In dealing with “Freedom as opposed to Necessity,” Dr. Magee declared “that a man is free to think in one way or another, that it is not absolutely necessary for him always to think in one way or another.” This declaration is so obscure, that I should have had to abandon all attempt to solve the Bishop’s meaning but for the added explanation—viz., “that is to say, his thought is not the necessary product of physical constitution, that his thoughts do not grow out of him, as the blade grows out of the seed or the flower out of the plant, that it is not mechanical or necessary, but that a man has the power to choose how he will think.” I do not imagine that Dr. Magee used the word “thought” as limited by Sir William Hamilton; or that he intended in the loose words he uttered on this head to examine the doctrine as to evolution of thought put forward by German thinkers. I assume that the Lord Bishop regarded brilliancy of speech as preferable to profundity of argument, and fancied that he would best clear the way for the other Christian advocates who are to follow him, by piling well-sounding but often perfectly unmeaning phrases in their pathway. When the Bishop of Peterborough urges that thought is not the necessary product of physical constitution, we answer by opening before him an ethnical map; and pointing to the Australian as probably the lowest human type, the Bushman of the Cape, the Esquimaux, the Negro, the Teuton, we ask whether physical constitution has not something to do with thought-ability? Nay, taking a mal-formed cranium or a diseased brain from a lunatic asylum, we demand further whether the unhealthy and inaccurate thought is not there alleged in precise terms to be the “necessary product of physical constitution?” The assertion “that a man has the power to choose how he will think,” may be met by the query—When? Has the old man, partly deaf, partly blind, with failing memory, the power to choose how he will think? Has the drunken man, while intoxicated, the power to choose how he will think? Has the untaught Norfolk farm labourer with Sir W. Hamilton’s “Philosophy of the Unconditioned” before him, the power to choose how he will think in opposition to or in support of Cousin or Kant? Has the man to whom Church of England Christianity was taught as a child, whose intellect was bent and bound while yet pliable and scarce resisting, whose scope of inquiry has always been restrained by that line where reason applied becomes blasphemy, has he the power to choose what he will think? Let the wretched subterfuges with which even thinkers above the average—as your Essayists and Reviewers, your Dunbar Heaths, your Drs. Giles and Irons, your Colensos and your Voyseys—try to reconcile orthodoxy and Freethought, be examined, and you will have fuller answer than any I can give. Has man the power to choose how he will think? It may be fairly presumed, that under the words “to think,” Dr. Magee included all phases of mental activity, perception, recollection of perception, comparison of perception, judgment, reason, volition. Any word by which any condition of mental activity could be fairly described is, I take leave to submit, included by Dr. Magee under the head of “thought.” But is it true that a man can choose his perceptions? Are they not first limited by his perceptive ability, and, next, by the range within which that ability can be exercised, and its development in exercise? And if perception be compulsory, if a man cannot refuse to perceive that which is within the range of his ability, if he cannot elect to perceive that which is not within its range, then how can the thought-processes—all related to, and more or less based upon, the primary perceptions, modified or enlarged as these may afterwards be—how can these be free? And will Dr. Magee contend that a man has the power to choose what he will remember, or what he will forget?