window as to walk downstairs, of course he is not a moral agent; but so
long as he observes, of his own accord, the usual precautions against
harm to himself, he is to be punished for his misdeeds.

* * * * *

These various questions respecting the Will, if stripped of unsuitable
phraseology, are not very difficult questions. They are about as easy to
comprehend as the air-pump, the law of refraction of light, or the
atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view
them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than
the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by
involving a simple fact in inextricable contradictions, they have led
people gravely to recognise self-contradiction as the natural and the
proper condition of a certain class of questions. Consistency is very
well so far, and for the humbler matters of every-day life, but there is
a higher and a sacred region where it does not hold; where the
principles are to be received all the more readily that they land us in
contradictions. In ordinary matters, inconsistency is the test of
falsehood; in transcendental subjects, it is accounted the badge of
truth.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _Fortnightly Review_, August, 1868.]

[Footnote 2: Donaldson's "History of Christian Literature and Doctrine,"
Vol. I., p. 277.]