exactly parallel instance of the situation is familiar to us. The daily
circuit of the sun around the earth, supposed to be fixed, so exactly
answers all the common uses that, in spite of its being false, we adhere
to it in the language of every-day life. It is a convenient
misrepresentation, and deceives nobody. And such will, in all
likelihood, be the usage regarding the external world, after the
contradiction is admitted, and rectified by a metaphysical circumlocution.
Speculators are still only trying their hand at an unobjectionable
circumlocution; but we may almost be sure that nothing will ever
supersede, for practical uses, the notion of the distinct worlds of Mind
and Matter. If, after the Copernican demonstration of the true position
of the sun, we still find it requisite to keep up the fiction of his
daily course; much more, after the final accomplishment of the
Berkeleyan revolution (to my mind inevitable), shall we retain the
fiction of an independent external world: only, we shall then know how
to fall back upon some mode of stating the case, without incurring the
contradiction.

* * * * *

IV. To return to the Will. The fact that we have to save, and to
represent in adequate language, is this:--A voluntary action is a
sequence distinct and _sui generis;_ a human being avoiding the cold,
searching for food, and clinging to other beings, is not to be
confounded with a pure material sequence, as the fall of rain, or the
explosion of gunpowder. The phenomena, in both kinds, are phenomena of
sequence, and of _regular_ or _uniform_ sequence; but the things that
make up the sequence are widely different: in the one, a feeling of the
mind, or a concurrence of feelings, is followed by a conscious muscular
exertion; in the other, both steps are made up of purely material