Unless we are to consider as such the following statement, by one of the writers quoted in the text: “In the case of mental exertion, the result to be accomplished is preconsidered or meditated, and is therefore known a priori, or before experience.”—(Bowen’s Lowell Lectures on the Application of Metaphysical and Ethical Science to the Evidence of Religion. Boston, 1849.) This is merely saying that when we will a thing we have an idea of it. But to have an idea of what we wish to happen, does not imply a prophetic knowledge that it will happen. Perhaps it will be said that the first time we exerted our will, when we had of course no experience of any of the powers residing in us, we nevertheless must already have known that we possessed them, since we can not will that which we do not believe to be in our power. But the impossibility is perhaps in the words only, and not in the facts; for we may desire what we do not know to be in our power; and finding by experience that our bodies move according to our desire, we may then, and only then, pass into the more complicated mental state which is termed will. After all, even if we had an instinctive knowledge that our actions would follow our will, this, as Brown remarks, would prove nothing as to the nature of Causation.
Our knowing, previous to experience, that an antecedent will be followed by a certain consequent, would not prove the relation between them to be any thing more than antecedence and consequence.
Reid’s Essays on the Active Powers, Essay iv., chap. 3.
Prospective Review for February, 1850.
Vide supra, p. 178, note.
Westminster Review for October, 1855.