The American Catholic Quarterly Review Volume 5 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ... accomplishment, and actually carry out the work, while at the same time his right season reprobates the action, which, however, he is compelled by an insane will to do, is to state a case whose conditions destroy themselves. It is surely nonsense to say that when a man of sane reason deliberately resolves to do a future action, selects the means, and then deliberately fulfils his purpose, he is not therein a free agent, since such action would include all the conditions, and that without any exception, for an act that is completely and perfectly free. There may be involuntary impulses, feelings, and diseased nervous action of various kinds in a person who, though diseased, is of right reason, but the action of such a one is merely physical and mechanical; there is then no object resolved on, no means deliberately selected, for his action is not designed, it is not at all voluntary. It follows, therefore, that there can be no such thing as "annihilation of the will power," except as consequent upon a previous " annihilation " of the reason itself. The imagination, as heretofore said, may be so injured by its lesions as to object before the intellect few genuine and true images of real things, as happens with idiots and with some maniacs; or it may offer some defective and delusory images, but yet present true, real, and healthy representations to the intellect, of all other things. Were the imagination to offer no images at all but delusory ones, the condition of the intellect would then be perfectly analogous to its state in a dream; were the imagination to offer before the intellect no images of any kind, true or false, the condition of the intellect would be as it is when a person is in a deep sleep, or, rather, as it is when the...