lastly to enquire in what points or respects they are incompatible with them.

And, at first sight, this undertaking may seem to the reader both easy and worthless; easy, because what every one thinks must be known by all men; and worthless, because the theories of philosophers do not stand and fall with the opinions of the people. To a more thoughtful consideration, however, it will appear to be neither.

It is not so easy to say what the people mean by their ordinary words, for this reason, that the question is not answered until it is asked; that asking is reflection, and that we reflect in general not to find the facts, but to prove our theories at the expense of them. The ready made doctrines we bring to the work colour whatever we touch with them; and the apprehension of the vulgar mind, at first sight so easy, now seems, because we are not vulgar, to present a difficulty. And to know the signification of popular phrases is, in the second place, not worthless. Not all our philosophy professes its readiness to come into collision with ordinary morality. On the subject of responsibility this is certainly the case; the expounders of 'Free-Will' believe their teaching to be thoroughly at one with popular ideas, and even to be the sole expression and interpretation of them. So much does this weigh with many men, that their belief in vulgar moral accountability is the only obstacle to their full reception of Necessitarianism. And not to all of the disciples of Necessity has been given that strength of mind, which still survives in our Westminster Reviewers, and for which 'responsibility or moral desert in the vulgar sense are terms which stand for 'horrid figments of the imagination' (West. Rev., Oct. 1873, p. 311). But, if to any philosophy what we call responsibility is not yet a figment, then it can not be without interest to know, on the one side, the conclusions of that philosophy; on the other side, the beliefs of the vulgar; and whether the two can be reconciled with one another. This is the limit of our present essay. Beyond us lie the fields of metaphysic, which the reader must remember we are, so far as possible, not to enter but merely to indicate.

So much by way of preface; what we have now to do is, first, to enter on a question of fact. What is the popular notion of

responsibility? The popular notion is certainly to be found in the ordinary consciousness, in the mind of the plain or non-theoretical man, the man who lives without having or wishing for opinions of his own, as to what living is or ought to be. And, to find this plain man, where are we to go? For nowadays, when all have opinions, and too many also practice of their own; when every man knows better, and does worse, than his father before him; when to be enlightened is to be possessed by some wretched theory, which is our own just so far as it separates us from others; and to be cultivated is to be aware that doctrine means narrowness, that all truths are so true that any truth must be false; when 'young pilgrims,' at their outset, are 'spoiled by the sophistry' of shallow moralities, and the fruit of life rots as it ripens-amid all this 'progress of the species' the plain man is by no means so common as he once was, or at least is said to have been. And so, if we want a moral sense that has not yet been adulterated, we must not be afraid to leave enlightenment behind us. We must go to the vulgar for vulgar morality, and there what we lose in refinement we perhaps are likely to gain in integrity.

Betaking ourselves, therefore, to the uneducated man, let us find from hin, if we can, what lies at the bottom of his notion of moral responsibility.

What in his mind is to be morally responsible? We see in it at once the idea of a man's appearing to answer. He answers for what he has done, or (which we need not separately consider) has neglected and left undone. And the tribunal is a moral tribunal; it is the court of conscience, imagined as a judge, divine or human, external or internal. It is not necessarily implied that the man does answer for all or any of his acts; but it is implied that he might have to answer, that he is liable to be called upon-in one word (the meaning of which, we must remember, we perhaps do not know), it is right that he should be subject to the moral tribunal; or the moral tribunal has a right over him, to call him before it, with reference to all or any of his deeds.

There is no

He must answer, if called on, for all his deeds. question of lying here; and, without lying, he can disown none of his acts-nothing which in his heart or his will has ever been suffered to come into being. They are all his, they are part of his

substance; he can not put them on one side, and himself on the other, and say, 'It is not mine; I never did it.' What he ever at any time has done, that he is now; and, when his name is called, nothing, which has ever been his, can be absent from that which answers to the name. In this (real or supposed) juridical sphere the familiar saying of Agathon,

μόνου γὰρ ἀυτοῦ καὶ θεὸς στερίσκεται,
ἀγένητα ποιεῖν ἄσσ ̓ ἂν ᾖ πεπραγμένα

is as inexorably true, as it is false when we pass into a higher region, where imputation of guilt is as meaningless, as even the Westminster Review would have it be.

And he must account for all. But to give an account to a tribunal means to have one's reckoning settled. It implies that, when the tribunal has done with us, we do not remain, if we were so before, either debtors or creditors. We pay what we owe; or we have that paid to us which is our due, which is owed to us (what we deserve). Further, because the court is no civil court between man and man, that which is owed to us is what we pay (alas for the figments of the unenlightened mind). In short, there is but one way to settle accounts; and that way is punishment, which is due to us, and therefore is assigned to us.

