Historically, it appears that the metaphysical problem has been created for us by purely non-ethical considerations.[considerations.] “Freedom of indifference” was maintained in the ancient world by the Epicureans, but not on ethical grounds. As readers of the second book of Lucretius know, they denied the validity of the postulate of rigidly mechanical causality simply to extricate themselves from the position into which their arbitrary physical hypotheses had led them. If mechanical causality were recognised as absolute in the physical world, and if, again, as Epicurus held, the physical world was composed of atoms all falling with constant velocities in the same direction, the system of things, as we know it, could never have arisen. Hence, rather than give up their initial hypothesis about the atoms, the Epicureans credited the individual atom with a power of occasional uncaused and arbitrary deviation from its path, as a means of bringing atoms into collision and combination. Thus with them “freedom of indifference” was the result of physical difficulties.
In the Christian Church the doctrine seems to have owed its wide—though not universal—acceptance to equally non-ethical difficulties of a theological kind. If God “foreknew from all eternity” the transgression of Adam and all its consequences, how could it be compatible with His justice to punish Adam and all his posterity for faults foreseen by Adam’s Creator?[[201]] The difficulty of reconciling the divine omniscience with the divine justice was supposed to be avoided—in truth, it was only evaded[[202]]—by assuming that man was created with a “free will of indifference,” so that obedience would have been just as easy as transgression if man had chosen to obey. In our own time the problem has assumed a rather different complexion, owing to the enormous developments of mechanical physical science, which began with Galileo and Descartes. Rigid causal determination being assumed as a first principle of physical science, the question arose whether the assumption should not also be extended to the psychical sphere. If so extended, it seemed to strike at the roots of moral responsibility, by making all human acts the inevitable “consequences of circumstances over which we have no control”; if not admitted, the rejection of the principle of rigid causal determination has often been thought to amount to the denial that there is any principle of rational connection in the psychical sphere. Hence, while persons specially interested in the facts of the moral life have frequently inclined to the more or less radical denial of rational connection between the events of the psychical series, others, whose special interests have lain in the direction of the unification of knowledge, have still more commonly thought it necessary to hold that human action is determined by antecedents in the same sense and to the same degree as the occurrences of the purely physical order.
It will be our object to show that these rival doctrines of Indeterminism and Determinism, or Necessitarianism, are alike irrational, alike incompatible with what in practice we understand as moral freedom of action, and alike based upon the false assumption that rigid mechanical determination is itself an actual fact, and not a mere postulate of the special physical sciences, valid only so far as it is useful. But before we enter upon our task, it is necessary to begin with a statement as to the real meaning of ethical freedom itself. Until we know what we mean by the kind of freedom we, as moral beings, desire and think we ought to have, it will be useless to ask whether we are or are not free.
§ 2. “Free” and “freedom” are manifestly what are called by the logicians “privative” terms; they denote the absence of certain restrictions. To be “free,” in whatever special sense you may use the word, means to be free from something. What, then, are the typical limitations which, in practice, we resent as making us unfree? They seem to be, in the main, the following:—(1) We are not free when our limbs are actually set in motion by an external physical agency, human or non-human. And the reason why we are then unfree is that the resulting movements of our bodies do not express a purpose of our own. They either express the purpose of some other being who moves our limbs as seems good to him, or, as in the case where we are set in motion by the “forces” of the inanimate world, express no purpose at all that is recognisable to us as such. And in either case we have expressed no purpose of our own by our movements; they do not truly belong to us at all, and there is therefore no freedom. It is not necessary that the result of the movement should be one which, if it had been suggested, we should have declined to entertain as a purpose of our own. We might perhaps, if left to ourselves, have done just what another man or the system of physical forces has done for us. Still, so long as the deed, whatever it was, was done for us and not by us, so long as it corresponded to no actual purpose of ours, it was not a free act.
(2) Again, we are not truly free when we act in ignorance (not due to previous free action of our own)[[203]] of the special circumstances. Here there is, as there was not in the former case, a genuine act. We actually purpose to do something, but what we purpose to do is not the deed which results from our movements. E.g., if I shoot a comrade by mistake for one of the enemy, it is true that I purpose to shoot, and so far the shooting is an act, and a free act, of my own. But I did not purpose to shoot my comrade, and so the result, in its concreteness, is not the expression of my purpose, and I consequently regard myself as not fully free in doing it, and therefore not morally accountable for it. So far our analysis coincides with that of Aristotle, previously referred to.
