ON LIBERTY AND NECESSITY
In this Essay I shall give the best account I can of the question concerning liberty and necessity from the writings of others, and afterwards add a few remarks of my own on the explanation of the terms employed in this controversy. Of Mr. Hobbes’s discourse on this subject, I should be nearly disposed to say with Gassendi, when another work of his, ‘De Cive,’ was presented to him,‘This treatise, though small in bulk, is in my judgment the very marrow of philosophy.’ In order to give a clear and satisfactory view of the question, I shall be obliged to repeat some things I have before stated, for which the importance of the subject as well as other circumstances will, I hope, be a sufficient excuse.
The doctrine of necessity is stated by this author with great force and precision as a general question of cause and effect, and with scarcely any particular reference to his mechanical theory of the mind. From this naked simple view of the matter, I cannot consistently with truth withhold my full and entire assent. The ground-work, the pure basis of the doctrine is in my opinion incontestable; it cannot be denied without overturning all the rules of science, as well as the plainest dictates of the understanding: whoever attacks it there in its stronghold, will only injure the cause he espouses. It is that rock upon which whoever falls will be dashed to pieces. But though I cannot pretend to undermine the foundation, yet I may attempt to shake some parts of the superstructure, and to clear away the crust of materialism which has grown over it. In my opinion, the representations which have commonly been given of the subject by the writers on both sides of the argument are almost equally erroneous, and their opposite conclusions built on an equal misconception of the true principle of necessity. By the principle of moral or philosophical necessity is meant then that the mind is invariably governed by certain laws which determine all its operations; or in other words, that the regular succession of cause and effect is not confined to mere matter, while the impulses of the will are left quite unaccounted for, self-caused, perfectly contingent and fantastical. We in general attribute those things to chance the causes of which we do not understand, both in mind and matter. But as there is a greater latitude and inconstancy in the one than in the other, insomuch that we can hardly ever predict with certainty the effect of particular motives on the mind, the opinion of chance, arbitrary inclination, or self-determination had gained much deeper root with respect to the operations of mind than to those of matter. The fallacy of this opinion Hobbes has exposed in a masterly, and I think unanswerable manner, and without running into those paradoxical conclusions from the first position which later necessarians have deduced from it. He affirms that necessity is perfectly consistent with human liberty; that is, that the most strict and inviolable connexion of cause and effect does not prevent the full, free, and unrestrained development of certain powers in the agent, or take away the distinction between the nature of virtue and vice, praise and blame, reward and punishment, but is the foundation of all moral reasoning.Except Dr. Jonathan Edwards, he is the only professed necessarian that I know of who has not been led, by the customary use of language, to quit the original definition of the term, and to slide from a philosophical into a vulgar and practical necessity. But I will state his reasoning in his own words, which are the best. They are as follows:
‘My opinion about Liberty and Necessity.
‘First, I conceive that when it cometh into a man’s mind to do or not to do some certain action, if he have no time to deliberate, the doing it or abstaining necessarily follows the present thought he hath of the good or evil consequences thereof to himself; as, for example, in sudden anger the action shall follow the thought of revenge; in sudden fear, the thought of escape; also when a man hath time to deliberate, but deliberateth not, because never any thing appeared that could him make doubt of the consequence, the action follows his opinion of the goodness or harm of it. These actions I call voluntary, because these actions thatfollow immediatelythe last appetite are voluntary, are here: where is only one appetite that one is the last.
‘Secondly, I conceive when a man deliberates whether he shall do a thing or not do it, that he does nothing else but consider whether it be better for himself to do it or not to do it; and to consider an action, is to imagine the consequences of it both good and evil; from whence is to be inferred, that deliberation is nothing else but alternate imagination of the good and evil sequels of an action, or (which is the same thing) alternate hope and fear, or alternate appetite to do or quit the action of which he deliberateth.
‘Thirdly, I conceive that in all deliberations, that is to say, in all alternate succession of contrary appetites, the last is that which we call the will, and is immediately next before the doing of the action, or next before the doing of it become impossible. All other appetites to do, and to quit, that come upon a man during his deliberations, are called intentions, and inclinations, but not wills, there being but one will, which also in this case may be called the last will, though the intentions change often.
‘Fourthly, I conceive that those actions which a man is said to do upon deliberation, are said to be voluntary, and done upon choice and election, so that voluntary action, and action proceeding from election is the same thing; and that of a voluntary agent, it is all one to say, he is free, and to say, he hath not made an end of deliberating.
‘Fifthly, I conceive liberty to be rightly defined in this manner: liberty is the absence of all the impediments to action that are not contained in the nature and intrinsical quality of the agent, as forexample, the water is said to descend freely, or to have liberty to descend by the channel of the river, because there is no impediment that way, but not across, because the banks are impediments, and though the water cannot ascend, yet men never say it wants the liberty to ascend, but the faculty or power, because the impediment is in the nature of the water, and intrinsical. So also we say, he that is tied wants the liberty to go, because the impediment is not in him, but in his bands; whereas we say not so of him that is sick or lame, because the impediment is in himself.
‘Sixthly, I conceive that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that, therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his will, is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing; so that whereas it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are necessitated.
‘Seventhly, I hold that to be a sufficient cause, to which nothing is wanting that is needful to the producing of the effect. The same also is a necessary cause. For if it be possible that a sufficient cause shall not bring forth the effect, then there wanteth somewhat which was needful to the producing of it, and so the cause was not sufficient; but if it be impossible that a sufficient cause should not produce the effect, then is a sufficient cause a necessary cause (for that is said to produce an effect necessarily that cannot but produce it;) hence it is manifest, that whatsoever is produced, is produced necessarily: for whatsoever is produced hath had a sufficient cause to produce it, or else it had not been; and therefore also voluntary actions are necessitated.
‘Lastly, I hold that the ordinary definition of a free agent, namely, that a free agent, is that, which, when all things are present which are needful to produce the effect, can nevertheless not produce it, implies a contradiction, and is nonsense; being as much as to say, the cause may be sufficient, that is to say necessary, and yet the effect shall not follow.
‘My Reasons.—For the first five points, wherein it is explicated—1. what spontaneity is; 2. what deliberation is; 3. what will, propension and appetite are; 4. what a free agent is; 5. what liberty is; there can no other proof be offered but every man’s own experience, by reflection on himself, and remembering what he himself meaneth when he saith an action is spontaneous: a mandeliberates: such is his will: that agent or that action is free. Now he that reflecteth so on himself, cannot but be satisfied, that deliberation is the consideration of the good or evil sequels of an action to come; that by spontaneity is meant inconsiderate action (or else nothing is meant by it); that will is the last act of our deliberation; that a free agent is he that can do if he will, and forbear if he will; and that liberty is the absence of external impediments. But, to those that out of custom speak not what they conceive, but what they hear, and are not able, or will not take the pains to consider what they think when they hear such words, no argument can be sufficient; because experience and matter of fact is not verified by other men’s arguments, but by every man’s own sense and memory. For example, how can it be proved that to love a thing and to think it good is all one, to a man that hath not marked his own meaning by those words? or how can it be proved that eternity is notnunc stansto a man that says those words by custom, and never considers how he can conceive the thing in his mind? Also the sixth point, that a man cannot imagine any thing to begin without a cause, can no other way be made known, but by trying how he can imagine it; but if he try, he shall find as much reason (if there be no cause of the thing) to conceive it should begin at one time as another, that he hath equal reason to think it should begin at all times, which is impossible, and therefore he must think there was some special cause why it began then, rather than sooner or later, or else that it began never, but was eternal.
