Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

ness. He alleges that its truth is obvious to all intelligent persons who are not puzzle-headed (p. 277). Also that it is immediately and "clamorously" testified by consciousness, along with the "Ego" itself, which makes the anti-impulsive effort (pp. 292, 293). The "Ego," and its making antiimpulsive effort, and the character of that effort as "anti-impulsive," are in Dr. Ward's eyes three facts in one, given immediately and indivisibly in consciousness; just as in old times the sight of the sunrise was thought to testify immediately to the fact that the sun moved and not the earth. Now I shall not repeat my argument on these points. I shall content myself with turning the tables on Dr. Ward, with respect to that contradiction with which he endeavours to saddle me.

Let it be granted argumenti gratia that I have an immediate consciousness that I exist, that I exert anti-impulsive effort, that the effort is antiimpulsive. Now I say, if I have such a power, surely it lies in my nature to have it. How can I have a power of resisting impulse without that power belonging to me, founded either in my nature alone or in my nature under its actual circumstances? Yet Dr. Ward expressly maintains that the power of anti-impulsive effort is independent of my nature (p. 270), and independent of my mental constitution as well as external circumstances (p. 299). I quote these passages for the sake of definiteness; but that this is his position is clear from every line of the article. Dr. Ward maintains that we have a power which is independent of our nature. What can he mean? What is an 66 Ego " which is independent of its own nature?

But the contradiction just signalised is not merely to be drawn by construction from Dr. Ward's supposed intuition of the Ego. It is apparent from his own statement of the case against determinism, in which (p. 281) he himself does what he charges me with doing, namely, identifies the act to which the agent is disposed by the entire circumstances external and internal, at the moment of choice, with the act which is in accordance with his "spontaneous impulse". He then alleges that the agent sometimes performs a different act from this; and that thereby determinism is disproved. "If, then, I act at any moment otherwise than according to such impulse-I act in some way different from that to which my entire circumstances of the moment dispose me" (p. 281). I therefore retort upon Dr. Ward the very words which he seeks to apply to me: If you mean anything, it must be, (1) that my whole assemblage of existent circumstances (external and internal), by their combined influence, dispose me to one stable, definite course; and (2) that at the same moment they do not, by their combined influence, dispose me to that course, but to some other. contradiction in terms" (p. 282).

[ocr errors]

A

I am disposed to agree heartily with Dr. Ward when he says, at the beginning of this same paragraph (p. 282), “It is a contradiction in terms to say that my entire circumstances of the moment can possibly dispose me to anti-impulsive effort." For the entire circumstances of the moment include the agent himself and all his powers. If they cannot dispose to "antiimpulsive effort," then "anti-impulsive effort" is a vain imagination, which is just my opinion.

But still further, the "anti-impulsive effort," according to Dr. Ward, is induced by reasons or motives of three distinct kinds, (1) virtue or duty to God, (2) permanent self-interest in this world, (3) permanent self-interest in another world (pp. 285, 287). Now it is only as part either of the agent's nature, or of his internal or external circumstances, that these or any other reasons can induce or justify his action, or stand in any relation to it. Whatever may be meant by anti-impulsive effort, then, it is clear that it cannot be independent of the agent's nature and circumstances, of what is otherwise described as his entire circumstances external and internal.

80.

