We may conclude then that judgments of right and wrong relate properly to volitions accompanied with intention--whether the intended consequences be external, or some effects produced on the agent’s own feelings or character. This excludes from the scope of such judgments those conscious actions which are not intentional, strictly speaking; as when sudden strong feelings of pleasure and pain cause movements which we are aware of making, but which are not preceded by any representation in idea either of the movements themselves or of their effects. For such actions, sometimes distinguished as ‘instinctive,’ we are only held to be responsible indirectly so far as any bad consequences of them might have been prevented by voluntary efforts to form habits of more complete self-control. We have to observe further that our common moral judgments recognise an important distinction between _impulsive_ and _deliberate_ wrongdoing, condemning the latter more strongly than the former. The line between the two cannot be sharply drawn: but we may define ‘impulsive’ actions as those where the connexion between the feeling that prompts and the action prompted is so simple and immediate that, though intention is distinctly present, the consciousness of personal choice of the intended result is evanescent. In deliberate volitions there is always a conscious selection of the result as one of two or more practical alternatives. In the case, then, of such volitions as are pre-eminently the objects of moral condemnation and approbation, the psychical fact ‘volition’ seems to include--besides intention, or representation of the results of action--also the consciousness of self as choosing, resolving, determining these results. And the question which I understand to be at issue in the Free Will controversy may be stated thus: Is the self to which I refer my deliberate volitions a self of strictly determinate moral qualities, a definite character partly inherited, partly formed by my past actions and feelings, and by any physical influences that it may have unconsciously received; so that my voluntary action, for good or for evil, is at any moment completely caused by the determinate qualities of this character, together with my circumstances, or the external influences acting on me at the moment--including under this latter term my present bodily conditions?--or is there always a possibility of my choosing to act in the manner that I now judge to be reasonable and right, whatever my previous actions and experiences may have been?