‘For the seventh point, which is, that all events have necessary causes, it is there proved in that they have sufficient causes. Further, let us in this place also suppose any event never so casual, as the throwing (for example) “ames ace” upon a pair of dice, and see if it must not have been necessary before it was thrown. For seeing it was thrown, it had a beginning, and consequently a sufficient cause to produce it, consisting partly in the dice, partly in outward things, as the posture of the parts of the hand, the measure of force applied by the caster, the posture of the parts of the table, and the like. In sum, there was nothing wanting which was necessarily requisite to the producing of that particular cast, and consequently the cast was necessarily thrown; for if it had not been thrown, there had wanted somewhat requisite to the throwing of it, and so the cause had not been sufficient. In the like manner it may be proved that every other accident, how contingent soever it seem, or how voluntary soever it be, is produced necessarily. The same may be proved also in this manner. Let the case be put, for example, of the weather: ’tis necessary that to-morrow it shall rain or not rain. If, therefore, it be not necessary it shall rain, it is necessary it shall not rain, otherwisethere is no necessity that the proposition, it shall rain or not rain, should be true. I know there be some that say, it may necessarily be true that one of the two shall come to pass, but not, singly that it shall rain, or that it shall not rain, which is as much as to say, one of them is necessary, yet neither of them is necessary; and therefore to seem to avoid that absurdity, they make a distinction, that neither of them is truedeterminate, butindeterminate, which distinction either signifies no more but this, one of them is true, but we know not which, and so the necessity remains, though we know it not; or if the meaning of the distinction be not that, it hath no meaning, and they might as well have said, one of them is truetitirice, but neither of them,tu patulice.
‘The last thing in which also consisteth the whole controversy, namely, that there is no such thing as an agent, which when all things requisite to action are present, can nevertheless forbear to produce it; or (which is all one) that there is no such thing as freedom from necessity, is easily inferred from that which hath been before alleged. For if it be an agent it can work, and if it work there is nothing wanting of what is requisite to produce the action, and consequently the cause of the action is sufficient, and if sufficient, then also necessary, as hath been proved before. And thus you see how the inconveniences, which it is objected must follow upon the holding of necessity, are avoided, and the necessity itself demonstratively proved. To which I could add, if I thought it good logic, the inconvenience of denying necessity, as that it destroyeth both the decrees and the prescience of God Almighty; for whatsoever God hath purposed to bring to pass by man, as an instrument, or foreseeth shall come to pass; a man, if he have liberty as hath been affirmed from necessitation, might frustrate, and make not to come to pass, and God should either not foreknow it, and not decree it, or he should foreknow such things shall be, as shall never be, and decree that which shall never come to pass. This is all that hath come into my mind touching this question since I last considered it.’
The letter from which the foregoing extract is taken is addressed to the Marquis of Newcastle, and dated at Rouen in 1651, twenty years before the publication of Spinoza’s most exact and beautiful demonstration of the same principle. Some of Hobbes’s antagonists had charged him with having borrowed his arguments from Marsennus, a French author; to which in one of his controversial tracts Hobbes replies with some contempt, that this Marsennus had heard him talk on the subject when he was in Paris, and had borrowed them from him. Dr. Priestley has done justice to Hobbes on this question of necessity, and I suspect more than justice in denying thatthe Stoics were acquainted with the same principle. At any rate, the modern commentators on the subject (and Dr. Priestley among them) have added nothing to it but absurdities, from which our author’s logic protected him; for he seldom reasoned wrong but when he reasoned from wrong premises. As this question is one of the most interesting in the history of philosophy, I shall perhaps be excused for adding one more extract (of considerable length) to prove that Hobbes is not, in this instance, chargeable with the practical inferences which have been made from his doctrine. In answer to the objections of Bishop Bramhall, with whom he had a controversy on the subject, he says:
‘Of the arguments from reason, the first is that which his Lordship saith is drawn from Zeno’s beating of his man, which is therefore calledArgumentum Baculinum, that is to say, a wooden argument. The story is this: Zeno held that all actions were necessary: his man therefore being for some fault beaten, excused himself upon the necessity of it: to avoid this excuse, his master pleaded likewise the necessity of beating him. So that not he that maintained, but he that derided the necessity was beaten, contrary to that his Lordship would infer.
‘The second argument is taken from certain inconveniences which his Lordship thinks would follow such an opinion.
‘The first inconvenience, he says, is this, that the laws which prohibit any action will be unjust.
‘2. That all consultations are vain.
‘3. That admonitions to men of understanding are of no more use than to children, fools, and madmen.
‘4. That praise, dispraise, reward and punishment are in vain.
‘5 and 6. That counsels, arts, arms, books, instruments, study, tutors, medicines are in vain.’
Hobbes’s answer to these conclusions is I think quite satisfactory. He says—
‘To which arguments his Lordship, expecting I should answer by saying, “the ignorance of the event were enough to make us use the means,” adds (as it were a reply to my answer foreseen) these words, “Alas! how should our not knowing the event be a sufficient motive to make us use the means?” Wherein his Lordship says right: but my answer is not that which he expecteth. I answer:
‘First, that the necessity of an action doth not make the laws that prohibit it unjust. To let pass that not the necessity, but the will to break the law maketh the action unjust, because the law regardeth the will and no other antecedent cause of action, and to let pass that no law can possibly be unjust, inasmuch as every man maketh (by hisconsent) the law he is bound to keep, and which consequently must be just, unless a man can be unjust to himself;—I say, what necessary cause soever precede an action, yet if the action be forbidden, he that doth it willingly may be justly punished. For instance, suppose the law on pain of death prohibit stealing, and that there be a man who by the strength of temptation is necessitated to steal, and is thereupon put to death, does not this punishment deter others from stealing? Is it not a cause that others steal not? Doth it not frame and make their wills to justice? To make the law is therefore to make a cause of justice, and to necessitate justice, and consequently ’tis no injustice to make such a law. The intention of the law is not to grieve the delinquent for what is past and not to be undone; but to make him and others just that else would not be so; and respecteth not the evil act past, but the good to come. Insomuch as without the good intention for the future, no past act of a delinquent would justify his killing in the sight of God.
