The eternal question of free will and determinism here naturally meets us, but on such a subject it is idle to suppose that a modern writer can do more than define the question and state his own side. The Determinist says that the real question is not whether a man can do what he desires, but whether he can do what he does not desire; whether the will can act without a motive; whether that motive can in the last analysis be other than the strongest pleasure. The illusion of free will, he maintains, is only due to the conflict of our motives. Under many forms and disguises pleasure and pain have an absolute empire over conduct. The will is nothing more than the last and strongest desire; or it is like a piece of iron surrounded by magnets and necessarily drawn by the most powerful; or (as has been ingeniously imagined) like a weathercock, conscious of its own motion, but not conscious of the winds that are moving it. The law of compulsory causation applies to the world of mind as truly as to the world of matter. Heredity and Circumstance make us what we are. Our actions are the inevitable result of the mental and moral constitutions with which we came into the world, operated on by external influences. The supporters of free will, on the other hand, maintain that it is a fact of consciousness that there is a clear distinction between the Will and the Desires, and that although they are closely connected no sound analysis will confuse them. Coleridge ingeniously compared their relations to 'the co-instantaneous yet reciprocal action of the air and the vital energy of the lungs in breathing.'[1] If the will is powerfully acted on by the desires, it has also in its turn a power of acting upon them, and it is not a mere slave to pleasure and pain. The supporters of this view maintain that it is a fact of the plainest consciousness that we can do things which we do not like; that we can suspend the force of imperious desires, resist the bias of our nature, pursue for the sake of duty the course which gives least pleasure without deriving or expecting from it any pleasure, and select at a given moment between alternate courses. They maintain that when various motives pass before the mind, the mind retains a power of choosing and judging, of accepting and rejecting; that it can by force of reason or by force of imagination bring one motive into prominence, concentrating its attention on it and thus intensifying its power; that it has a corresponding power of resisting other motives, driving them into the background and thus gradually diminishing their force; that the will itself becomes stronger by exercise, as the desires do by indulgence. The conflict between the will and the desires, the reality of self-restraint and the power of Will to modify character, are among the most familiar facts of moral life. In the words of Burke, 'It is the prerogative of man to be in a great degree a creature of his own