As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt: “Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.” There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate: “The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.” Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have no _science_; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have no _art_; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have no _morality_. Ælfric, A. D. 900: “The verb ‘to will’ has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.” C. Will and permanent states.—(_a_) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of intellect, of affection, of will. (_b_) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (_c_) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.