a sort of by-product of this mechanism, which would go on just the same without it.[128]