as

But the character of the anti-impulsive effort is a point on which Dr. Ward specially charges me with having entirely failed to apprehend his meaning. He says, "On many various occasions-such is our contentionit is matter of direct and unmistakable observation, that this or that act is an act of anti-impulsive and not of congenial effort. He [Mr. Hodgson] argues, as though we accounted this quality of the act to be a mere matter of inference; and he contends that our inference is not conclusively established" (p. 285). Nothing can be a greater misconception than this charge of misconception on me. I really argue, not as Dr. Ward represents, but as though he accounted it matter of experience and refused to account it matter of inference; and then proceed to argue that he is wrong in doing These are my words: "Dr. Ward claims to have an immediate knowledge of the agent, or soul, per se, in cases of conscious anti-impulsive effort, and claims it as an essential part of the facts of which anti-impulsive effort consists. But the existence of this knowledge requires proof, &c." (MIND XVIII., pp. 232-3). And referring to this afterwards, Dr. Ward's reply must be, as shown above, that we have an immediate intuition of the soul per se, in the very moment of conflict. And to this I now make the further reply, &c." (ibid., p. 240). How then can Dr. Ward say, that I argue though we accounted" this quality of the act a mere matter of inference? Dr. Ward's article offers many other tempting openings for reply, but I confine myself to the strictly necessary. One more objection only I will advert to, an incidental one, quoted by him from a critic in the Spectator, à propos of his instance of the Christian military officer. "How in the world," says the critic, "can a desire derive strength from its fixity? We can barely imagine a desire deriving fixity from its strength, but certainly not strength from its fixity. Let a desire be ever so permanent, yet if it be but faint it will be overcome by a stronger desire." The officer in Dr. Ward's instance had "a firm resolve, by God's grace, to comport himself Christianly". And I argued that this "resolve" involved a desire (say to live according to the Divine law) which derived its strength from its fixity in his mind. I think it is not difficult to see how it would help to combat the vivid desire of revenge. It would poison its sweetness by constantly suggesting its incompatibility with peace of mind, so that, as often as the idea of revenge occurred, there would arise amari aliquid with it. And it would also call up by association a host of habitual ideas, all antagonistic to the indulgence. It is true that we must consider the relative strength of desires as they are at given moments, and in the present case at any moment when the desire of revenge may be supposed to rise into consciousness in conflict with the resolve to obey the Christian law. But it is not requisite to suppose the resolve victorious at all such moments; it is enough for Dr. Ward's purpose if it is victorious at any one of them. And my argument is that, when it is victorious, its strength is owing in great measure to its being based upon fixed or habitual desires, or ideas including desires; which would hold good notwithstanding that the resolve itself may (as Dr. Ward now urges, p. 284) have been adopted immediately before. The Spectator's argument seems also to imply, that the vividness of desires is the only element to be considered in trying to estimate the relative quantities of pleasure which they may be supposed to contain. But the recollection that a pleasure is a deliberately chosen and approved one, which is to be reckoned to its "fixity," is surely a distinct and additional element of pleasure in it.

II. I turn now to another branch of the subject. Dr. Ward concludes his article with some criticisms on what he supposes to be my theory of free-will. But he has naturally a very imperfect idea of what my theory is. He classifies me roundly and without qualification (p. 298) as a Hedonistic Determinist, which I think any one who had weighed the Chapter

[ocr errors]

entitled "The Logic of Ethic" in my Theory of Practice, Vol. II., ch. ii., and especially § 83, would hesitate to do. Even such indications as my article in MIND afforded he does not appear to have made much use of. Judging from the words which he puts into my mouth at p. 300, he thinks that I may be compelled to content myself with a merely nominal and illusive freedom, a sense of freedom without the reality of it; that the reality of it is incompatible with my form of determinism. He has paid no attention to the words in which I distinguish his view of freedom from my own, where I say that I do not, as he does, "oppose liberty antithetically to necessity" (MIND XVIII., p. 228). The meaning of this must now be briefly drawn out.

I decline to oppose liberty antithetically to necessity, because they are things belonging to two different orders of ideas. Necessity belongs to the logical, and liberty to the causative or in better phrase the efficient order. Necessity when said of things or events means a certain character attaching to them, namely, that of uniformity or inviolability in their arrangement, in their sequences and co-existences, and is opposed not to liberty but to contingency. The order of efficiency, or (as we may also call it) causation or conditioning, is the actual realising of this order. If we speak of necessity as being found in this order, we have or ought to have a quite different idea in our minds from that of uniformity, namely, the idea of compulsion. The term necessity is an ambiguous one. Applied to the logical order of things it means uniformity, applied to the efficient order of things it means compulsion. Freedom also is similarly ambiguous. It is opposed to necessity in both its senses. Opposed to necessity in its sense of uniformity, it means contingency, hap-hazard, lawlessness. Opposed to necessity in its sense of compulsion, it has no synonym but itself. The true and proper meaning of freedom is freedom as opposed to compulsion. And the true and proper meaning of necessity is necessity as opposed to contingency. Thus, freedom being opposed to compulsion, and necessity to contingency, there is no antithetical opposition between freedom and necessity.

