desirable fruit. But
you could not perceive that the fruit was desirable until you had
experienced desire of it. And here we are at the old, inexplicable
seesaw. It must appear desirable in order to be desired; it must be
desired in order to appear desirable: the perception must precede the
desire, and the desire must precede the perception. These are foolish
subtilties, but all the fitter for their purpose. Our motive-mongering
friends should understand that they can explain no farther than their
neighbors,--that by enslaving the will they only shift the difficulty,
not solve it.

Anything but this shallow sciolism! More philosophical a thousand times
than the knowing and facile metaphysic which makes man a thing of
springs and pivots and cogs, are the notions of old religionists, which
attributed human action in large part to preventing, suggesting, and
efficient "grace," or those of older poets, who gave Pallas Athene for
a counsellor to Odysseus, and Krishna for a teacher to the young Aryan
warrior,--which represent human action, that is, as issuing in part out
of the Infinite. A thousand times more _philosophical_, as well as
ten thousand times more inspiring, I say, are the metaphysics of
Imagination,--of scriptures and great poems and the _live_ human
heart,--than the cut-and-dried sciolisms which explain you a man in five
minutes, and make everything in him as obvious as the movements of a
jumping-jack.

To deny, then, the existence of free-will is, in my judgment, a grave
error; but to deny it on the ground of its identity with chance is more
than an ordinary error, however grave; it is a poison in the blood of
one's thought, conveying its vice to every part and function of the
system. And herewith we pass to the next head.

2. _Consciousness_. It has been the persuasion of wise men in various
ages, and is the persuasion of many, as wise, doubtless, as their
neighbors, now, that the soul has a native sense of its quality and
perpetual relations. By Plato this sense, in some of its aspects, was
named Reminiscence; by modern speakers of English it is denoted as
Consciousness. This, according to its grades and applications, is
qualified as personal, moral, intellectual, or, including all its higher
functions, as intuitive or spiritual. Of this high spiritual sense, this
self-recognition of soul, all the master-words of the language--God,
Immortality, Life, Love, Duty--are either wholly, or in all their
grande