Hence, when the late Mr. Mill said, 'Responsibility means punishment,' what he, had in his mind was the vulgar notion, though he expressed it incorrectly, unless on the supposition that all must necessarily transgress. What is really true for the ordinary consciousness; what it clings to, and will not let go; what marks unmistakeably, by its absence, a philosophical' or a 'debauched' morality, is the necessary connection between responsi bility and liability to punishment, between punishment and desert, or the finding of guiltiness before the law of the moral tribunal. For practical purposes we need make no distinction between responsibility, or accountability, and liability to punishment. Where you have the one, there (in the mind of the vulgar) you have the other; and where you have not the one, there you can not have the other. And, we may add, the theory which will explain the one, in its ordinary sense, will also explain the other; and the theory which fails in the one, fails also in the other; and the

doctrine which conflicts with popular belief as to one, does so also with regard to the other.

So far we have seen that subjection to a moral tribunal lies at the bottom of our answering for our deeds. The vulgar understand that we answer; that we answer not for everything, but only for what is ours; or, in other words, for what can be imputed to us. If now we can say what is commonly presupposed by imputability, we shall have accomplished the first part of our undertaking, by the discovery of what responsibility means for the people. And at this point again we must repeat our caution to the reader, not to expect from us either law or systematic metaphysics; and further to leave out of sight the slow historical evolution of the idea in question. We have one thing to do, and one only, at present-to find what lies in the mind of the ordinary man.

Now the first condition of the possibility of my guiltiness, or of my becoming a subject for moral imputation, is my self-sameness; I must be throughout one identical person. We do say, 'He is not the same man that he was,' but always in another sense, to signify that the character or disposition of the person is altered. We never mean by it, 'He is not the same person,' strictly; and, if that were our meaning, then we (the non-theoretical) should also believe, as a consequence, that the present person could not rightly be made to answer for what (not his self, but) another self had done. If, when we say, 'I did it,' the I is not to be the one I, distinct from all other I's; or if the one I, now here, is not the same I with the I, whose act the deed was, then there can be no question whatever but that the ordinary notion of responsibility disappears.

In the first place, then, I must be the very same person to whom the deed belonged; and, in the second place, it must have belonged to me-it must have been mine. What then is it which makes a deed mine? The question has been often discussed, and it is not easy to answer it with scientific accuracy; but here we are concerned simply with the leading features of the ordinary notion. And the first of these is, that we must have an act, and not something which can not be called by that name. The deed must issue from my will; in Aristotle's language, the άgx must be in myself. Where I am forced, there I do nothing.

I am not an agent at all, or in any way responsible. Where compulsion exists, there my will, and with it accountability, does not exist. So far the ordinary consciousness is clear, and on this point we must not press it further. To fix the limits of compulsion; to say where force ends, and where will begins; to find the conditions, under which we may say, 'There was no possibility of volition, and there could have been none'' is no easy matter, and fortunately one which does not concern us. [See more, Note A.]

Not only must the deed be an act, and come from the man without compulsion, but, in the second place, the doer must be supposed intelligent; he must know the particular circumstances of the case. (Τὸ ἑκουσιον δόξειεν ἂν εἶναι οὗ ἡ ἀρχὴ ἐν αὐτῷ εἰδότι τὰ xað' ixaora iv oïs ǹ rgãžis). If the man is ignorant, and if it was not his duty to know (for, supposing that to be his duty, the act, done in ignorance, is imputed to the will through the ignorance itself, which is criminally imputable), then the deed is not his act. A certain amount of intelligence, or 'sense,' is thus a condition of responsibility. No one who does not possess a certain minimum of general intelligence can be considered a responsible being; and under this head come imbecile persons, and, to a certain extent, young children. Further, the person whose intellect is eclipsed for a time-such eclipse being not attributable to himself. can not be made accountable for any thing. He can say, and say truly, 'I was not myself;' for he means by his self an intelligent will.

- Thirdly, responsibility implies a moral agent. No one is accountable, who is not capable of knowing (not, who does not

I If, through my bad habits, it is my fault, that what presumably would' not have been compulsion amounted to it in my case, then I am responsible for what I do under such compulsion. The degree is of course another matter.

"If there are in fact any adult sane persons, of whom it can be said that (capacity or no capacity) they not only are without any notions of good and bad, but have never had any the smallest chance of having them, and so are incapable; and whose fault it therefore in no sense is that they are what they are, then such persons must be considered as out of the moral sphere, and therefore, in the court of conscience, irresponsible and lunatic (whatever they have to be in law). But what standard a man is to be morally judged by, is quite another question, which we do not discuss.