Chapter I: Preliminary (5)

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 determined
_necessarily_, 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 a _motive_—as
distinguished from a _motor_—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 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 this
_would_ changes 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 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 themselves _inter se_: they need and
meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The
decision will not be _unmotived_, 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 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.