II
We may now proceed to the second problem of the will, the objection that human action is determined by motives, and that what we call freedom is nothing else than the necessary result of the pressure of motives upon the will. In other words, the conduct of the individual is always determined by the strongest motive. It will be seen on examination that this objection is just another form of that which we have already considered. Indeed, the {87} analogy of mechanical power is frequently applied to the motives of the will. Diverse motives have been compared to different forces which meet in one centre, and it is supposed that the result in action is determined by the united pressure of these various motives. Now it may be freely admitted at the outset that the individual never acts except under certain influences. An uninfluenced man, an unbiassed character cannot exist. Not for one moment do we escape the environment, material and moral, which stimulates our inner life to reaction and response. It is not contended that a man is independent of all motives. What we do affirm is that the self-realising potentiality of personality is present throughout. Much of the confusion of thought in connection with this subject arises from a false and inadequate notion of personality. Personality is the whole man, all that his past history, present circumstances and future aims have made him, the result of all that the world of which he is a part has contributed to his experience. His bodily sensations, his mental acts, his desires and motives are not detached and extraneous forces acting on him from without, but elements which constitute his whole being. The person, in other words, is the visible or tangible phenomenon of something inward—the phase or function by which an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human intercourse and interaction, and plays his peculiar and definite part in life.[4] But this totality of consciousness, so far from reducing man to a 'mere manufactured article,' gives to personality its unique distinction. By personality all things are dominated. 'Other things exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind and for the sake of other things: a person is never a mere means to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law, of starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon and a standard.'[5]
{88}
The objection to the freedom of the will which we are now considering may be best appreciated if we examine briefly the two extreme theories which have been maintained on the subject. On the one hand, determinism or, as it is sometimes called, necessitarianism, holds that all our actions are conditioned by law—the so-called motive that influences a man's conduct is simply a link in a chain of occurrences of which his act is the last. The future has no possibilities hidden in its womb. I am simply what the past has made me. My circumstances are given, and my character is simply the necessary resultant of the natural forces that act upon me. On the other hand, indeterminism, or libertarianism, insists upon absolute liberty of choice of the individual, and denies that necessity or continuity determines conduct. Of two alternatives both may now be really possible. You can never predict what will be, nor lay down absolutely what a man will do. The world is not a finished and fixed whole. It admits of infinite possibilities, and instead of the volition I have actually made, I could just as easily have made a different one.
Without entering upon a detailed criticism of these two positions, it may be said that both contain an element of truth and are not so contradictory as they seem. On the one hand, all the various factors of the complex will may seem to be determined by something that lies beyond our control, and thus our will itself be really determined. But, on the other hand, moral continuity in its last analysis is only a half truth, and must find its complement in the recognition of the possibilities of new beginnings. The very nature of moral action implies, as Lotze has said, that new factors may enter into the stream of causal sequence, and that even though a man's life may be, and must be, largely conditioned by his circumstances, his activity may be really originative and free. What the determinists seem to forget is, as Green says, that 'character is only formed through a man's conscious presentation to himself of objects as his good, as that in which his self-satisfaction is found.'[6] {89} Desires are always for objects which have a value for the individual. A man's real character is reflected in his desires, and it is not that he is moved by some outside abstract force, which, being the strongest, he cannot resist, but it is because he puts himself into the desire or motive that it becomes the strongest, the one which he chooses to follow. My motives are really part of myself, of which all my actions are the outcome. Human desires, in short, are not merely external tendencies forcing a man this way or that way. They are a part of the man himself, and are always directed towards objects related to a self; and it is the satisfaction of self that makes them desirable.
On the other hand, the fallacy lurking in the libertarian view arises from the fact that it also makes a hard and fast distinction between the self and the will. The indeterminists speak as if the self had amongst its several faculties a will which is free in the sense of being able to act independently of all desires and motives. But, as a matter of fact, the will, as we have said, is simply the man, and it cannot be separated from his history, his character, and the objects which his character desires. To speak, as people sometimes do in popular language, of being free to do as they like—that is, to be influenced by no motive whatever, is not only an idea absurd in itself, but one which, if pushed to its consequences, would be subversive of all freedom, and consequently of all moral value. 'The liberty of indifference,' if the phrase means anything at all, implies not merely that the agent is free from all external compulsion, but that he is free from himself, not determined even by his own character. And if we ask what it really is that causes him to act, it must be answered, some caprice of the moment, some accidental impulse or arbitrary freak of fancy. The late Professor James makes a valiant attempt to solve the 'dilemma of determinism' by resorting to the idea of 'chance' which he defines as a 'purely relative term, giving us no information about that which is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with something else—not controlled, secured or {90} necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence.'[7] 'On my way home,' he says, 'I can choose either of two ways'; and suppose 'the choice is made twice over and each time falls on a different street.' 'Imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then am set again at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same,[8] I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. Looking outwardly at these universes of which my two acts are a part, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one and which the rational and necessary one?' Perhaps an outsider could not say, but Professor James, if he examined his reasons, could say. He assumes that 'everything else is the same.' But that is just what cannot be. A new factor has been introduced, it may be a whim, a sudden impulse, perhaps even a desire to upset calculation—a something in his character in virtue of which his second choice is different from his first. It is an utter misnomer to call it 'chance.' Even though he had tossed a coin and acted on the throw, his action would still be determined by the kind of man he was.
