Christianity and Ethics: A Handbook of Christian Ethics

by Archibald B. D. Alexander

'THE MIRACLE OF THE WILL'

Closely connected with the conscience as a moral capacity is the power of self-determination, or as it is popularly called—free-will. If conscience is the manifestation of man as knowing, will is more especially his manifestation as a being who acts. The subject which we now approach presents at once a problem and a task. The nature of freedom has been keenly debated from the earliest times, and the history of the problem of the will is almost the history of philosophy. The practical question which arises is whether the individual has any power by which the gulf between the natural and the spiritual can be transcended. Can man choose and decide for a spiritual world above that in which he is by nature involved? The revelation of the good must, indeed, precede the activity of man. But at the same time the change cannot merely happen to him. He cannot simply be a passive recipient. The new life must be taken up by his own activity, and be made his by his own decision and acceptance. This responsive activity on the part of man is the task which life presents to the will.

Much obviously depends upon the answer we are able to give to this question. If man has no power of choice, no capacity of self-determination, and is nothing more than a part of the natural world, then the ethical life is at once ruled out of court.

The difficulties connected with the problem of moral freedom resolve themselves mainly into three: a scientific, a psychological, and a theological.

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I. On the part of natural science it is claimed that man is subject, like everything else, to physical necessity.

II. From the psychological standpoint it is urged that man's actions are always determined by the strongest motive.

III. On the theological side it is alleged that human freedom is incompatible with divine Sovereignty. A complete doctrine of freedom would require to be examined in the light of these three objections. For our purpose it will be sufficient to indicate briefly the value of these difficulties, and the manner in which they may be met.

I

The wonderful progress of the natural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century has tended to banish the old idea of freedom from the realm of experience. Science, it is maintained, clearly shows that man belongs to a great world-movement, in relation to which his whole life and work are completely determined. Though even in earlier ages, and especially in Stoic philosophy, this conception of life was not ignored, it is more particularly in recent times, under the influence of the evolutionary theory, that the idea of determination has been applied with relentless insistence to the structure of the soul. There is, it is alleged, no room for change or spontaneity. Everything, down to the minutest impulse, depends upon something else, and proceeds from a definite cause. The idea of choice is simply the remnant of an unscientific mode of thinking. It might be sufficient to reply that in thus reducing life and experience to a necessary part of a world-whole, more is surrendered than even science is willing to yield. The freedom which some writers reject in the interests of science they attempt to introduce in an altered form. Why are these philosophers so anxious to conserve the ethical consequences of life? Is it not because they feel that there is something in man which will not fit into a rigid world-mechanism, and that conduct would cease {84} to have moral worth if life were reduced to a causal series of happenings? But it may be further argued that, if the mechanical conception of life, which reduces the spiritual to the natural, were consistently carried out it would lead not merely to the destruction of the moral life, but to the destruction of science itself. If man is merely a part of nature, subject entirely to nature's law, then the realities of the higher life—love, self-sacrifice, devotion to ends beyond ourselves—must be radically re-interpreted or regarded simply as illusions. But it is also true that from this standpoint science itself is an illusion. For if reality lies only in the passing impressions of our sensible nature, the claim of science to find valid truth must end in the denial of the very possibility of knowledge. Does not the very existence of physical science imply the priority of thought? While in one sense it may be conceded that man is a part of nature, does not the truth, which cannot be gainsaid, that he is aware of the fact, prove a certain priority and power which differentiates him from all other phenomena of the universe? If he is a link in the chain of being, he is at least a link which is conscious of what he is. He is a being who knows himself, indeed, through the objective world, but also realises himself only as he makes himself its master and the agent of a divine purpose to which all things are contributing, and for which all things exist. In all our reasoning and endeavour we must start from the unity of the self-conscious soul. Whatever we can either know or achieve, is our truth, our act presented in and through our self-consciousness. It is impossible for us to conceive any standard of truth or object of desire outside of our experience. As a thinking and acting being man pursues ends, and has the consciousness that they are his own ends, subject to his own choice and control. It is always the self that the soul seeks; and the will is nothing else than the man making and finding for himself another world.