And so long as pleasure and pain, in fact and in prospect, operate upon
the will, so long as the individual is in a state wherein motives
operate, there may be moral weakness, but there is nothing more. In such
cases, punishment may be properly employed as a corrective, and is
likely to answer its end. This is the state termed accountability, or,
with more correctness, PUNISHABILITY, for being accountable is merely an
incident bound up with liability to punishment. Moral weakness is a
matter of a degree, and in its lowest grades shades into insanity, the
state wherein motives have lost their usual power--when pleasure and
pain cease to be apprehended by the mind in their proper character. At
_this_ point, punishment is unavailing; the moral inability has passed
into something like physical inability; the loss of self-control is as
complete as if the muscles were paralysed.

In the plea of insanity, entered on behalf of any one charged with
crime, the business of the jury is to ascertain whether the accused is
under the operation of the usual motives--whether pain in prospect has a
deterring effect on the conduct. If a man is as ready to jump out of the
window as to walk downstairs, of course he is not a moral agent; but so
long as he observes, of his own accord, the usual precautions against
harm to himself, he is to be punished for his misdeeds.

* * * * *

These various questions respecting the Will, if stripped of unsuitable
phraseology, are not very difficult questions. They are about as easy to
comprehend as the air-pump, the law of refraction of light, or the
atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view
them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than
the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by
involving a simple fact in inextricable contradictions, they have led
people gravely to recognise self-contradiction as the natural and the
proper condition of a certain class of questions. Consistency is very
well so far, and for the humbler matters of every-day life, but there is
a higher and a sacred region where it does not hold; where the
principles are to be received all the more readily that they land us in
contradictions. In ordinary matters, inconsistency is the test of
falsehood; in transcendental subjects, it is accounted the badge of
truth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Fortnightly Review_, August, 1868.]