Chapter V: The Fairy Halls of Science (2)

There would, of course, never have been any controversy as to this had those who took the negative been honest enough to accept a rational definition of will and of freedom. Nobody ever claimed that the will is free in all respects. Nobody supposes that a man set upon by a mob can go his way as if nothing had interfered with him. He may be dragged to the stake or the scaffold. Physically, there are circumstances in which his movements are most certainly exteriorly determined. The most that he can do is to refuse his consent to those motions he is forced to perform, so that the resulting conduct is none of his.

But psychologists have assured us that the giving or withholding of this consent is automatic; that physical forces are still at work; that a man has a mob inside of his head even when there is no mob without; and that what he does seemingly of his own volition is but the net result of the pullings and haulings of this interior horde of instincts, desires and stimulators. Moreover, these forces themselves came either from parents or environment, and the man himself is but their sum--he is his own inner mob. Nor can it be denied that the law of the Conservation of Energy gave psychologists the right of the argument. Since Newton, only the very wisest of men have had any intellectual excuse for believing themselves either real or free.

“Analysis, in tracing down the sources of [physical action],” says Lillie, “seems always to restate determinism; it shows the will to be motivated; motives have their natural origins; actions not consciously motivated are either habitual and referable to past motivation, or are instinctive and determined by heredity. In either case we seem to have a mechanistic determination.”

Having thus fairly stated the enemy’s argument, he goes further and admits that “although voluntary action affects mechanical change and seems free, the ‘energy balance sheet’ of a man shows no conflict with the law of conservation, indicating that there is no creation of energy within the organism.... Classical physics thus seems definitely incompatible with the idea of freedom. Accordingly, scientific men--and somewhat curiously biologists in larger proportion than physicists--have commonly regarded freedom as a delusion. In so doing they have created more difficulties than they have resolved; certainly the inner conviction of freedom has not been abolished in the minds of most thinking men.”

There are one or two points to be noted here. “Somewhat curiously, biologists in larger proportion than physicists” have been willing to abandon the free-will hypothesis. He doubtless means comparatively recent biologists, men who have taken their foundation physics from the books regarded as authoritative in their school days. Or perhaps there is another reason. Following the Idol of the Tribe, they look below them for their models, and seem to feel obliged to make their subjects as much like the machinist’s subjects as possible. And when they deal with man they are shut off from the corrective influences of free experiment. Mistakes in speculative biology are not at once apparent. They are not immediately applied, and returns are slow in coming in. But I am willing that the enemy should take what comfort he can from the biologists. He may say, if he likes, that biologists are the ones who call life mechanical because biologists are the ones who work closest to life. Lillie happens to be a biologist himself--a biologist of details, not of generalities.

As to the “energy balance sheet” of the individual, I think he leans over backward in his endeavor to be fair. Considering the exceedingly minute quantities of energy involved, it cannot rightly be claimed that the energy balance sheet even of a wayside daisy has ever been experimentally worked out with an accuracy fit to be called conclusive. Only recently have we even begun to measure quantities of this order of magnitude. Only recently did we know how very little energy we needed at our disposal in order to rid our inner conduct of external compulsion--and it is inner conduct alone with which we are here concerned. We do not ask to be able to shake a physical leg at will, but merely to be capable of shifting our attention to legs if and when we chose, or to entertain the desire to shake.

But once more let us grant the point to the adversary. Let him prove the balance sheet of the individual if he can--it will avail him nothing. Lillie, in seeming to leave intact the Law of Conservation, is but planning a flank attack. For a curious reason soon to appear, the law may rule and yet leave us free. It will then cease to be of moral importance. Our biologist goes on: “We must regard it not as a coincidence but as highly significant that the only region where physical science gives evidence of ... externally uncontrolled, or individual, action, is in the field of ultra-microscopic phenomena.”

Nevertheless, there is a coincidence here. The field where Lillie has noted externally uncontrolled individual action is his own field. As a worker in a marine biological laboratory, the minutest forms of life are objects of his daily study.

If I wanted to settle the question by authority and a show of erudition, I could now quote from Jordan’s “The Philosophical Foundations of the Quantum Theory.”[104] While if it depends merely upon famous names I could cite Einstein and Smoluchowski, who have found that the second law of thermo-dynamics (according to which heat is said to pass from higher to lower temperatures in direct proportion to the energy which is extracted from it--another way of expressing our old friend, Conservation) does not hold true when the time and space involved are sufficiently small. And to this Svedberg, in his “Colloid Chemistry,” agrees by saying that in microscopic systems it is obvious that “fluctuations of entropy” (variations in the amount of a given energy which is found to be “available”) undoubtedly occur.

