to
ask for the cause of a human mind, since, _ex hypothesi_, a human mind
is a part of the self-existing substance, although not on this account
self-existing as to its individual personality. As argued in a previous
chapter, the personality appears to arise on account of circumscription,
or the isolation of a constituent part of the World-eject. Therefore,
although it may be reasonable to ask for a cause of this
circumscription--or of the personality--it is not reasonable to ask for
a cause of the substance which is thus circumscribed, or of the quality
of spontaneity which that substance exhibits.

I will now state the whole case in another way. When we regard the facts
of volition from the stand-point of psychology, the only theory of them
which is open to us is, as we have before seen, that of determinism.
Moreover, within these limits that theory is perfectly true. Psychology,
as such, cannot recognize any principle more ultimate than natural
causation, seeing that, like any other of her sisters in the family of
sciences, her whole work and duty are confined to the investigation of
this principle. But, just as in the case of all the other sciences, when
her investigations have been pushed to the point where they encounter
the problem of explaining this principle itself, her investigations
must necessarily cease; this principle is for all the sciences the
ultimate datum, behind which they cannot go without ceasing to be
sciences. But it does not follow that because the area of science is
limited by that of causation, therefore we are precluded from asking any
questions as to the nature of this ultimate datum. Of course any
questions which we may thus ask cannot possibly be answered by science;
they are questions of philosophy, in the consideration of which science,
from her very nature and essential limitation of her office, can have no
voice. Now, if on taking up the principle of causation where this is
left by science--viz. as the ultimate or unanalyzable _datum_ of
experience, upon which all her investigations are founded, and by which
they are all limited--philosophy finds any reason to surmise that it is
resolvable into the principle of mind, philosophy is thus able to
suggest that any distinction between mental processes as determinate or
free, is really a meaningless distinction. For, according to this
suggestion, the issue is no longer as to whether these processes are
caused or uncaused; the very idea of ca