‘Secondly, I deny that it maketh consultations to be vain. ’Tis the consultation that causeth a man and necessitateth him to choose to do one thing rather than another: so that unless a man say that that cause is in vain which necessitateth the effect, he cannot infer the superfluousness of consultation out of the necessity of the election proceeding from it. But it seemeth his Lordship reasons thus: “If I must do this rather than that, I shall do it though I consult not at all;” which is a false proposition and a false consequence, and no better than this: “If I shall live till to-morrow, I shall live till to-morrow, though I run myself through with a sword to-day.” If there be a necessity that an action shall be done, or that any effect shall be brought to pass, it does not therefore follow that there is nothing necessarily requisite as a means to bring it to pass; and therefore when it is determined that one thing shall be chosen before another, ’tis determined also for what cause it shall be chosen, which cause for the most part is deliberation or consultation; and therefore consultation is not in vain, and indeed the less in vain by how much the election is more necessitated, ifmoreandlesshad any place in necessity.
‘The same answer is to be given to the third supposed inconvenience, namely, that admonitions are in vain: for admonitions are parts of consultation, the admonitor being a counsellor for the time to him that is admonished.
‘The fourth pretended inconvenience is, that praise, dispraise, reward and punishment will be in vain. To which I answer, that for praise and dispraise, they depend not at all on the necessity of the action praised or dispraised. For what is it else to praise, but to say a thing is good; good, I say, for me or for some body else, or forthe state and commonwealth? And what is it to say an action is good, but to say it is as I would wish, or as another would have it, or according to the will of the state, that is to say, according to the law. Does my Lord think that no action can please me or him or the commonwealth, that should proceed from necessity? Things may therefore be necessary, and yet praiseworthy, as also necessary, and yet dispraised, and neither of them both in vain, because praise and dispraise, and likewise reward and punishment, do by example make and conform the will to good and evil. It was a very great praise in my opinion that Velleius Paterculus gives Cato, when he says that he was good by nature,et quia aliter esse non potuit.
‘To the last objection, that counsels, arts, arms, instruments, books, study, medicines, and the like would be superfluous, the same answer serves as to the former, that is to say, that this consequence,if the effect shall come to pass, then it shall come to pass without its causes, is a false one, and those things named counsels, arts, arms, &c. are the causes of those effects.’—Page 291.
‘His Lordship’s third argument consisteth in other inconveniences, which he saith will follow, namely, impiety, and negligence of religious duties, as repentance and zeal to God’s service, &c. To which I answer as to the rest, that they follow not. I must confess, if we consider the greatest part of mankind, not as they should be, but as they are, that is, as men whom either the study of acquiring wealth or preferment, or whom the appetite of sensual delights or the impatience of meditation, or the rash embracing of wrong principles have made unapt to discuss the truth of things; I must, I say, confess that the dispute of this question will rather hurt than help their piety, and therefore if his Lordship had not desired this answer, I should not have written it, nor do I write it but in hopes your Lordship and his will keep it private. Nevertheless in very truth, the necessity of events does not of itself draw with it any impiety at all. For piety consisteth only in two things: one that we honour God in our hearts, which is, that we think as highly of his power as we can, (for to honour any thing is nothing else but to think it to be of great power). The other is that we signify that honour and esteem by our words and actions, which is calledcultus, or worship of God. He therefore that thinketh that all things proceed from God’s eternal will, and consequently are necessary, does he not think God omnipotent? Does he not esteem of his power as highly as is possible, which is to honour God as much as may be in his heart? Again, he that thinketh so, is he not more apt by external acts and words to acknowledge it, than he that thinketh otherwise? Yet is this external acknowledgment the same thing which we call worship;so that this opinion fortifies piety in both kinds, external and internal, and therefore is far from destroying it. And for repentance, which is nothing else but a glad returning into the right way, after the grief of being out of the way, though the cause that made him go astray were necessary, yet there is no reason why he should not grieve; and, again, though the cause why he returned into the way were necessary, there remaineth still the cause of joy. So that the necessity of the acting taketh away neither of those parts of repentance—grief for the error, and joy for returning.’—Tripos, p. 292.
The author afterwards properly defines a moral agent to be one that acts from deliberation, choice, or will, not from indifference; and, speaking of the supposed inconsistency between choice and necessity, adds:
‘Commonly when we see and know the strength that moves us, we acknowledge necessity; but when we see not or mark not the force that moves us, we then think there is none, and that it is not causes but liberty that produceth the action. Hence it is that they think he doth not choose this that of necessity chooses it, but they might as well say, fire doth not burn, because it burns of necessity.’
The general question is thus stated by Mr. Hobbes in the beginning of his treatise: the point is not, he says, ‘whether a man can be a free agent; that is to say, whether he can write or forbear, speak or be silent, according to his will, but whether the will to write, and the will to forbear, come upon him according to his will, or according to any thing else in his own power. I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say—I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech. In fine, that freedom which men commonly find in books, that which the poets chaunt in the theatres, and the shepherds on the mountains, that which the pastors teach in the pulpits, and the doctors in the universities, and that which the common people in the markets, and all mankind in the whole world do assent unto, is the same that I assent unto, namely, that a man hath freedom to do if he will, but whether he hath freedom to will is a question neither the bishop nor they ever thought on.’
All in which I differ from Hobbes is, that I think there is a real freedom of choice and will, as well as of action, in the sense of the author, that is, not a freedom from necessity or causes in either case, but a liberty in any given agent to exert certain powers without being controlled or impeded in their exercise by another agent.
Helvetius says, ‘It is true we can form a tolerably distinct idea of the wordliberty, understood in a common sense. A man is free who is neither loaded with irons, nor confined in prison, nor intimidated like the slave by the dread of chastisement: in this sense, the libertyof a man consists in the free exercise of his power: I say of his power, because it would be ridiculous to mistake for a want of liberty the incapacity we are under to pierce the clouds like the eagle, to live under the water like the whale, or to become king, emperor, or pope. We have so far a sufficiently clear idea of the word. But this is no longer the case when we come to apply liberty to the will. What must this liberty then mean? We can only understand by it a free power of willing or not willing a thing: but this power would imply that there may be a will without motives, and consequently an effect without a cause. A philosophical treatise on the liberty of the will would be a treatise of effects without a cause.’—Helvetius on the Mind, p. 44.
