to ascribe to our mental powers
a material foundation is held to be degrading to our nobler part. Again,
a philosopher of our own day--Sir W. Hamilton--has placed on the
title-page of his principal work this piece of rhetoric: "On earth,
there is nothing great but man; in man, there is nothing great but
mind". Now one would suppose that there are on earth many things besides
man deserving the appellation of "great"; and that the mechanism of the
body is, in any view, quite as remarkable a piece of work as the
mechanism of the mind. There was one step more that Hamilton, as an
Aristotelian, should have made: "In mind, there is nothing great but
intellect". Doubtless, we ought not to dissect an epigram; but epigrams
brought into a perverting contact with science are not harmless. Such
gross pandering to human vanity must be held as disfiguring a work on
philosophy.

The sentiment of dignity has much to answer for in the doctrine of
Free-will. In Aristotle, the question had not assumed its modern
perplexity; but the vicious element of factitious personal importance
had already peeped out, it being one of the few points wherein the bias
of the feelings operated decidedly in his well-balanced mind. In
maintaining the doctrine that vice is voluntary, he argues, that if
virtue is voluntary, vice (its opposite) must also be voluntary; now to
assert virtue not to be voluntary would be to cast an _indignity_ upon
it. This is the earliest association of the feeling of personal dignity
with the exercise of the human will.

[FALSE PRIDE IN CONNECTION WITH FREE-WILL.]

The Stoics are commonly said to have started the free-will difficulty.
This needs an explanation. A leading tenet of theirs was the distinction
between things in our power and things not in our power; and they
greatly overstrained the limits of what is in our power. Looking at the
sentiment about death, where the _idea_ is everything, and at many of
our desires and aversions, also purely sentimental, that is, made and
unmade by our education (as, for example, pride of birth), they
considered that pains in general, even physical pains and grief for
the loss of friends, could be got over by a mental discipline, by
intellectually holding them not to be pains. They extolled and magnified
the power of the will that could command such a transcendent discipline,
and infused an emotion of _pride_ into the consciousness of this
greatness of will. In subsequent ages, poets,