The argument employed by Dr. Maudsley is very weak—happily so, indeed; for were his conclusions correct man’s misdeeds would be neither punishable nor corrigible, any more than the blast of the tempest which strews the shore with wrecks and desolation. They would be the necessary outcome of his constitution. The trouble is that Dr. Maudsley pushes to excess a doctrine which has in it much that is true. We do not deny the doctrine of hereditary impulses; we know that some are more prone to evil than others, that the moral lineaments are often transmitted from parent to child to no less an extent than physical traits and resemblances; but we know that free will remains throughout, and that, no matter how strong the impulse to do a certain act may be, the power to resist is unquestionable. Habit and association may render the will practically powerless, but, unless a man has lost the attributes of his race, he never becomes absolutely irreclaimable. The allusion to grace and diabolical temptation is, to say the least, stupid. Dr. Maudsley knows as much about the matter, to all appearances, as the inhabitants of Patagonia. No theologian deserving the name ever asserted that man is swayed to good by grace alone, or equally moved to evil by the spirit of darkness, without any will-activity. The doctrine would be just as subversive of free-will and moral order as Dr. Maudsley’s, and consequently as absurd. The truth is that man’s will has been weakened by his fall (_labefactata ac debilitata_), is weaker in some than in others, but never becomes extinct, unless where the abnormal condition of insanity occurs. We regret that Mr. Dugdale accepts Dr. Maudsley as an authority and quotes approvingly the following words: “Instead of mind being a wondrous entity, the independent source of power and self-sufficient cause of causes, an honest observation proves incontestably that it is the most dependent of all natural forces. It is the highest development of force, and to its existence all the lower natural forces are indispensably prerequisite.” This is simply scientific jargon. It conveys no meaning, and in reality substitutes new and more obscure terms for old and well-understood ones. We are told to reject the “wondrous entity” mind, and to consider instead all so-called mental operations as the outcome of force. In a previous article[9] we pointed out the great diversity of meanings annexed to the word force, and proved that none of those who so glibly use it have a clear conception of what it signifies. Mr. Dugdale further accepts the recent materialistic doctrine of Hammond, Vogel, and the so-called modern school of physiologists, who make will a mere matter of cerebral activity and cell-development.