Now I cannot perceive why there is any more difficulty in annexing a meaning to the word liberty, as it relates to the faculties of the mind than as it relates to those of the body, or why a treatise of the one should be a treatise of effects without a cause any more than of the other. If the distinction between liberty and necessity is lost in this case, it is not because liberty but because necessity can have no place in the will, or because we cannot easily put a padlock on the mind. If the prisoner who has his chains struck off, walks or runs, dances or leaps, is this an instance of an effect without a cause, because it is an effect of liberty, or of what Helvetius calls the free exercise of his power? Not that he can exert this power without means or motives, that is, without ground to move on, or limbs to move with, or breath to draw, or will to impel him, but ‘with all these means and appliances to boot’ he has a power to do certain things which his chains deprived him of the liberty of doing, but which the striking them off restores to him again. Why then, if liberty does not in its common sense signify an effect without a cause, but the free exercise of a power, did it not signify the same thing or something similar as applied to the mind? Has the mind no powers, or are they necessarily impeded and hindered from operating? My notion of a free agent, I confess, is not that represented by Mr. Hobbes, namely, one that when all things necessary to produce the effect are present can nevertheless not produce it; but I believe a free agent of whatever kind, is one which where all things necessary to produce the effect are present, can produce it; its own operation not being hindered by any thing else. The body is said to be free when it has the power to obey the direction of the will: so the will may be said to be free when it has the power to obey the dictates of the understanding. The absurdity of the libertarians is in supposing that liberty of action, and liberty of will have the same identical source, viz. the will; or that as it is the will that moves the body, so it is the will that moves itself in order to be free.
Mr. Locke’s chapter ‘On Power,’ in the first volume of theEssay, contains his account of liberty and necessity, and has been more found fault with than any other part of his work; I think without reason. He seems evidently to have admitted the definition of necessity, though he has avoided the name, which is not much to be wondered at, considering the misconception to which it is liable, and which can scarcely be separated from it in the closest reasoning, much less as a term of general signification. In other words, he denies the power of the mind to act without a cause or motive, or, in any manner in any circumstances, from mere indifferency and absolute self motion; but he at the same time rejects the inference which has been drawn from this principle, that the mind is not an agent at all, but entirely subject to external force or blind impulse. What he has said is little more than an expansion of Hobbes’s general description of practical liberty, ‘that it is a power to do, if we will.’ Thus, according to Mr. Locke, it would not be so absurd to give a restive horse the spur or the whip to make him go straight forward on a plain road, as it would be in order to make him leap up a precipice a hundred feet high. The one the horse has a power or liberty to do if he will, the other he has no power to do at any rate. That is, here are two sorts of impediments, one that may be overcome, and which it is right to take means to overcome, and another which cannot be overcome, and which it is therefore absurd to meddle with. To say that these two necessities are in effect the same, is an abuse of language; yet for not lumping them together in the dashing style of our modern wholesale dealers in paradox, Mr. Locke has been made the subject of endless abuse and contumely. The difference between them, as stated by this author with great force and earnestness of feeling, in truth constitutes all that men in general mean when they talk of freedom of will, and make it, as in this sense it is, the ground-work of morality. There are certain powers which the mind has of governing not only the actions of the body, but of regulating its own thoughts and desires, and it is to make us exert these powers that all the distinctions, rules and sanctions of morality have been established. It must be ridiculous to attempt to make us do, what upon the face of the thing it was known we could not do; yet it is on this literal and unqualified interpretation of the term, as implying a flat impossibility of the contrary, an utter incapacity and helplessness in the mind, a concurrence of causes foreign to the will itself, and irresistible in their effect, and with which it must therefore be in vain to contend, that most of the consequences from the doctrine of necessity have been built; such as that reward and punishment are absurd and improper, that virtue and vice are words without a meaning, that the assassin is no more amoral or accountable agent than the dagger which he uses, and many others of the same stamp. The sword and the assassin would be equally moral and accountable agents, if they were both equally accessible to moral motives, that is, to reward and punishment, praise and blame, &c.; but they are not. This seems to be a distinction of great pith and moment. It is said to be a mere difference of words; at least it makes all the difference whether such motives as reward and punishment, praise and blame, should be applied or not, and this one should think was a difference of practice. It is objected, indeed, that still both are equally necessary agents. But this appears to me to be a confusion of words. It is in vain to exhort flame not to burn, or to be angry with poison for working: and it would be equally in vain to exhort men to certain actions or to resent others, if exhortation and resentment had no more effect upon them, that is, if they were really governed by the same sort of blind, physical, unreasoning, unresisting necessity. In fact, the latest necessarians have abandoned the true, original, philosophical meaning of the term, in which it implies no more than the connection between cause and effect, and have substituted for it the prejudiced notion of their adversaries, who confound it with mechanical necessity, ‘fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,’ or the unconditionalfiatof omnipotence.
The following extracts which I shall condense as much as I can consistently with the nature of the argument, will shew the view which Mr. Locke has taken of this subject. I would only observe, by the by, that I so far agree with Hobbes and differ from Mr. Locke, in thinking that liberty in the most extended and abstract sense is applicable to material as well as voluntary agents; moral liberty,i.e.freedom of will evidently is not, because such agents have no such faculty.
‘All the actions that we have any idea of,’ says my author, ‘reducing themselves to these two,viz.thinking and moving, so far as a man has a power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free. Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power, wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind, directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary. Where any particular action is not in the power of the agent, to be produced by him according to his volition, there he is not at liberty; that agent is under necessity. So that liberty cannot be where there is no thought, no volition, no will; but there may be thought, there may be volition, there may be will, where there is no liberty. A little consideration of an obvious instance or two may make this clear.
‘A tennis-ball, whether in motion by the stroke of a racket, orlying still at rest, is not by any one taken to be a free agent. If we inquire into the reason, we shall find it is because we conceive not a tennis-ball to think; and consequently not to have any volition, or preference of motion to rest orvice versâ; and therefore has not liberty, is not a free agent, but both its motion and rest come under our idea of necessity, and are so called. Likewise a man falling into the water (a bridge breaking under him) has not herein liberty, is not a free agent. For though he has volition, though he prefers his not falling to falling, yet the forbearance of that motion not being in his power, the stop or cessation of that motion follows not upon his volition; and therefore therein he is not free. So a man striking himself or his friend by a convulsive motion of his arm, no body thinks he has in this liberty, every one pities him as acting by necessity and constraint.’
Here I will just stop to observe that the stanch sticklers for necessity, who make up by an excess of zeal for their want of knowledge, would read this passage with a smile of self-complacent contempt, and remark profoundly that whether the man struck his friend on purpose, or from a convulsive motion, he was equally under necessity, and the object of pity. Now whether he is an object of pity, I shall not dispute; but I conceive he is also an object of anger in the one case which he is not in the other, because anger will prevent a man’s striking you again, but will not cure him of St. Vitus’s dance. It is to this sort of indiscriminate, blind, senseless necessity which neutralizes all things and actions, and under the pretence of establishing the operation of causes, destroys the distinction between the different degrees and kinds of necessity, to which I do not profess myself a convert.