But there is no need to follow such a thorny path as this. Lillie sufficiently sums up the situation by declaring that “the universality of the rule of physical determination” as regards very minute, or “quantum” phenomena, is now subject to question; and that “in the highest manifestations of life, prediction [that is, the discovery of a mechanical law governing conduct] is not possible at all.” And he adds: “It follows that the regularity of macroscopic [or large] phenomena, in which determinism is for all practical purposes complete and trustworthy, is in reality a _statistical regularity_.”

What can he possibly mean?

Here is in reality a flash of light in darkness, the gist of the whole matter, the way out, the explanation of a thousand riddles. And he must put it in such language as this!

For a statistical regularity is of course nothing but the regularity to be observed in averages. Individuals vary in a way which groups do not. No one is compelled to commit suicide this year. If I do such a thing it will be because I am individually a fool. And nobody knows whether my good sense is going to last another twelvemonth or not. Yet every actuary in every life-insurance company’s office in the world knows how many people are going to commit suicide this year, and next year, and the year after; and the quota which each civilized country is going to furnish. Their knowledge may not be absolutely accurate as to the last digit. There is a very slight margin for mistake. But they are almost as certain of the figures as they are of the figures for last year, or the year before. Mass action is sufficiently regular to make calculations based upon a comparison of its future with its past exceedingly profitable. Groups, and groups alone, obey the Law of Conservation. It was group action observed among atoms which gave rise to the formulation of that law. Individuals behave capriciously, obeying the laws of their unique natures, laws known only to God.

But it will be objected: is not man a mass of atoms, or a mass of whatever ultimate particles science finally arrives at? And the answer is an emphatic _no_. His body is such a mass, but it is so formed as to be controlled, in so far as its movements are voluntary, by an individual self whose inner essence is single. The only way to make group action out of one man’s conduct is to observe him over a long period of time. His average may be guessed at. But nobody can say how he will act in a new and unusual circumstance.

5. CHANCE

Pious people have always been prone to declare that there is no such thing as chance. They have been afraid that belief in chance implied a disbelief in the omnipotence of God. Never were pious people more mistaken--or perhaps I should say misinformed. The doctrine of probabilities is one of those things belonging to mathematics which the pundits have decided it were better for us common people not to understand. So they have carefully refrained from stating it in interesting, or even human, language, pretending that we were barred from comprehension by the inadequacy of our intelligence and education.

Nevertheless we all inhabit a world upon the phenomena of which the doctrine of probabilities is founded. We are compelled to live every day surrounded by events “obeying” the Law of the Greatest Probability. And those of us who have made any success in life have become pretty good mathematicians, though we may know no mathematical symbols beyond the signs of addition, subtraction and division.

It is of course misleading to say that events _obey_ the law of the greatest probability. Events do not obey any of the laws which science has formulated. On the contrary, the laws were, in so far as they are laws and not mere errors, formulated in obedience to the events. But to say that there is no such thing as chance is to say that there is no such thing as ignorance, which to my mind is hardly a pious idea. For chance, rightly understood, is but the measure of our ignorance. Nothing more.

Given total ignorance, the chance of guessing right is too remote to be calculable and can be expressed only by the meaningless formula, “nothing to infinity.” Given total knowledge, certainty leaves no room for probability. In all other circumstances, chance is the balance in which we weigh what we know against what we do not know. Gambling is called a vice because nobody ever uses the word except to describe some form of chance-taking which he considers vicious--the vice usually consisting in a foolish attempt to get something for nothing. It is considered particularly immoral to lose. But in a broad sense, everyone gambles who lives. I hope I will be pardoned, then, if I take my illustrations from actual games.

If we know that a penny is a disk of equally weighted sides and is to be tossed in the air by an unknown amount of force which will cause it to turn over an unknown number of times, the chance of its falling head up is the same as that of its falling head down. We say the odds are even. If we do not know what a penny is, we cannot reckon the odds. If we know exactly what a penny is, know its present position in relation to the table-top, and know that it is going to turn over three times, say, there are no odds to calculate. Ignorance has been supplanted by knowledge.

But why do we say that an even-sided disk, thrown at hap-hazard, is as likely to fall head up as it is to fall tail up? Because observation in the past has taught us that such is the case. We may reason subsequently about momentum, gravity, and the like, but observation lies at the bottom of our knowledge. Very well. The sun rose this morning. I know that. What is the chance of its rising tomorrow morning?

If I know nothing but what I have stated, the chance, from my point of view, is as one to one. The odds are even, nothing more. It is just as likely not to rise as it is to rise. From the standpoint of an Omnipotent God, this is not the case. He knows whether it is going to rise or not. To God there is indeed no chance.

