But this view is in direct contradiction to the deepest and clearest deliverance of human consciousness, which affirms that I am a deliberative and ruling Mind, and bids me regard my Will as Reason in action. I seem to know this so intimately and profoundly that if it is an illusion there appears to be nothing else in the world of which I can ever venture to feel sure. We know the outside world only at two removes. The external object has first to impress itself in some as yet unexplained manner on our physical organism, and the latter has then in a manner equally mysterious to produce a state of consciousness in the observer. But consciousness, in Man, can turn upon and interrogate itself; it is subject and object in one; and its deliverances, so far as they go, so far as they are pure deliverances of consciousness with no argumentative deduction subtly mingled with them, are the truest things we know or ever can know. I do not see how they can possibly be brought to the test by any other kind of knowledge: _they_ are the test of everything. We find, then, that when we talk of ‘free’ choice as the prerogative of man what we mean at bottom is the choice of a self-determining Mind. We find, also, that while for every event in the physical world we are obliged to assume an antecedent cause, we are under no such obligation as regards Mind. When we have traced any sequence of causes and effects up to a Mind, we require to go no further. We can conceive a self-determining Mind. If man is such, or so far as he is such, his will is what we call free. But to say that we are profoundly conscious of the existence of our will does not by any means get rid of the difficulties connected with this belief, and it is incumbent on us either to attempt a solution of them or frankly to dismiss them as, for the present, insoluble. If possible, to begin with, we must obtain a clear idea of the difference of the will from other forms of vital action.