2. Will.A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”[pg 509]F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
2. Will.A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”[pg 509]F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
2. Will.A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”[pg 509]F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
2. Will.A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”[pg 509]F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
2. Will.A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”[pg 509]F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
2. Will.A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”[pg 509]F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
A. Will defined.—Will is the soul's power to choose between motives and to direct its subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen,—in other words, the soul's power to choose both an end and the means to attain it. The choice of an ultimate end we call immanent preference; the choice of means we call executive volition.
In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.
In this definition we part company with Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2. He regards the will as the soul's power to act according to motive,i. e., to act out its nature, but he denies the soul's power to choose between motives,i. e., to initiate a course of action contrary to the motive which has been previously dominant. Hence he is unable to explain how a holy being, like Satan or Adam, could ever fall. If man has no power to change motives, to break with the past, to begin a new course of action, he has no more freedom than the brute. The younger Edwards (Works, 1:483) shows what his father's doctrine of the will implies, when he says:“Beasts therefore, according to the measure of their intelligence, are as free as men. Intelligence, and not liberty, is the only thing wanting to constitute them moral agents.”Yet Jonathan Edwards, determinist as he was, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom of God (Works, 4:381), urges the use of means, and appeals to the sinner as if he had the power of choosing between the motives of self and of God. He was unconsciously making a powerful appeal to the will, and the human will responded in prolonged and mighty efforts; see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 109.
For references, and additional statements with regard to the will and its freedom, see chapter on Decrees, pages 361, 362, and article by A. H. Strong, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-242, and reprinted in Philosophy and Religion, 114-128. In the remarks upon the Decrees, we have intimated our rejection of the Arminian liberty of indifference, or the doctrine that the will can act without motive. See this doctrine advocated in Peabody, Moral Philosophy, 1-9. But we also reject the theory of determinism propounded by Jonathan Edwards (Freedom of the Will, in Works, vol. 2), which, as we have before remarked, identifies sensibility with the will, regards affections as the efficient causes of volitions, and speaks of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. Hazard, Man a Creative First Cause, and The Will, 407—“Edwards gives to the controlling cause of volition in the past the name of motive. He treats the inclination as a motive, but he also makes inclination synonymous with choice and will, which would make will to be only the soul willing—and therefore the cause of its own act.”For objections to the Arminian theory, see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 359-399; McCosh, Divine Government, 263-318, esp. 312; E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 109-137; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:115-147.
James, Psychology, 1:139—“Consciousness is primarily a selecting agency.”2:393—“Man possesses all the instincts of animals, and a great many more besides. Reason,per se, can inhibit no impulses; the only thing that can neutralize an impulse is an impulse the other way. Reason may however make an inference which will excite the imagination to let loose the impulse the other way.”549—“Ideal or moral action is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”562—“Effort of attention is the essential phenomenon of will.”567—“The terminus of the psychological process is volition; the point to which the will is directly applied is always an idea.”568—“Though attention is the first thing in volition, express consent to the reality of what is attended to is an additional and distinct phenomenon. We say not only: It is a reality;[pg 505]but we also say:‘Let it be a reality.’”571—“Are the duration and intensity of this effort fixed functions of the object, or are they not? We answer,No, and so we maintain freedom of the will.”584—“The soul presents nothing, creates nothing, is at the mercy of material forces for all possibilities, and, by reinforcing one and checking others, it figures not as anepiphenomenon, but as something from which the play gets moral support.”Alexander, Theories of the Will, 201-214, finds in Reid's Active Powers of the Human Mind the most adequate empirical defense of indeterminism.
B. Will and other faculties.—(a) We accept the threefold division of human faculties into intellect, sensibility, and will. (b) Intellect is the soul knowing; sensibility is the soul feeling (desires, affections); will is the soul choosing (end or means). (c) In every act of the soul, all the faculties act. Knowing involves feeling and willing; feeling involves knowing and willing; willing involves knowing and feeling. (d) Logically, each latter faculty involves the preceding action of the former; the soul must know before feeling; must know and feel before willing. (e) Yet since knowing and feeling are activities, neither of these is possible without willing.
Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”
Socrates to Theætetus:“It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.”364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.”411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.”Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”
As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt:“Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.”There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate:“The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.”Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have noscience; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have noart; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have nomorality. Ælfric, A. D. 900:“The verb‘to will’has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”
C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of[pg 506]intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.
I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.
I“make up”my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.”All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus:“I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.”“Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.”Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.”By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel.“Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.”By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may“make level in the desert a highway for our God”(Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to“the word of the kingdom”(Mat. 13:19).
The word“character”meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill:“A character is a completely fashioned will.”We may talk therefore of a“generic volition”(Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark”(Dwight L. Moody). In this sense,“purpose is the autograph of mind.”Duke of Wellington:“Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!”When Macbeth says:“If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,”the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim:“A man's character is made for him, not by him.”Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.
D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are notcauses, which compel the will, butinfluences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.
“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”
“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.”The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict[pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury:“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.”Jonathan Edwards made motives to beefficientcauses, when they are onlyfinalcauses. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne:“Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.”Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”
The will, in choosingbetweenmotives, chooseswitha motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.”New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.”William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development.Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.”Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of aconditionalandlimitedfreedom.”
E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.
There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”
There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives[pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts:“We know causality only as we know will,i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot findcause, but onlyantecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power tomakea decision, not tobe madeby decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.”While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish.“Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”
Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.”Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the‘data of ethics’when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.”Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which isfatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which isdeterminism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have aninfluence, but influence is not to be confounded withcausalefficiency.”
Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It ischoice, notcreation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.”Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.”Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is“not a power to choose without motive.”It“does not exclude motives to the contrary.”Volition“supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.”Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is notcaused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”
F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the“bondservant of sin”(John 8:31-36) or the“servant of righteousness”(Rom. 6:15-23;cf.Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making awillis significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”
Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is notcause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but bycharacterin the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”
My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.”Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction:“Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.”Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ:“If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed”(John 8:36).
Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the[pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.”Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and sofarthe will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and sofarthe man is a free agent.”Santayana:“A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.”Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”
G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.
There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.
There is such a thing as“psychical automatism”(Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother:“Oscar, why can't you be good?”“Mamma, it makes me so tired!”The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain:“Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.”Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determinednecessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of amotive—as distinguished from amotor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.”Fichte:“If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.”Lessing:“Kein Mensch muss müssen.”Delitzsch:“Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”
Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism[pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements,i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.”3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.”4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for thiswouldchanges And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe:“Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”
Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.”Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.”Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.
H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.
Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.
Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát:“With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency,i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.”The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's.“Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?”“Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.”Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the[pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark:“You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”
Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.”Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.”J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.”James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.”See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.”Shadworth Hodgson:“Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.”Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life:“The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”
We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon:“There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III:“I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable.Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.”Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.
Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.”Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.
Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselvesinter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not beunmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.”309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.”311—“The whole[pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”
See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.