But to mankind at large? Surely the chances of the sun rising tomorrow are better than even? To be sure they are. For mankind at large knows not only that the sun rose yesterday morning, but the morning before that, and on ever so many other mornings. How many? Upon the answer to this question rests the actual chance of its rising again, for the answer shows the amount of our knowledge. The more knowledge, the more certain the chance.

Let us say we know that the sun has risen for a billion mornings. Tomorrow, if there be a tomorrow, will mark a billion and one. Then there are a billion and one events, or sunrises, under consideration, and only one of them is still in doubt. The chances of the sun’s rising tomorrow are therefore a billion to one. If we know it has already risen a trillion times, they are a trillion to one. As knowledge increases, certainty approaches.

I have heard it objected that, according to this theory, the chance of a one-year-old child to live another year must be only even, while a man of 99 has 99 chances in a hundred of rounding out his century. This would indeed be true if we knew nothing about either babes or nonogenarians but their years. But we have a great deal of other information--statistics--bills of health. We must put all of our knowledge into the calculation.

Almost everybody is now willing to admit this method of reckoning probability when it is applied to dawns or to life insurance. It seems quite natural to say that we know the sun will rise again because, so far as we know, it always has risen; or to say that a baby has a longer prospect of life than has a very old man because we have observed that babies generally live, while very old men generally die. But when we apply the same method to the calculations of certain other things--the behavior of our penny, for instance--we shall meet, strangely enough, with a lot of heretics. If a penny has fallen heads for twenty times in succession, there are those who will say that the chances of heads coming on the next throw are much worse than one to one. “It is time for a change,” they will contend. And nothing can keep them, if sportingly inclined, from wagering their money on tails. But a mathematician will coldly bet on heads. _He knows that there is something the matter with that penny!_

So come what are known as “runs of luck,”--a subject apparently remote from that of free will, but not so remote as it seems. Runs of luck are the result of unknown influences; for if the influences are known we do not say “luck,” we use a harsher term. The oftener a thing has happened before, the more likely it is to happen again. Some large force must be at work, or there would not have been the run. This is such an important rule that anyone who doubts it would do well to convince himself of its validity. He will in that way not only improve his mind, he will save money be he never so little of a “gambler” in the vicious sense of the term. Losers are always playing the stock-market and the world for “reactions” that “must come.” Winners always “go with the trend.” They are vicious only when their prizes are evil.

“But what,” some will say, “of the change of luck which wipes out the winnings? What of those larger cycles which bring the smaller cycles to an end?” Just this. We know nothing of the larger cycles until we, or somebody whose word we can trust, has begun to experience them. Therefore our ignorance is complete in most cases, and we have no chance against the larger cycles or rhythms at all--which is why sensible people usually keep out of the stock-market. Doubtless there is some larger cycle in cosmic events which will some day put out the sun. But unless we have somehow been able to put our finger already upon its pulse, we must ignore it in our calculations. We cannot bring it to book. When any one cycle has kept up a faithful performance as long as the sun has kept on rising, it must be a rather large cycle and is pretty safe to depend on for our remaining days.

But I did not enter into this digression merely to give a few tips on gambling, or the advice not to gamble at all when gambling can be avoided. The calculation of probabilities is of vast utility in matters infinitely more important than markets or games. With it mathematicians have put mere telescopists to shame. Give a mathematician the past course of a planet, and he will calculate its future course without taking the trouble to find out a thing about the nature of planets. This is no chimera. It has been done. The vagaries of the motions of a heavenly body fall into series; into cycles; into cycles within cycles. Accuracy in prediction is determined by accuracy and amount of past observations, and by nothing else.

But what has this to do with the human will? Everything. The so-called “laws” of science, including the Law of Conservation, are the laws of chance, nothing more. They are founded upon the behavior of great masses of particles, or the behavior of one or a few particles (more accurately, _particulars_) over long periods of time. As Lillie phrases it, the regularity of nature is a “statistical regularity,” like the regularity of the statistics of suicide. It does not interfere with the freedom of the individual, of the particular. Here is the answer to Freud’s absurd statement that the attempt to reconcile human free will with divine omnipotence is always a failure. The actuary calculates the number of suicides that are going to take place--does he thereby compel you to kill yourself?

There is, of course, this difference between an actuary and Omniscience. The actuary only knows the total result. Omniscience must know the individuals who will help to make up that result. Omniscience knows just what we are, individually. Omniscience knows every Psyche, and knows what it will chose. I may know that a pair of dice are so loaded that they will always come up sixes. Is it my knowledge which compels them so to fall?