This distinction between the two orders, the logical and the efficient, with the distribution of necessity to the former and freedom to the latter, is an indispensable preliminary to comprehending the free-will controversy. Determinism is a doctrine based upon the logical order and applied to the efficient. Determinism maintains the uniformity of nature, necessity as opposed to contingency, but says nothing whatever about compulsion or non-compulsion of agents in the efficient order. A determinist is perfectly at liberty to maintain the freedom of the will. No logical objection can be made to him merely on the score of his determinism. The question of freedom has nothing to do either with necessity in the sense of uniformity, or with its opposite, contingency; it is a question of compulsion or noncompulsion; and for my part I cannot avoid attributing freedom to every existing thing, in such a way as to be a co-element with compulsion in the actions that take place between the thing and its environment. But I hope to have an opportunity before long, in another connexion, of returning to this more abstruse part of the free-will question.

Now I venture to repeat, in spite of Dr. Ward's "emphatic" denial (p. 299), that the meaning I attach to the term free-will is the meaning attached to it by mankind at large. By freedom, whether of the will or anything else, men at large mean freedom from compulsion. What know they or care they about uniformity of nature, or predestination, or reign of law? They feel their freedom: no fact can be more certain to them; they have an immediate sense of it. And note what this implies; it implies that freedom is to them a fact and not a theory. If freedom as opposed to necessity was what they immediately felt, and meant by the term freedom, they

would have an immediate sense of a theory. Freedom from compulsion can be immediately felt; but freedom as opposed to necessity must first be thought. Observe too, how inevitably the language we use in describing human choice and action implies the universal presence of law, as where in the Prayer-Book freedom is identified with the service of God, "whose service is perfect freedom". Observe too, how frequently compulsion is implied when we speak of the absence of freedom, as when we say that a man is the slave of his passions. Freedom from one law involves subjection to another law, so that we are never free from law, but often from compulsion.

It is when people begin to theorise that they begin to substitute a freedom which must first be thought for a freedom which is immediately felt. They vainly imagine that the freedom which must first be thought is the only real freedom, and that the felt freedom is delusive. The task which they ought to propose to themselves, on the other hand, is also to think the felt freedom; to explain it without substituting a thought freedom for it. Nothing is easier, nothing is more common, and few things are more pernicious, than to explain a thought which you have first introduced, and call it explaining a fact.

People then get puzzled, when they begin to theorise, with the double senses of necessity and freedom. I feel I have the power of choice between A and B, they say, and yet how is it that from all eternity it has been decided which I shall choose; has been decided before I was born, consequently not by me but for me? The distinction of the two orders is the only key to this difficulty. In the foregoing sentence, having the power of choice, being decided by me, and decided for me, are ideas belonging to the efficient order. Decided from all eternity is an idea belonging to the logical order. It says nothing about either by me or for me. It means that the Omniscient knows whether I shall choose A or B. It is not decided efficiently until I actually make the choice. Until that moment the conditions, antecedent and co-existent, are not in combination. The efficiency is in me, the knowledge in him. But whether that efficiency is compulsory on me or not, of this nothing whatever is said by the words decided from all eternity. It depends on how the me is defined, what is included in it, and what are its relations to its environment.

par

Thus it is that the ordinary man gets into confusion on the subject of free-will, the moment he begins to theorise about it, and for no other reason than for want of distinguishing between the two orders to which freedom and necessity respectively belong. This is the same confusion in which Dr. Ward is entangled; and so completely that sometimes he seems to hold a perfectly causeless freedom or liberty of indifference, at other times, as I remarked in my former article, he speaks the language of determinism, ticularly when he emphasises the reasonableness of anti-impulsive action. For the confusion is one which it is hopeless to remedy by the Scholastic means, by supposing a soul-entity endowed with a power of free action, an agent invented ad hoc. The difficulty is not where to find a free agent, but to show what free action is, and how it is possible. What is free action, we ask; and are told it is the action of a being expressly endowed with a power of acting freely. Singular infatuation!