To return.—‘As it is in the motions of the body,’ proceeds Mr. Locke, ‘so it is in the thoughts of our minds: where any one is such, that we have power to take it up or lay it by, according to the preference of the mind, there we are at liberty. Yet some ideas to the mind, like some motions to the body, are such as in certain circumstances it cannot avoid, nor obtain their absence by the utmost effort it can use. A man on the rack is not at liberty to lay by the idea of pain, and divert himself with other contemplations. And sometimes a boisterous passion hurries our thoughts, as a hurricane does our bodies, without leaving us the liberty of thinking on other things which we would rather choose. But as soon as the mind regains the power to stop or continue, begin or forbear any of these motions of the body without, or of the mind within, according as it thinks fit to prefer either to the other, we then consider the man as free again.’
‘But freedom,’ says my author, ‘unless it reaches farther than this, will not serve the turn; and it passes for a good plea that a man isnot free at all, if he is not as free to will, as he is to act what he wills. Concerning a man’s liberty, there yet therefore is raised this farther question, whether a man be free to will? And as to that I imagine that a man in respect of willing, when any action in his power is once proposed to his thoughts as presently [that is, immediately] to be done, cannot be free. The reason whereof is very manifest; for it being unavoidable that the action depending on his will should exist or not exist, and its existence or non-existence following perfectly the determination of his will, he cannot avoid willing the existence or non-existence of that action; it is absolutely necessary that he will the one, or the other,i.e.prefer the one to the other, since one of them must necessarily follow.’—Page 246.
This seems to be the weak part of Mr. Locke’s reasoning, and is the only place, as I remember, where he has considered the certainty of the event as inconsistent with the practical liberty for which he contends. At this rate, it must be given up altogether: there can be no such thing as liberty. For in all cases whatever, one determination must happen rather than another. In all cases whatever, we must choose either one way or another, or suspend our choice. Suspense and deliberation, as Helvetius and others have justly remarked, are in this sense equally necessary with precipitation of judgment. The actual or final event is in both cases the necessary consequence of preceding causes, but that does not destroy freedom of choice in either case, if the event depends upon the exercise of choice, whether the time allowed for the mind to choose in, be longer or shorter. If by liberty be meant the uncertainty of the event, then liberty is a nonentity: but if it be supposed to relate to the concurrence of certain powers of an agent in the production of that event, then it is as true and as real a thing as the necessity to which it is thus opposed, and which consists in the exclusion of certain powers possessed by an agent from operating in the producing of any event. At the same time it must be granted, that the power of deliberation is the most valuable privilege of our rational nature, and the great enlargement of the discursive faculty of the will. Mr. Locke seems only to have erred in mistaking a difference of degree or extent for one of kind. The practical truth of the distinction is undeniable. His words are:—
‘The mind having in most cases, as is evident from experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one after another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them, examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty man has; and from the not using of it right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, and faults, which we run into in the conduct of our lives, and our endeavours after happiness: whilstwe precipitate the determination of our wills, and engage too soon before due examination. For during the suspension of any desire, before the will be determined to action, we have an opportunity to examine, view, and judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do; and when upon due examination we have judged, we have done our duty, all that we can or ought to do, in pursuit of our happiness; and it is not a fault, but a perfection of our nature, to desire, will, and act, according to the last result of a fair examination. This seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that which is (I think improperly) calledfree-will.’—Essay, vol. i. p. 264.
Moral liberty, it should seem then, all the liberty which a man has or which he wants, does not after all consist in a power of indifferency, or in a power of choosing, without regard to motives, but in a power of exciting his reason and of obeying it. There are two general positions advanced by the author in the course of this inquiry, to neither of which I can agree; namely, that action always proceeds from uneasiness, and that we are perfect judges of present good and evil. With respect to the first, it is true indeed that nothing can be an object of desire till we suffer uneasiness from the want of it, but it is just as true, that the want of any thing does not cause uneasiness in the mind, unless it is first an object of desire, or unless the prospect of it gives us pleasure. As to the second position, that we cannot be deceived in judging of our actual sensations, it would be true, if the sensation and the judgment formed upon it were the same, but they neither are nor can be. Let any person smell to a rose, and look at a beautiful prospect or hear a fine piece of music at the same instant, and try to determine which of them gives him most pleasure. If he has the least doubt or hesitation, the principle laid down by Mr. Locke cannot pass for an axiom. From not accurately distinguishing between sensation and judgment, some writers have been led to confound good and evil with pleasure and pain. Good or evil is properly that which gives the mind pleasure or pain on reflection, that is, which excites rational approbation or disapprobation. To consider these two things as either the same or in any regular proportion to each other, is I think to betray a very superficial acquaintance with human nature. Yet in defiance of the necessary distinction between the faculties by which we feel and by which we judge, these moralists have laid it down as a fundamental rule that all pleasures which are so in themselves are equally good and commendable; yet as these ideas relate solely to the reflex impression made by certain things on the understanding, to insist that we shall judge of them by an appeal to the senses, is unwisely to overturn the principle of the division of labour among our faculties, and to force one to do the officeof another. For this there seems no more reason than for attempting to hear with our fingers, to see a sound, or feel a colour.
‘Oh! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind;Or make him feel a shadow with his mind.’
‘Oh! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind;Or make him feel a shadow with his mind.’
‘Oh! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind;Or make him feel a shadow with his mind.’
‘Oh! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind;
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind.’
Yet the absurdity of the attempt arises only from the inaptitude of the organ to the object.
Among simple ideas Mr. Locke reckons that of power. It were to be wished that he had given it as simple a source as possible, viz. the feeling we have of it in our own minds, which he sometimes seems half inclined to do, instead of referring it to our observation of the successive changes which take place in matter. It is by this means alone, that is, by making it an original idea derived from within, like the sense of pleasure or pain, and quite distinct from the visible composition and decomposition of other objects, that we can avoid being driven into an absolute scepticism with regard to cause and effect. For Hume has, I think, demonstrated that in the mere mechanical series of sensible appearances, there is nothing to suggest this idea, or point out the indissoluble connection of one event with another, any more than in the flies of a summer. We get this idea solely from the exertion of muscular or voluntary power in ourselves: whoever has stretched forth his hand to an object, must have the idea of power. Under the idea of power I include all that relates to what we call force, energy, weakness, effort, ease, difficulty, impossibility, &c. Accordingly, I should conceive that no man of strong passions, or great muscular activity would ever give up the idea of power. Hume, who seems to have discarded it with the least compunction, was an easy, indolent, good-tempered man, who did not care to stir out of his arm-chair; a languid, Epicurean philosopher, of a reasonable corpulency, who was hurried away by no violent passions, or intense desires, but looked on most things with the same eye of listlessness and indifference. He was one of the subtlest and most metaphysical of all metaphysicians. And perhaps he was so for the reason here stated. The Scotch in general are not metaphysicians: they have in fact always a purpose, they aim at a particular point, they are determined upon something beforehand. This gives a hardness and rigidity to their understandings, and takes away that tremulous sensibility to every slight and wandering impression which is necessary to complete the fine balance of the mind, and enable us to follow all the infinite fluctuations of thought through their nicest distinctions.