But some will say that if our human dice are loaded, it must have been God who loaded them, and that beneath that load free will disappears.

It might have been that way, I will admit. Omniscience, being also Omnipotence, might have loaded the dice, beyond question. Omnipotence was under no compulsion to grant free will to anything. But by the same reasoning, Omnipotence was free to withhold Its hand, and to let us determine to a certain extent our actions for ourselves. Even the finite mind has been able to see how this can be without interfering at all with that regular march of events which characterizes a cosmos in distinction from a chaos. A cosmos of free particulars will still have a “statistical regularity.”

As a matter of fact, this system of delegated authority, of limited grants of real power, seems to run through all nature. The Commander-in-Chief leaves certain details to his generals; the generals leave certain details to their captains, the captains to their lieutenants. The private soldier has his particular duty to perform. And each one is held responsible for the performance of his own duty within his own limited sphere of action--a duty which he is free to perform or to leave undone. Whenever an individual is rewarded or punished for something which he was not free to do or not to do, our natures recoil from what we term an “injustice.” With no free will at all, any reward or punishment would be unjust. And it is to this sort of a world our materialistic psychologists and philosophers have been trying to introduce us. No wonder they shied away from the conception of consciousness. Sentience without freedom seems unjust. Even with limited freedom, it seems unjust. Man’s sense of justice, therefore, has compelled him to regard this life as a fragment; to say that only willfully endured or provoked pains and privations are deserved, to believe in another life beyond the grave without waiting for further proof of it. Thus Dante was constrained to write even over the gates of Hell, “_Giustizia mosse ’l mio Alto Fattore_.”[105]

If we return now to the doctrine of probabilities and to Lillie we shall find him nodding, for he says: “It already seems clear that many of the physical laws with which we are familiar in the realm of microscopic phenomena cease to apply on the scale where events are determined by the ‘chance’ fluctuations of molecular movement.”

Chance here is clearly not the proper word. It contradicts his whole argument. Obviously he is using it in a very loose sense--much as behaviorists use it when they say that the first synapse between dendrite and axone in the brain is chance-determined. As a mathematician he must know that these isolated phenomena of the exceedingly minute are precisely those to which the law of probabilities cannot be applied. As much cannot be said of the behaviorists. Their attaching of the word “chance” to the word “synapse” is due to no slip of the pen, but rather to some regrettable individual action behind the synapse itself.

“Ultra-microscopic phenomena,” Lillie goes on, in a way which quite confirms the foregoing explanation of his lapse, “thus give evidence ... of control by individual action rather than by statistical or mass action. The laws relating to such [microscopic] action ... assuming such laws to exist ... are as yet imperfectly known. But they are certainly entirely different from physical laws.”

This may seem remarkable, but after all it is only what we should have expected. In the ultra-microscopic world we are approaching individual action and leaving mass action, the average action of many individuals, behind. The illusion of bondage begins to disappear.

What makes this so important is the fact that we are so built that the minutest imaginable interior events may determine our largest actions. I lift a pound weight, but it was the movement of the all but impalpable particles of the brain which decided what the movement was to be. A touch upon the trigger fires the gun. And the force at the disposal of will needs to be only enough to move these tiny particles in the vital field. The trigger-touch, the precipitating circumstance, is traceable, says Lillie, “to ultra-microscopic events in the nerve cells.” And it is precisely this fact, with the opportunity it offers for central control, which makes a man’s behavior, even as to his body, something other than the result of a struggle of blind forces. Man is not a mass of particles like a dumb-bell.

There is, Lillie contends (and he is supported by Maxwell and Boltzman), “a smoothing off, or obliteration of detail” in “effects controlled by mass action.” So we say that we lose ourselves in a crowd. “Mass action” represents the “sum of numerous fluctuating minutiæ.” What we see is like a composite picture, with individual traits more or less obliterated. Excess in one unit is off-set by deficiency in another, so to our sight the individual is obscured. “The relation between a smoothed curve and the distribution of the points showing the individual data is a relation of a similar kind,” he adds for the mathematically minded. And then he throws an almost literal bombshell into the determinist camp, with these words:

“Every now and then an unexplained catastrophe occurs in stores of high explosives. We know from observation ... as well as from theoretical considerations of probability, that at infrequent intervals an internal molecular movement of unusual amplitude occurs. Such a movement may exceed the critical minimum below which no chemical reaction results,”--and so blow up the whole mass.

But what we are here interested in is that unexplained molecular movement of unusual amplitude. It is almost like coming upon the creative spark itself, and--as is frequently the case with creative sparks--the immediate result is destructive to existing conditions.

