ined in their meaning. Thus Lambert, to set forth the
basis of his system, had adopted certain common words that answered to
his notions. The word Will he used to connote the medium in which the
mind moves, or to use a less abstract expression, the mass of power by
which man can reproduce, outside himself, the actions constituting his
external life. Volition--a word due to Locke--expressed the act by which
a man exerts his will. The word Mind, or Thought, which he regarded as
the quintessential product of the Will, also represented the medium in
which the ideas originate to which thought gives substance. The Idea, a
name common to every creation of the brain, constituted the act by which
man uses his mind. Thus the Will and the Mind were the two generating
forces; the Volition and the Idea were the two products. Volition, he
thought, was the Idea evolved from the abstract state to a concrete
state, from its generative fluid to a solid expression, so to speak, if
such words may be taken to formulate notions so difficult of definition.
According to him, the Mind and Ideas are the motion and the outcome
of our inner organization, just as the Will and Volition are of our
external activity.

He gave the Will precedence over the Mind.

"You must will before you can think," he said. "Many beings live in
a condition of Willing without ever attaining to the condition of
Thinking. In the North, life is long; in the South, it is shorter; but
in the North we see torpor, in the South a constant excitability of the
Will, up to the point where from an excess of cold or of heat the organs
are almost nullified."

The use of the word "medium" was suggested to him by an observation he
had made in his childhood, though, to be sure, he had no suspicion then
of its importance, but its singularity naturally struck his delicately
alert imagination. His mother, a fragile, nervous woman, all
sensitiveness and affection, was one of those beings created to
represent womanhood in all the perfection of her attributes, but
relegated by a mistaken fate to too low a place in the social scale.
Wholly loving, and consequently wholly suffering, she died young, having
thrown all her energies into her motherly love. Lambert, a child of six,
lying, but not always sleeping, in a cot by his mother's bed, saw the
electric sparks from her hair when she combed it. The man of fifteen
made scientific application of this fact which had amused the child, a
fact be