Freedom, according to this view, consists in the ability indifferently to adopt either of two alternative courses; so long as one alternative is closed to you (whether by your “character” or by external circumstances makes no difference according to the indeterminist), you are not “free” and not acting as a moral and accountable being. You are only acting freely in following your purpose when you could equally well follow its direct opposite. The arguments by which this doctrine is supported, over and above the general contention that determination by antecedents is incompatible with moral responsibility, are chiefly of the nature of appeals to immediate feeling. Thus we are told (1) that when we act from choice and not under compulsion we always have the immediate feeling that we could equally well act in the opposite sense; and (2) that it is a matter of direct experience that, in resisting temptation, we can and do act “in the line of greatest resistance,” and that the “will” is therefore independent of determination by “motives.”
The detailed discussion of the actuality of the alleged facts belongs, of course, to Psychology, and I do not propose to enter into it here. But it should be manifest that, even admitting the facts to be as the indeterminist states them, they do not warrant the inference he bases on them. Thus (1) it is no doubt true that I often am aware, in resolving on a certain course of action, that I could, if I pleased, act differently. But the conditional clause by its presence makes all the difference between teleological determination and no determination at all. It is, e.g., no genuine fact of experience that I am aware that I could violate all the habits of a lifetime, practise all the crimes I most abhor, and neglect all the interests to which I am most devoted. I could do all this “if I pleased,” but before I could “please” I should have to become a different man; while I am the man I am, it is a manifest absurdity to hold that I can indifferently express in my behaviour the purposes which constitute my individuality or their opposites.
(2) The argument from the successful resistance of temptations is equally fallacious. We have seen already that the determinist assumption against which it is directed, namely, that conduct is mechanically determined by the inherent “strength” of “motives,” is itself unmeaning. “Motives” are, if they are anything, another name for the interests which constitute our character, not external influences which “work upon” that character, and thus their relative “strength” is nothing independent of character, but a new expression for the structure of the individual character itself. But the counter-argument of Indeterminism is just as unmeaning. To talk of the “conquest” of temptation as the “line of greatest resistance” is to use the very same unintelligible mechanical analogy as the determinist uses in talking of the antecedent “strength” of a “motive.” There are, in fact, only two possible interpretations of the indeterminist’s contention, and neither of them supports his conclusion. Either the “resistance” of which he speaks must be measured by our actual success in resisting the suggestion to act, and in that case the very fact that we do not yield to the temptation shows that for us yielding would have been the “line of greatest resistance”; or else “resistance” must be measured by the extent to which the rejected alternative still persists as a psychical fact after its rejection. Then the alleged experience simply amounts to this, that we can and sometimes do, in obedience to training or conviction, refuse to act upon suggestions which as psychical facts have sufficient intensity to remain before the mind even after our refusal. And this, interesting and suggestive as it is, seems no particular reason for denying the teleological determination of our conduct.[[210]]
The real metaphysical objection to Indeterminism however, is not that it is an unprovable and unnecessary hypothesis, but that it involves the denial of rational connection between human actions. By declaring that conduct is not determined by character, it virtually asserts that it is chance which ultimately decides how we shall actually behave in a concrete case. And chance is simply another name for the absence of rational connection. This is illustrated, e.g., by the use we make of the conception of chance in the various empirical sciences. Thus, when I say that it is a matter of chance what card I shall draw from the pack, what I mean is that the result depends in part upon conditions which I do not know, and therefore cannot use as data for a conclusion in favour of one result rather than another. I do not, of course, mean that the result is not conditioned at all, or that, with a sufficient knowledge of the conditions it might not have been calculated in advance, but merely that I in particular have not this sufficient knowledge. Hence the admission of chance in the relative sense of “conditions not at present accurately known” does not conflict with the fundamental axiom of all thinking, the principle that all existence is a rational unity or scheme of some sort. In fact, since we never can know the “totality of the conditions” of anything, it would be true to say that there is an element of chance, in this relative sense, in all concrete actualities.
But absolute chance, such as the doctrine of an indeterminate free will maintains, would amount to the simple absence of any rational connection whatever between the facts which are alleged to issue from such a will. This is why the indeterminist view leads in the end, if consistently carried out, to the same metaphysical absurdity as the determinist. From failure to see that rational connection, such as is presupposed when we impute praise or blame to an agent on the score of his conduct, means teleological determination, both the rival theories in the end deny the rational interconnection of human acts, the one replacing it by the fiction of a purposeless mechanical “necessity,” the other by the equal fiction of a “blind chance.” And the two fictions are really the same thing under different names. For the only piece of definite information that could be extracted either from the assertion that human conduct is mechanically determined, or that it is the result of chance, is the conclusion that in either case it is not the expression of coherent purpose.
§ 9. It is thus obvious that Indeterminism fails, in precisely the same way as the opposing theory, to afford any theoretical basis for moral responsibility. True, I cannot be “responsible” for deeds which are the outcome of a purely mechanical system of antecedents, because such deeds, not issuing from the purposes of my self, are in no true sense mine; but the same would be equally true of the results of an indeterminate free will. As not owing their existence to my purpose, those results are in no real sense “my” acts, and the choice of the name “free will” for their unknown source only serves to disguise this consequence without removing it. Only as issuing from my character, and as the expression of my individual interests, can acts be ascribed to me as “mine” and made the basis of moral approbation in censure of my “self.”
Thus we see that the determinist and the indeterminist are led alike to impossible results because of the common error involved in their point of departure. Both start with the false assumption that the causal determination of an event by its “antecedents”—which we have in our earlier books seen to be a postulate ultimately not in accord with reality, but permissible in so far as it permits us to obtain useful results by treating events as if they were thus determined—is ultimately real as a feature of concrete existence. Having thus at the outset excluded genuine teleological determination from their conception of the world of change, both theorists are alike debarred from the correct understanding of those psychical processes for the comprehension of which teleological categories are indispensable.
In the terms of theories which treat determination as purely mechanical, the factors which manifestly are the determining conditions of conduct, namely, character and the alternative possibilities of action, inevitably come to be conceived of as the temporal “antecedents” of the act which issues from them. And when once this notion of character as a sort of pre-existing material upon which “motives” from without operate has been framed, it matters little in principle whether you take “character” and “motive” by themselves as the complete antecedents by which action is determined, or add a third “antecedent” in the form of an inexplicable arbitrary “free will.” In either case all possibility of a truthful representation of the freedom actually implied in moral accountability was surrendered when the “character” which expresses itself through an act, and the “motive” which is another name for that character as particularised by reference to circumstances, were falsely separated in thought from each other, and then further treated as the temporal antecedents of the act in which they are expressed. In our own treatment of the problem of freedom we were able to escape both sides of the dilemma, because we recognised from the first that the categories of mechanical determination are not the expression of real fact, but limitations artificially imposed upon facts for special purposes of a kind which have nothing in common with the ethical and historical appreciation of human conduct, and therefore irrelevant and misleading when applied out of their rightful sphere.
Consult further:—H. Bergson, Sur les données immédiates de la conscience; F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, Essay 1; W. R. B. Gibson, “The Problem of Freedom” (in Personal Idealism); T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, bk. i. chap. 3, bk. ii. chap. 1; W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii. chap. 26; Will to Believe (The Dilemma of Determinism); J. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 21 (on Power); J. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii. bk. i. chap. 1; J. S. Mill, Logic, bk. vi. chap. 2 ff.; J. Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, lect. 8; H. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, bk. i. chap. 5; Lectures on the Ethics of Green, etc., pp. 15-29.