Not that I think that here is actually the naked finger of God. I am no Monist. So far as human experience, at least, is concerned, I believe that however far we pursue matter, either into its minute or its starry depths, it remains matter; and that spirit is separate and apart from it. The ultimate knot cannot be untied. The seamless veil has been drawn too tightly across the face of Deity for it ever to be penetrated by physical science.

Call matter but force, if you will. Admit that even material force is of a spiritual nature, that its materiality consists in what we call its material effects. Nevertheless there is a gulf between those locked forces and spirit properly so-called. Saying that everything is God is only an indirect way of saying that there is no God--no God but what is locked up.

If all be matter, how can we, who too must then be matter, manage to contemplate the universe? We must conclude with Dr. Watson that we do not contemplate it. The same thing cannot at once be both subject and object. If all be spirit, then what separates us from the Great Spirit? Why is not our knowledge and comprehension, our power and our duration of days infinite and commensurate with ourselves here and now? For in the case supposed, we would ourselves be God. There would be nothing to come between.

Spinoza, who claimed that all is God, contradicted himself by calling his philosophy a philosophy, a search for truth. Were his theory true, we should not have to search. We would be already one with the All. Nor could any of the diverse phenomena of creation exist. There could be no separation between part and part, even in our sense perceptions. With nothing but spirit, out of what could those shadows, those lapses, those ignorances between this and that be made? Of nothing? But nothing is nothing. It is not even empty space, nor darkness, nor a shadow. Even the Vedantic philosophers had the wit to see that there must be a gulf between Brahma on the one hand and Vishnu and Siva on the other. They had no explanation to offer. Modern would-be Brahmins have assumed that there is no inexplicable. Instead of rising to the Gospels, they have fallen below the Vedas.

Lillie seems not to have fallen into this error, for he says that “microscopic events” are determined by “sub-microscopic events”; that “behind or internal to the sub-microscopic events, we must assume a series of ultra-microscopic events reaching back by convergence into the field where the known types of physical determination are replaced by another type of determination, the special conditions of which we do not know.” But as the action of the brain-cell determines the motion of the arm, so the action of something yet more minute determines the action of the cell, and so on until we come to the ultimate physical basis of the series. In this field of the physically ultimate, events are self-determined. They occur through no compulsion from without.

“If by free we mean externally uncontrolled, it would appear that the ultimate local centers or units of action should be independent of one another, i. e., a radical discontinuity should exist at the base of physical reality. Something of the kind seems to be indicated by quantum phenomena,”--phenomena of an ultra-minute variety. Men have often spoken of the eternal loneliness of the soul. Here we see that in this very loneliness lies its freedom. If it chooses to surrender this, for good or for evil, its surrender is still a choice.

And in conclusion, Lillie most rightly adds that one may “hesitate to call [this ultimate physical field]” the “metaphysical field,” or the field beyond matter. Our author makes no attempt to taper his matter off into spirit merely by subdividing it. And he goes on:

“If would seem, however, that there must be some final support or substratum of the physical to which only the term metaphysical can be applied.” Which I take to mean that he believes in a substratum which is not physical. And having thus shown that back of matter experimental science feels that there is something else, and that we in our inner selves are quite free from external control, whatever compulsion may be put upon the actual motions of our bodies by things beyond our power, he rounds out his argument by saying:

“There is also the general philosophical position that the universe, considered in its totality, must be the expression of free action, since an all-inclusive whole cannot be determined externally, i. e., by conditions outside of itself,”--there being nothing outside of itself. In other words, not only are we free, but God is omnipotent; and the two facts, instead of being contradictory, are found to be but the different ends of the same chain of reasoning. Freud’s dictum proves to be not quite so final as it seemed. Lillie has torn it to bits in a single article.

And had we not gone to Lillie we might have gone to Cassier, LeBon, Claude Bernard, Lucien Poincaré, or to any of a multitude of clear-headed scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. They may not give us all we seek, but they at least give us this. Let behaviorists and psychoanalysts say what they will, reason has not yet vanished from the world. Neither has unreason, for that matter--as the next chapter will show.

FOOTNOTES:

[98] “The Descent of Man,” p. 780.

[99] “The _Novum Organum_,” i. 63.

[100] _Op. cit._, i. 45.

[101] _Vide Le Recueil des travaux des Pays Bas_, No. 44, pp. 281 to 304, for the year 1925.

[102] _Le Recueil des travaux des Pays Bas_, No. 44, pp. 281 to 304, 1925.

[103] In the Paris _Matin_, September 4, 1927.

[104] _Nature_, vol. 119, 1927, p. 566.

[105] “Justice moved my High Maker,” Dante’s “_Inferno_,” canto III, line 4.