To return to the doctrine of necessity. I shall refer to the authority of but one more writer, who has indeed exhausted the subject, and anticipated what few remarks I had to offer upon it: Imean Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise on the Will. This work, setting aside its Calvinistic tendency with which I have nothing to do, is one of the most closely reasoned, elaborate, acute, serious, and sensible among modern productions. No metaphysician can read it without feeling a wish to have been the author of it. The gravity of the matter and the earnestness of the manner are alike admirable. His reasoning is not of that kind, which consists in having a smart answer for every trite objection, but in attaining true and satisfactory solutions of things perceived in all their difficulty and in all their force, and in every variety of connexion. He evidently writes to satisfy his own mind and the minds of those, who like himself are intent upon the pursuit of truth for its own sake. There is not an evasion or ambiguity in his whole book, nor a wish to produce any but thorough conviction. He does not therefore lead his readers into a labyrinth of words, or entangle them among the forms of logic, or mount the airy heights of abstraction, but descends into the plain, and mingles with the business and feelings of mankind, and grapples with common sense, and subdues it to the force of true reason. All philosophy depends no less on deep and real feeling than on power of thought. I happen to have Edwards’s ‘Inquiry concerning Freewill,’ and Dr. Priestley’s ‘Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity,’ bound up in the same volume: and I confess that the difference in the manner of these two writers is rather striking. The plodding, persevering, scrupulous accuracy of the one, and the easy, cavalier, verbal fluency of the other, form a complete contrast. Dr. Priestley’s whole aim seems to be to evade the difficulties of his subject, Edwards’s to answer them. The one is employed according to Berkeley’s allegory, in flinging dust in the eyes of his adversaries, while the other is taking true pains in digging into the mine of knowledge. All Dr. Priestley’s arguments on this subject are mere hackneyed common-places. He had in reality no opinion of his own, and truth, I conceive, never takes very deep root in those minds on which it is merely engrafted. He uniformly adopted the vantage ground of every question, and borrowed those arguments which he found most easy to be wielded, and of most service in that kind of busy intellectual warfare to which he was habituated. He was an able controversialist, not a philosophical reasoner.
Dr. Priestley states in his ‘Illustrations’ and in his letter to Dr. Horsley, that the difference between physical and moral necessity is merely verbal. He says, speaking of the connexion between cause and effect in the mind, ‘Give me the thing and I will readily give up the name.’ It appears to me that Dr. Priestley was quite as much attached to the name as to the thing, and that the philosophicalprinciple of necessity, without its unpopular title, would have afforded him but little satisfaction. Now the obnoxiousness of the name, and in my opinion, almost all the difficulty and repugnance which the generality of men find in admitting the doctrine arises from the ambiguity lurking under the term necessity, which includes both kinds of necessity, moral and physical, and with which Dr. Priestley delights to probe the prejudices of his adversaries, thinking the differences of moral and physical necessity a mere question of words, and that provided there are any laws or any causes operating upon the mind, it is of no sort of consequence what those laws or causes are. It is the same inability to distinguish between one cause and another which creates the vulgar prejudice against necessity, and which is exposed in a very satisfactory manner by the author of the ‘Inquiry into the Will.’ He says, in a letter written expressly to vindicate himself from having confounded moral with physical necessity, ‘On the contrary, I have largely declared that the connexion between antecedent things and consequent ones which takes place with regard to the acts of men’s wills, which is called moral necessity, is called by the name ofnecessityimproperly; and that all such terms asmust,cannot,impossible,unable,irresistible,unavoidable,invincible, &c. when applied here, are not applied in their proper signification, and are either used nonsensically, and with perfect insignificance, or in a sense quite diverse from their original and proper meaning, and their use in common speech; and that such a necessity as attends the acts of men’s wills, is more properly calledcertaintythannecessity. I think it is evidently owing to a strong prejudice in persons’ minds, arising from an insensible habitual perversion and misapplication of such-like terms, that they are ready to think that to suppose a certain connexion of men’s volitions without any foregoing motives or inclinations, is truly and properly to suppose such a strong irrefragable chain of causes and effects as stands in the way of, and makes utterly vain, opposite desires and endeavours, like immovable and impenetrable mountains of brass; and impedes our liberty like walls of adamant, gates of brass, and bars of iron: whereas all such representations suggest ideas as far from the truth, as the East is from the West. I know it is in vain to endeavour to make some persons believe this, or at least fully and steadily to believe it: for if it be demonstrated to them, still the old prejudice remains, which has been long fixed by the use of the termsnecessary,must, &c. the association with these terms of certain ideas, inconsistent with liberty, is not broken, and the judgment is powerfully warped by it; as a thing that has been long bent and grown stiff, if it be straightened, will return to its former curvity again and again.’
The reasoning in the ‘Inquiry’ to which the author here refers, in justification of himself, is as follows:
‘Men in their first use of such phrases as these,must,cannot,unavoidable,irresistible, &c. use them to signify a necessity of constraint or restraining a natural necessity or impossibility, or some necessity that the will has nothing to do in. A thing is said to benecessary, when we cannot help it, let us do what we will. So any thing is said to beimpossibleto us, when we would do it, or would have it brought to pass and endeavour it, but all our desires and endeavours are in vain. And that is said to beirresistible, which overcomes all our opposition, resistance and endeavour to the contrary. And we are said to beunableto do a thing, when our utmost supposable desires and endeavours to do it are insufficient. All men find, and begin to find in early childhood, that there are innumerable things which cannot be done which they desire to do; and innumerable things, which they are averse to, that must be; they cannot avoid them, whether they choose them or no. It is to express this necessity which men so soon and so often find, and which so greatly affects them in innumerable cases, that such terms and phrases are first formed; and it is to signify such a necessity that they are first used, and that they are most constantly used in the common affairs of life; and not to signify any such metaphysical, speculative and abstract notion as that connexion [between cause and effect] in the nature and course of things, to signify which they who employ themselves in philosophical inquiries into the first origin and metaphysical relations and dependencies of things, have borrowed those terms, for want of others. But we grow up from our cradles in a use of such phrases entirely different from this, or from the one in which they are used in the controversy about liberty and necessity. And it being a dictate of the universal sense of mankind, evident to us as soon as we begin to think, that the necessity signified by these terms in the sense in which we first learn them, does excuse persons, and free them from all fault or blame, hence our idea of excusableness or faultlessness is tied to these phrases by a strong habit, which grows up with us;—or if we use the words as terms of art in another sense, yet unless we are exceeding circumspect and wary, we shall insensibly slide into the vulgar use of them, and so apply the words in a very inconsistent manner: this habitual connexion of ideas will deceive and confound us in our reasonings and discourses whenever we pretend to use the terms in that manner.’—Pages 20, 21, 290, &c.