(3) Again, I am not acting freely where the circumstances are not such as to admit of the formation of purpose at all. For this reason, merely automatic action—if there is such a thing—is not genuine action, and therefore not free.[[204]] Impulsive action without reflection, again, comes under this category. It is, of course, accompanied by feelings of satisfaction, and if impeded gives rise to craving, and so cannot be called simply non-purposive. But in genuinely impulsive reaction, where the possibility of reflection is excluded, there can be little clear awareness of the concrete character of the purpose that is being put into execution, and hence such action is not truly free. And in practical life, though we are certainly held morally responsible for impulsive action, in so far as it is thought we might have modified it by previous habitual practice of reflection or by avoiding a situation which we had reason to think would deprive us of the power to reflect, we are never held as fully accountable for the deed of impulse as for the reflectively thought out and deliberately adopted purpose.[[205]]
Further, we feel ourselves unfree when we fail to execute our purposes, either from sheer inability to attend to a consistent scheme of action, or because we attend equally to purposes which are internally incompatible. This is why the “democratic” man, whose interests are an incoherent medley without logical unity, and the “tyrannical man,” or, as we should now say, the “criminal type,” whose passions are constantly at war with one another and with his judgment, are regarded by Plato as the typically unfree beings. To be really free, in the last resort, we must have purposes which are coherent and abiding. And it is thus no paradox to say that unfreedom in the end means, in the main, not knowing your own mind, while to be free is to know what you mean.
§ 3. We may now draw some important consequences from this review of the facts upon which every valid interpretation of freedom has to be based. (1) Freedom, as Locke said in that famous chapter “On Power” which is still the classic discussion of the whole subject as far as English philosophy is concerned, “belongs to the man, not to the will.” The proper question to ask is, “Am I free?” not “Is my will free?” or “Have I a free will?” For “freedom” and “will,” as the facts enumerated above show, are but the negative and the positive name for the same property, the property of acting so as to put what we first possessed as our private purpose into execution in the world of sensible fact. I “will” when my outward deed is thus the expression of my purpose; in the same case, and in no other, I am “free.” Thus to “will” and to be “free” are one and the same thing; a will which was not free would be a will which was not the translation into sensible fact of any one’s purpose, and thus no will at all. Thus the question, “Are we free?” might be also put in the equivalent form, “Can we ever will anything?” and to the question, as thus put, experience gives a ready answer. For we certainly do conceive purposes, and we certainly, in some of our movements, do translate those purposes in act. And therefore we may say that freedom is undoubtedly, in the only sense in which it is desired, a fact of immediate experience.[[206]]
(2) If we retain the expression “freedom to will” by the side of the phrase “freedom to act,” it can only be in a very special sense. It is clear that not only may my outward deed be a translation into fact of my present purpose, but my present purpose itself, as a psychical event, may also be a translation into fact of a former purpose. This is largely the case with all results of deliberate self-training and discipline, and to a less degree with all acquired habits. Thus, e.g., the movements by which I write these lines are the expression of my preconceived purpose to write the present paragraph, but that purpose itself, as an event in my history, is similarly the expression of a former purpose to compose a work on Metaphysics. Thus there is a real sense in which we can agree with Leibnitz in criticising Locke’s dictum that we are free to act, but not free to will. For the mental conception of a purpose is itself an act, and in so far as it translates into existing thoughts and feelings a previous purpose it may be said itself to be “freely willed.”[[207]]
(3) Freedom, in actual experience, is always limited, and, moreover, admits of the most various degrees. As to the first point, it follows immediately from our consideration of the circumstances which make us unfree. If to be fully free means that your outward deed is the full expression of an inward consistent purpose, then we can see at once that complete freedom is, for all finite beings, an infinitely distant ideal. For it means (a) that I am not hampered in the execution of my purpose by vacillation of interest or conflict of incompatible interests within myself; (b) nor by the establishment of “habitual” reactions so nearly mechanical as to repeat themselves out of season unless checked by special reflection; (c) nor by the limits set to my power to “act or to forbear” in the physical world by the action of my fellows and of “brute” nature.[[208]] Hence only an experience which is absolutely devoid of internal conflict and external, partly discrepant environment, in other words, only the experience which is the infinite whole, can be in all its detail entirely and absolutely free. From the possibilities of internal lack of unity of purpose and external collision with rival purpose which are inseparable from our position as finite beings, it must follow that we are never more than partially or relatively free.