It harmonises with this view of the matter, to find Dr. Ward putting forward as a statement which on my principles I must reject, that "when I successfully resist my will's spontaneous impulse, I do so by my own intrinsic strength and personal exertion" (p. 290). Substituting the words strong lower desire for spontaneous impulse, in order that Dr. Ward may not again suppose me to grant the correctness of his nomenclature, so far from seeing anything in this to reject, I see nothing but what I earnestly maintain. The question is not whether this is done by the agent or not, but

what the analysis of his doing so is. The analysis of the resistance not the fact of it determines whether Dr. Ward's view of freedom or mine is true. And I remember a similar use made of the expression "a dead heave," I think by the same critic in the Spectator from whom Dr. Ward quoted the objection noticed above; as if the fact of a "dead heave" being made against some powerful temptation proved of itself the truth of Dr. Ward's analysis of it. Granted the "dead heave" is made and that we make it,— what is the we, and how do we make it? When will empiricists see that the really important questions in philosophy are analytical ones?

Dr. Ward imagines that I stand quite alone among determinists in my use of the word freedom (p. 299), and almost alone among contemporary determinists in writing as a Theist (p. 298). Also that, as to a moral government of the world and similar questions, "very few non-Calvinistic Determinists will be found" on my side (p. 300). He seems to have difficulty in realising that Scholastic empiricism has opponents who stand on ground very different from materialistic empiricism, or that the Scholastic doctrine of free-will can possibly be rejected, unless by those who deny free-will itself. As to my own isolation, I rejoice to think that he is entirely mistaken. Leibniz who, so far as I know, was the first to propound the doctrine of Determinism, strictly so-called, certainly held free-will as part and parcel of it, and precisely in the sense that I do. He based determinism on the principle of "Ratio, Sufficiens," and opposed it to the opposite errors of the liberty of indifference on one side, and compulsion on the other. Dr. Ward must certainly have read his De Libertate. It occupies less than a page in Erdmann's edition, p. 669. "Libertas indifferentiæ est impossibilis. Adeo ut ne in Deum quidem cadat, nam determinatus ille est ad optimum efficiendum, et creatura semper ex rationibus internis externisque determinatur." And again: "Deus cum sit perfectissimus adeoque liberrimus, determinatur ex se solo. Nos vero, quo magis cum ratione agimus eo magis ex nostræ naturæ perfectionibus determinamur, hoc est liberi sumus."

My theory is identical with that of Leibniz both in its practical outcome, the conception of liberty, and in the essentials of its logical basis. But Í introduce a further distinction, for the sake as hope of greater clearness, that of the logical and efficient orders. And what I mean by the logical order, in this place, is that list of final modal categories, arrived at in my Philosophy of Reflection, Vol. I., p. 421, The Actual, The Conditionallynecessary, and The Necessary; which are the specially philosophical categories, to which every thing that exists must ultimately be referred. Leibniz's necessity and contingency belong to this order; his liberty, spontaneity, and compulsion, belong to the efficient order. The contingency of which Leibniz speaks is purely logical not real; he denies real contingency altogether, calling it the indifferens. He has no real indetermination. But a real indetermination is indispensable as the basis of that kind of liberty which Dr. Ward maintains, and which I cannot in any way distinguish from what Leibniz calls liberty of indifference.

The first strictly determinist theory, therefore, was a free-will theory, a free-will and not a compulsory determinism. Leibniz held both the uniformity of the course of nature, under the name of the principle of Ratio Sufficiens, and also the doctrine of free-will. This also is how he was understood by one of his most illustrious disciples, Moses Mendelssohn, of whose words I will avail myself to express what I have yet to say on the subject, by quoting two short passages which put this whole question in the clearest light:

"Predestination appears to some incompatible with self-determination, as if no freely-choosing being could act according to his good pleasure if it

« ZurückWeiter »