_Volition_ is the power of the mind to act executively. Or, perhaps, it is the resultant of the impulses actuating a mind at any particular instant. Whatever volition is, it is the same thing in the insect as in the man. Non-human beings have been observed to pause and deliberate and to make wise and momentous decisions in the twinkling of an eye. A chased hare will decide to squat, to go straight ahead, or to do something else which the emergency demands, just as unmistakably as a human fugitive. In the sense of being the power to act differently from the manner in which a being actually does act, there is no such thing as freewill. The will of the worm is just as free as the will of the judge—not in the sense that it is as varied in the directions of its activity, but in the sense that the character of its activities is determined inevitably by the character of its antecedents. All will, whether human or non-human, invariably acts in the direction of the strongest motive, just as a stone or a river invariably moves, if it moves at all, in the direction of the strongest tendency or force. It is impossible that this should be otherwise. For, if the will in any case elects to overthrow this fact by arbitrarily discarding a stronger motive for a feebler, in the very motive of the election are concealed elements which transform the feebler motive into the stronger. All motion, voluntary and involuntary—the motion of bullets, beings, societies, and suns—takes place along the lines of least arrest. Every being is compelled to decide as he does decide and to act as he does act by the inherited tendencies of his own nature and the tendencies of the environment in which he exists. And if any being, after having passed through life, were again placed back at the beginning of life and endowed with the same nature as before, and were acted upon through life by surroundings identical with those he had previously met, he would act—that is, he would exercise his will—in precisely the same way in every particular as he had previously done. To deny these things is to assert that the conduct of living beings is without law, and that psychology and sociology are not sciences. Non-human beings, all of the higher ones, have the same brain and nervous apparatus as man, and in their involuntary phenomena they closely resemble human beings. Aim a pretended blow near the eyes of a dog or a horse and it will wink involuntarily, just as a human being does. Sever the spinal cord of a man or a frog, and irritate the feet of each, and they will each manifest the same phenomena of reflex action, drawing their feet away each time from the stimulus.