The activity of the will, which is the organ of habit, of practice, of the use or non-use of organs among animals, is, like every other activity of the animal soul, dependent upon material processes in the central nervous system, upon peculiar motions which emanate from the albuminous matter of the ganglion cells, and the nervous fibres connected with them. The will, as well as the other mental activities, in higher animals, in this respect is different from that of men only in quantity, not in quality. The will of the animal, as well as that of man, is never free. The widely spread dogma of the freedom of the will is, from a scientific point of view, altogether untenable. Every physiologist who scientifically investigates the activity of the will in man and animals, must of necessity arrive at the conviction that _in reality the will is never free_, but is always determined by external or internal influences. These influences are for the most part ideas which have been either formed by Adaptation or by Inheritance, and are traceable to one or other of these two physiological functions. As soon as we strictly examine the action of our own will, without the traditional prejudice about its freedom, we perceive that every apparently free action of the will is the result of previous ideas, which are based on notions inherited or otherwise acquired, and are therefore, in the end, dependent on the laws of Adaptation and Inheritance. The same also applies to the action of the will in all animals. As soon as their will is considered in connection with their mode of life, in its relation to the changes which the mode of life is subject to from external conditions, we are at once convinced that no other view is possible. Hence the changes of the will which follow the changes of nutrition, and which, in the form of practice, habit, etc., produce variations in structure, must be reckoned among the other material processes of cumulative adaptation.