I know nothing about necessity; I only believe that nature is practically uniform even in human action. I know nothing about an infinitely distant past; I only know that I ought to base on uniformity those inferences which are to guide my actions. But that man is a free agent appears to me obvious, and that in the natural sense of the words. We need ask for no better definition than Kant's:-- 'Will is a kind of causality belonging to living agents, in so far as they are rational; and freedom is such a property of that causality as enables them to be efficient agents independently of outside causes determining them; as, on the other hand, necessity (Naturnothwendigkeit) is that property of all irrational beings which consists in their being determined to activity by the influence of outside causes.' ('Metaphysics of Ethics,' chap. iii.) I believe that I am a free agent when my actions are independent of the control of circumstances outside me; and it seems a misuse of language to call me a free agent if my actions are determined by a transcendental Ego who is independent of the circumstances inside me--that is to say, of my character. The expression 'free will' has unfortunately been imported into mental science from a theological controversy rather different from the one we are now considering. It is surely too much to expect that good and serviceable English words should be sacrificed to a phantom. In an admirable book, 'The Methods of Ethics,' Mr. Henry Sidgwick has stated, with supreme fairness and impartiality, both sides of this question. After setting forth the 'almost overwhelming cumulative proof' of uniformity in human action, he says that it seems 'more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition.' 'No amount of experience of the sway of motives ever tends to make me distrust my intuitive consciousness that in resolving, after deliberation, I exercise free choice as to which of the motives acting upon me shall prevail.'