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of facts that require it, those of choice and responsibility. The sense of obligation, with the subsequent feelings of virtue and guilt, of approval and condemnation; the facts of government, of reward and punishment, the mind can not understand or fully accept without the interpretation of the idea of liberty; without making the connection between choice and motives, between personal action and the circumstances under which it takes place, one of freedom. Hence springs the notion of liberty, and the obstinate defense and maintenance of it by so many, in spite of faulty definitions, in spite of this inability to render any explanation of it satisfactory to the purely scientific mind.

We are not conscious of liberty. If we were, there would be no room for discussion. We no more know the exact nature of the connection between the motives and the will from experience simply, than we do the connection between the volition and subsequent muscular action. In view of the accepted fact of accountability, and the absence of all sensible constraint in motives, the mind predicates of the connection liberty itself supplying the idea, and applying it to the phenomena; exactly as to another class of facts, it, in the same independent way, brings the idea of causal interdependence. In each case the mind proceeds to meet and expound the facts with its own independent notion, seen by itself to be applicable to the conditions of the problem. The movement is exactly that which takes place in the explanation of other experiences under the notion of space; and of still others under that of time. The supersensual nature of the idea of liberty must be admitted by all, certainly not less by those who deny its intelligibility, and ridicule the assertion of its existence, than by those who accept both. It seems quite evident, that if freedom does exist, it is the regulative idea presiding over the facts of choice; the form under which the connection of the