‘It follows that when the aforesaid terms are used in cases wherein no opposition, or insufficient will or endeavour is or can be supposed, but the very nature of the supposed case (as that of willing or choosing)excludes any such opposition, will, or endeavour, these terms are then not used in their proper signification, but quite beside their use in common speech.’—Pages 21, 22.
The author has, I think, in these passages, laid open the source of most of the confusion on the subject in question. For this double meaning lurking under the word necessity has been the chief reason why persons, who were guided more by their own feelings and the customary associations of language than by formal definitions, have altogether rejected the doctrine; while persons of a more logical turn, who could not deny the truth of the abstract principle, have yet in their explanations of it, and inferences from it, fallen into the same vulgar error as their opponents. The partisans for necessity have given up their common sense, as they supposed, to their reason, while the advocates for liberty rejected a demonstrable truth from a dread of its consequences; and both have been the dupes of a word. I have been the more ready to appeal to this writer’s authority, because he is allowed on all hands to be one of the most strict, severe, and logical of all necessarians. What he has said on the subject of free-will, as consisting in perfect contingence, independent of all motive, or as implying an absolute beginning of action without any precedent determining cause might, one would imagine, have been sufficient, even if Hobbes’s reasonings had not, to banish that opinion out of the world. He has followed it through all its windings, and detected it in all its varying shades, with equal patience and sagacity. He sums up the absurdities of this notion of liberty, or of mere absolute self-will, in these words:
‘The following things are all essential to it, viz. that an action should be necessary, and not necessary; that it should be from a cause and no cause; that it should be the fruit of choice and design, and not the fruit of choice and design; that it should be the beginning of motion and exertion, and yet be consequent on previous exertion; that it should be before it is; that it should spring immediately out of indifference and equilibrium, and yet be the effect of preponderation; that it should be self-originated, also have its original from something else; that it is what the mind causes itself, of its own will, and can produce or prevent, according to its choice, or pleasure, and yet what the mind has no power to prevent, precluding all previous choice in the affair. So that an act of the will [determining itself by its own free-will], according to their metaphysical account of it, is something of which there is no idea, it is nothing but a confusion of the mind, excited by words without any distinct meaning. If some learned philosopher, who had been abroad, in giving an account of the curious observations he had made in his travels, shouldsay, “He had been in Tierra del Fuego, and there had seen an animal, which he calls by a certain name, that begat and brought forth itself, and yet had a sire and a dam distinct from itself; that it had an appetite and was hungry before it had a being; that his master, who led him, and governed him at his pleasure, was always governed by him, and driven by him where he pleased: that when he moved, he always took a step before the first step; that he went with his head first, and yet always went tail foremost; and this though he had neither head nor tail;” it would be no impudence at all to tell such a traveller, though a learned man, that he himself had no notion or idea of such an animal as he gave an account of, and never had, nor ever would have.’—Page 281, of theInquiry.
The author seems to have hit upon the source of this erroneous account of free-will, with his usual truth of feeling. He says, almost immediately after:—‘The thing which has led men into this inconsistent notion of action, when applied to volition, as though it were essential to this internal action that the agent should be self-determined in it, and that the will should be the cause of it, was probably this: that according to the sense of mankind, and the common use of language, it is so with respect to men’s external actions; which are what originally, and according to the vulgar use and most proper sense of the word, are calledactions. Men in these are self-directed, self-determined, and their wills are the cause of the motions of their bodies, and the external things that are done; so that unless men do them voluntarily, and of choice, and the action be determined by their antecedent volition, it is no action or doing of theirs. Hence some metaphysicians have been led unwarily, but exceeding absurdly, to suppose the same concerning volition itself,thatthat also must be determined by the will; which is to be determined by antecedent volition, as the motion of the body is; not considering the contradiction it implies.’—Ibid., page 286.
I shall proceed to state as briefly as I can my own notions of liberty and necessity, as far as they any way differ from the foregoing account.
First, then, I conceive that if by necessity be understood and only understood the connexion of cause and effect, or the constant dependence of one thing on another, in the human mind as well as in matter, that according to this interpretation all things are equally certain and necessary. On the other hand, if by liberty be meant any thing opposite to this connexion of cause and effect: that is, a positive beginning of any action or motion out of nothing, or out of a state of indifference, or from itself, I believe that there is no such thing as liberty in the mind any more than in matter. All things have their preceding determining causes, and nothing is, but whatmust be in the precise given circumstances. This has been demonstrated over and over again, and the contrary supposition reduced to a manifest absurdity in every possible way by Hobbes, Hume, Hartley, Edwards, Priestley, and others.
But, secondly, I conceive that the question does not stop here, because certain ideas have been annexed to these terms of liberty and necessity, both by the learned and by common men, which have nothing at all to do with the affirmation or denial of the simple connexion between cause and effect. What I shall therefore attempt will be to point out a few instances of the misapplication of the term to prove a necessity not included in the certainty of the event, and to disprove liberty in a sense in which it does not interfere with that certainty, or with philosophical necessity: that is, I shall attempt to show in what sense, in conformity with the general law to which all things are by their nature subject, man is an agent, a free agent, a moral and accountable agent; that is, deserving of reward and punishment, praise and blame, &c. Now by an agent I mean any thing that acts or has a power to operate, that is, to produce effects; by a free agent I mean one that is not hindered from acting; by a moral and accountable agent I mean one that acts from will, and is influenced by motives; by reward and punishment I mean what every one does; by praise and blame I mean our approbation or disapprobation of any agent that is conscious of our sentiments towards him, or that is capable of reflecting on his own conduct, and of being affected by what others think of it. If by an agent be meant the beginner of action, or one that produces an effect of itself, there can be no such thing; but if by an agent be meant one that contributes to an effect, there is such a thing as an agent; and the more any thing contributes to an effect and determines it to be this or that, the more it is an agent. If by freedom be meant a freedom from causes, or necessity in the abstract, there can be no freedom in this sense, but there may be and is a freedom from certain causes and from certain kinds and degrees of necessity; that is, from physical causes, or compulsion, and from absolute, unconditional necessity. If all things are equally necessary, that do not spring out of nothing, then indeed the distinction between liberty and necessity must be in all cases absurd. Again, by free-will I do not mean the power or liberty to act without motives, but with motives. The mind cannot act without an occasion or ground for acting, but this does not shew that it is no agent at all, or that it is not a free agent; that is, that its action is restrained or hindered by the action of anything else. The intellectual and voluntary powers are free, just as the corporeal are, namely, when they are free to produce certain effects, which, if excited, they can produce, asthe body is free when it can move in consequence of the mind’s direction; it is no longer free when though the same reason exists for its moving, it is hindered by something else from obeying the impulse. In short, liberty is this: the power in any agent in given circumstances to operate in a certain manner, if left to itself; or perhaps more unequivocally, opportunity given to any agent to exert certain powers to produce an effect, when nothing but those powers and the absence of impediments is wanting to produce it. To be free is to possess all the requisites for acting in one’s-self, and in the circumstances, and not to be counteracted. Again if moral good and evil are supposed to be something self-created, then they are merely fictions of the mind; but if we suppose an agent to be entitled to praise or blame, reward or punishment, not because he is a self-willed, but a voluntary agent, that is to say, a being possessing certain powers and habitually and with determination exerting them to certain purposes, then there will be a foundation for this distinction in nature. To the idea of moral responsibility, it is not necessary that the agent should be the sole or absolutely first cause of the evil, for example, but that he should be one real, determining cause of it, and while he remains what he is, the same effects will follow. An agent is the author of any evil, when without him, that is, without something peculiar and essential to his disposition and character, it would not exist.