Let us not seek to defend freedom on inadequate grounds, or contend for a spurious liberty. No view of the subject should indeed debar us from acknowledging 'changes in heart and life,' but a misunderstanding of the doctrine of freedom may tend to paralyse moral initiative. The attempt to sunder the will and the understanding and discover the source of freedom in the realm of the emotions, as the voluntarists seek to do, cannot be regarded as satisfactory or sound philosophy. In separating faith and knowledge the Ritschlian school tends to make subjective feeling the measure of truth and life; while recent psychological experiments in America with the phenomena of faith-healing, hypnotism and suggestion, claim to have discovered hitherto unsuspected potencies of the will. This line of thought has been welcomed by many as a relief from the mechanical theory of life and as a witness to moral {91} freedom and Christian hope. But so far from proving the sovereignty and autonomy of the will, it discloses rather the possibilities of its abject bondage and thraldom.
No one can doubt the facts which Professor James and others, working from the side of religious psychology, have recently established, or discredit the instances of conversion to which the annals of the Christian life so abundantly testify. But even conversion must not be regarded as a change without motives. There must be some connection between motive, character and act, otherwise the new spiritual experience would be simply a magical happening lacking all moral significance. If there were no continuity of consciousness, if I could be something to-day irrespective of what I was yesterday, then all we signify by contrition, penitence, and shame would have no real meaning. Even the grace of God works through natural channels and human influences. The past is not so much obliterated, as taken up into the new life and transfigured with a new value.
The truth of spontaneity and initiative in life has lately found in M. Bergson a fresh and vigorous advocacy, and we cannot be too grateful to that profound thinker for his reassertion of some neglected aspects of freedom and his philosophical vindication of the doctrine which puts it in a new position of prominence and security. 'Life is Creation.' 'Reality is a perpetual growth, a Creation pursued without end.' 'Our will performs this miracle.' 'Every human work in which there is invention, every movement that manifests spontaneity brings something new into the world. In the composition of the work of genius, as in a simple free decision, we create what no mere assemblage of materials could have given.'[9] But yet he says that 'life cannot create absolutely because it is confronted with matter. . . . But it seizes upon this matter which is necessity itself, and strives to introduce into it the greatest possible amount of indetermination and liberty.'[10] Even Bergson, though he emphasises so strongly immediacy and incalculableness in {92} all human action, cannot deny that the bodily arrangements and mechanisms are at least the basis of the working of the soul. Man cannot produce any change in the world except in strict co-ordination with the forces and qualities of material things. The idea in his consciousness is powerless save in so far as it is a guide to combinations and modifications which are latent in reality. The man who works with his hands does not create out of nothing a new totality. Even genius is conditioned by the elements he works with and upon. He can do nothing with his materials beyond what it is in themselves to yield. This sense of co-operation is strongly marked in the higher grades of activity. The world may be in the making, as Bergson says, but it is being made of possibilities already inherent in it. Life may be incalculable, and you can never know beforehand what a great man, indeed, what any man may achieve, but even the originality of a Leonardo or a Beethoven cannot effect the impossible or contradict the order of nature. The sculptor feels that the statue is already lying in the marble awaiting only his creative touch to bring it forth. The metal is alive in the worker's hands, coaxing him to make of it something beautiful.[11] Purpose does not come out of an empty mind. Freedom and initiative never begin entirely de novo. Life is a 'creation,' but it is also, as M. Bergson labours to prove, an 'evolution.' Our ideals are made out of realities. Our heaven must be shaped out of the materials of our earth.
A moral personality is a self-conscious, self-determining being. But that is only half the reality. The other half is that it is a self-determining consciousness in a world. As Bergson is careful to tell us, the shape and extent of self-consciousness are determined by our relation to a world which acts upon us and upon which we act. Without a world in which we had personal business we should have no self-consciousness.
The co-operation of spontaneity and necessity is implied {93} in every true idea of freedom. If a man were the subject of necessity alone he would be merely the creature of mechanical causation. If he had the power of spontaneity only his so-called freedom would be a thing of caprice. Necessity means simply that man is conditioned by the world in which he lives. Spontaneity means, not that he can conjure up at a wish a dream-world of no conditions, but that he is not determined by anything outside of himself, since the very conditions amid which he is placed may be transmuted by him into elements of his own character. Moral decisions are never isolated from ideals and tasks presented by our surroundings. The self cannot act on any impulse however external till the impulse has transplanted itself within and become our motive.
'Our life,' says Eucken, 'is a conflict between fate and freedom, between being "given" and spontaneity. Spiritual individuality does not come to any one, but has first to be won by the work of life, elevating that which destiny brings. . . . The idea of freedom calls man to independent co-operation in the conflict of the worlds. It gives to the simply human and apparently commonplace an incomparable greatness. However powerful destiny may be, it does not determine man entirely: for even in opposition to it there is liberation from it.'[12]