Nothing could be more hopeful. We seem to be setting out on a magnificent, unincumbered highway. But McDougall is a born reconciler of irreconcilables. He can not abandon Conservation even after having repudiated it. Earlier predilections, no doubt, bar the way. So he seeks to retain both his Will and the Law which forbids it. Fit successor to James and to Santayana, he presents the spectacle of a house divided against itself. Yet he lacks the wistful melancholy of the unbelieving Catholic, who found the intellect so hard and dry and useless when made supreme over all, but strove faithfully to worship it nevertheless. Nor has he the reckless inconsistency of the unbelieving Protestant, James, who could say one thing heartily, and then, in another mood, say something quite the opposite--no less heartily. McDougall is neither hearty nor melancholy. He has partially accepted Freud, and has worked in the same clinic with Jung. He is a psychiatrist. His important contributions to knowledge all deal with the abnormal. He has studied insects and animals. But such thirst for the human as he owns to has been largely satisfied by his practical ministrations to the sick and semi-demented. Therefore he is able to weave his intricate patterns of words about the incompatible presumptions of his argument with a certain appearance of enjoyment, and seems to fancy that when the thread of the discourse has become sufficiently tangled it will have brought the incompatibles together. “Resolutions of the will are not bolts from the blue,” he asserts.[34] And he does not see that this commits him hopelessly to the mechanistic camp. For resolutions of the will must be bolts from the blue--just that, exactly--or they do not transcend the law of the Conservation of Energy. And if they do not add a jot or tittle by way of effect to what is already found in the cause, they are not free. “Shall we say that Divine [clearly he means ‘human’] Reason sits at the head, controlling the fierce passions that reside in the belly as a charioteer controlls a team of savage steeds?” asks McDougall.[35] “Aye!” cried the great Aristotle, centuries ago. “Hardly!” exclaims our Carolina professor. “Reason is not a conative [i. e. striving] energy that may be thrown on this side or that in our moral conflicts.”[36] “Reason is not that X of which we are in search, though it plays an important part in bringing that X to bear.”[37]