1. Every thing is an agent that is any way necessary or conducing to an effect. The doctrine of second causes does not destroy agency. It no more proves that those causes do not act because something has acted before them, than that they do not exist, because something has existed before them. The theological writers on this side of the question affirm, I think improperly, that God or the first cause is the sole agent in the universe, to which all second causes are to be referred as instruments, having no real efficacy of their own. If so, all events are produced immediately by the divine agency, that is, all second causes are parts of the divine essence, and in all that we see or hear or feel, we must conceive of something far more deeply interfused, a spirit and a motion that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and breathes through all things. This doctrine is that of Spinoza: but upon this supposition second causes, as the immediate operation of the Deity are and must be real and efficient. On the other hand, if to exclude this system of pantheism, we consider the things and appearances about us as merely natural, still what are called second causes must be real and efficient causes, or they could not produce their effects. If nothing can operate but the first cause, then whatever produces effects is the Deity: but if this conclusion be thought objectionable, then we must allow other causes of events to bereally and truly such in themselves: for from that which is no cause, which has no power, any more than nothing, nothing can follow. All second causes, that is, all things that exist are, therefore, either parts of the Deity or parts of nature, and in neither case can they be absolutely insignificant, worthless, null, and of no account. Dr. Priestley is for having men refer all the good in the universe to God as the author of it, and all the evil that takes place to man or to second causes. I cannot think that this is sound philosophy nor practical wisdom. The necessarians have evidently borrowed their notions of agency and second causes from the advocates for liberty: for taking up the same unfounded assumption of the libertarians, that action is the absolute beginning of motion, and that any thing short of this is no action at all, and finding that the will was not a cause in the absurd sense supposed by their adversaries, they have concluded that it was no cause at all; not considering whether a cause might not be more properly defined that which produces an effect in consistency with other things than that which produces it independently of them. Action then in any sense of the word is the same as co-operation. It may be asked, whether this account does not destroy the distinction between active and passive. I answer that it does, if by active be meant unconnected action, and by passive connected action; but not else. That is, if by action be understood the positive determinate tendency or the additional impulse to the production of any effect, and by passiveness an indifference in any agent to this or that motion, except as it is acted upon by, and transmits the efficacy of other causes, this distinction will remain as broad and palpable as ever. Any thing is so far active as it modifies and re-acts upon the original impulse; it is passive in as far as it neither adds to, nor takes from that original impulse, but merely has a power of receiving and continuing it. This I take to be the practical and philosophical meaning of the terms. This distinction therefore, applies equally to matter and mind. The explosion of gunpowder cannot be attributed entirely or principally to the spark which ignites it, because the effect is increased a thousand-fold by the inherent qualities of the gunpowder. The motion communicated by one body to another in void space is considered as the mere passive result of the former, because the effect in the second agent is simply the continuation of what it was in the first. So it is in the mind. Motives do not act upon it simply or absolutely; but according to the dictates of the understanding or the bias of the will. At one time we yield to any idle inclination that happens to prevail, and at others resist to the utmost the strongest motives. That is, the mind is itself an agent, one chief determining cause of our volitions. It is on the view taken by the mind of motives, on ourdisposition to attend to or neglect them, to compare and weigh them, that their effect depends. But the necessarians have always delighted to illustrate the operations of the mind in volition by referring to the impulse communicated by one billiard-ball to another, or to different weights in a pair of scales. Both which illustrations are as little applicable as possible, because in neither of them is there supposed to be the least activity of action; that is, the least capacity to resist or increase or alter the impressed force in the thing acted upon. That is, the mind in these similes is requisite as a merely passive agent, by which I mean a thing perfectly indifferent and nugatory, a mere cypher without any character of its own, that is neither good nor bad, neither deserving of praise nor blame; a cameleon, colourless kind of thing, the sport of external impulses and accidental circumstances, or of a necessity in which it has itself no share. Thus the responsibility of the mind has been taken from it, and transferred to outward circumstances, and all characters in themselves rendered alike indifferent. This is the necessary consequence of abstracting the influence of motives from the mind on which and by which they act. I prefer exceedingly to the modern instances of a couple of billiard-balls, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysophus, the stoic in Cicero, who says, ‘Ille igitur qui protrusit cylindrum dedit ei principium motionis, volubilitatem autem non dedit: sic visum objectum imprimet quidem et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem, sed assensio erit in potestate nostrâ.’ That is, suppose I push against a heavy body; if it be square it will not move: if it be cylindrical it will. What the difference of form is to the stone, the difference of disposition is to the mind. In fact, the necessarians, to maintain this doctrine of the nullity of second causes, have been forced to consider every thing as a succession of simple impulses passing from hand to hand: so that there being no fixed point, no resting-place for the imagination, we are perpetually obliged to shift the cause from one object to another: every thing has to be accounted for, and referred back to something else, and in this ceaseless whirl of fleeting causes all ideas of power or agency seem to slide from under us. Lest the mind should prove refractory, to the laws ascribed to it, they thought it most prudent to deprive it of all activity and power of resistance. They were very absurdly afraid that without this their whole scheme might be overturned, as if though the mind were freed from being the servile drudge of external impulses, it would not still follow the bent of its own nature. The above distinction will, I conceive, set the mind free from one of the shackles imposed on it by the necessarians, namely, that imbecility, helplessness, and indifference, which they have superadded to the regular connexion of cause and effect, though it makesno essential part of it. The mind, according to the advocates for free-will, is a perfectly detached, unconnected, independent cause: according to the necessarians, it is no cause at all: neither branch of the antithesis is true.
2. According to the definition of liberty above given, freedom, that is free agency, is applicable to mind as well as to matter. Free-will does not, because will does not, belong to it. By a free agent, I understand, with Hobbes, one that is not hindered from acting according to his natural or determinate bias. The body is free when it can obey the impulse of the mind; so also a billiard-ball might be said to be free while it is not fixed to the table, or hindered from being impelled by the stroke of the mace. In the same sense, the water, as Mr. Hobbes observes, is said to descend freely along the channel of the river, while no obstacle intercepts its progress. But though necessarians allow liberty to the body, and to inanimate things, they deny that it is in any sense applicable to the mind or will.