There is no such thing as an act of pure will. Peters, Willenswelt, 126—“Jedes Wollen ist ein Etwas wollen”—“all willing is a willing of some thing”; it has an object which the mind conceives, which awakens the sensibility, and which the will strives [pg 508]to realize. Cause without alternative is not true cause. J. F. Watts: “We know causality only as we know will, i. e., where of two possibles it makes one actual. A cause may therefore have more than one certain effect. In the external material world we cannot find cause, but only antecedent. To construct a theory of the will from a study of the material universe is to seek the living among the dead. Will is power to make a decision, not to be made by decisions, to decide between motives, and not to be determined by motives. Who conducts the trial between motives? Only the self.” While we agree with the above in its assertion of the certainty of nature's sequences, we object to its attribution even to nature of anything like necessity. Since nature's laws are merely the habits of God, God's causality in nature is the regularity, not of necessity, but of freedom. We too are free at the strategic points. Automatic as most of our action is, there are times when we know ourselves to have power of initiative; when we put under our feet the motives which have dominated us in the past; when we mark out new courses of action. In these critical times we assert our manhood; but for them we would be no better than the beasts that perish. “Unless above himself he can erect himself, How mean a thing is man!”
Will, with no remaining power of contrary choice, may be brute will, but it is not free will. We therefore deny the relevancy of Herbert Spencer's argument, in his Data of Ethics, and in his Psychology, 2:503—“Psychical changes either conform to law, or they do not. If they do not conform to law, no science of Psychology is possible. If they do conform to law, there cannot be any such thing as free will.” Spinoza also, in his Ethics, holds that the stone, as it falls, would if it were conscious think itself free, and with as much justice as man; for it is doing that to which its constitution leads it; but no more can be said for him. Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, xiii—“To try to collect the ‘data of ethics’ when there is no recognition of man as a personal agent, capable of freely originating the conduct and the states of will for which he is morally responsible, is labor lost.” Fisher, chapter on the Personality of God, in Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief—“Self-determination, as the very term signifies, is attended with an irresistible conviction that the direction of the will is self-imparted.... That the will is free, that is, not constrained by causes exterior, which is fatalism—and not a mere spontaneity, confined to one path by a force acting from within, which is determinism—is immediately evident to every unsophisticated mind. We can initiate action by an efficiency which is neither irresistibly controlled by motives, nor determined, without any capacity of alternative action, by a proneness inherent in its nature.... Motives have an influence, but influence is not to be confounded with causal efficiency.”
Talbot, on Will and Free Will, Bap. Rev., July, 1882—“Will is neither a power of unconditioned self-determination—which is not freedom, but an aimless, irrational, fatalistic power; nor pure spontaneity—which excludes from will all law but its own; but it is rather a power of originating action—a power which is limited however by inborn dispositions, by acquired habits and convictions, by feelings and social relations.”Ernest Naville, in Rev. Chrétienne, Jan. 1878:7—“Our liberty does not consist in producing an action of which it is the only source. It consists in choosing between two preëxistent impulses. It is choice, not creation, that is our destiny—a drop of water that can choose whether it will go into the Rhine or the Rhone. Gravity carries it down,—it chooses only its direction. Impulses do not come from the will, but from the sensibility; but free will chooses between these impulses.” Bowne, Metaphysics, 169—“Freedom is not a power of acting without, or apart from, motives, but simply a power of choosing an end or law, and of governing one's self accordingly.” Porter, Moral Science, 77-111—Will is “not a power to choose without motive.” It “does not exclude motives to the contrary.” Volition “supposes two or more objects between which election is made. It is an act of preference, and to prefer implies that one motive is chosen to the exclusion of another.... To the conception and the act two motives at least are required.” Lyall, Intellect, Emotions, and Moral Nature, 581, 592—“The will follows reasons, inducements—but it is not caused. It obeys or acts under inducement, but it does so sovereignly. It exhibits the phenomena of activity, in relation to the very motive it obeys. It obeys it, rather than another. It determines, in reference to it, that this is the very motive it will obey. There is undoubtedly this phenomenon exhibited: the will obeying—but elective, active, in its obedience. If it be asked how this is possible—how the will can be under the influence of motive, and yet possess an intellectual activity—we reply that this is one of those ultimate phenomena which must be admitted, while they cannot be explained.”
F. Will and responsibility.—(a) By repeated acts of will put forth in a given moral direction, the affections may become so confirmed in evil or in good as to make previously certain, though not necessary, the future good or evil action of the man. Thus, while the will is free, the man may be the “bondservant of sin” (John 8:31-36) or the “servant of righteousness” (Rom. 6:15-23; cf. Heb. 12-23—“spirits of just men made perfect”). (b) Man is responsible for all effects of will, as well as for will itself; for voluntary affections, as well as for voluntary acts; for the intellectual views into which will has entered, as well as for the acts of will by which these views have been formed in the past or are maintained in the present (2 Pet. 3:5—“wilfully forget”).
Ladd, Philosophy of Knowledge, 415—“The self stands between the two laws of Nature and of Conscience, and, under perpetual limitations from both, exercises its choice. Thus it becomes more and more enslaved by the one, or more and more free by habitually choosing to follow the other. Our conception of causality according to the laws of nature, and our conception of the other causality of freedom, are both derived from one and the same experience of the self. There arises a seeming antinomy only when we hypostatize each severally and apart from the other.”R. T. Smith, Man's Knowledge of Man and of God, 69—“Making a will is significant. Here the action of will is limited by conditions: the amount of the testator's property, the number of his relatives, the nature of the objects of bounty within his knowledge.”
Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 349-407—“Action without motives, or contrary to all motives, would be irrational action. Instead of being free, it would be like the convulsions of epilepsy. Motives = sensibilities. Motive is not cause; does not determine; is only influence. Yet determination is always made under the influence of motives. Uniformity of action is not to be explained by any law of uniform influence of motives, but by character in the will. By its choice, will forms in itself a character; by action in accordance with this choice, it confirms and develops the character. Choice modifies sensibilities, and so modifies motives. Volitional action expresses character, but also forms and modifies it. Man may change his choice; yet intellect, sensibility, motive, habit, remain. Evil choice, having formed intellect and sensibility into accord with itself, must be a powerful hindrance to fundamental change by new and contrary choice; and gives small ground to expect that man left to himself ever will make the change. After will has acquired character by choices, its determinations are not transitions from complete indeterminateness or indifference, but are more or less expressions of character already formed. The theory that indifference is essential to freedom implies that will never acquires character; that voluntary action is atomistic; that every act is disintegrated from every other; that character, if acquired, would be incompatible with freedom. Character is a choice, yet a choice which persists, which modifies sensibility and intellect, and which influences subsequent determinations.”
My freedom then is freedom within limitations. Heredity and environment, and above all the settled dispositions which are the product of past acts of will, render a large part of human action practically automatic. The deterministic theory is valid for perhaps nine-tenths of human activity. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 118, 119—“We naturally will with a bias toward evil. To act according to the perfection of nature would be true freedom. And this man has lost. He recognizes that he is not his true self. It is only with difficulty that he works toward his true self again. By the fall of Adam, the will, which before was conditioned but free, is now not only conditioned but enslaved. Nothing but the action of grace can free it.” Tennyson, In Memoriam, Introduction: “Our wills are ours, we know not how; Our wills are ours, to make them thine.” Studying the action of the sinful will alone, one might conclude that there is no such thing as freedom. Christian ethics, in distinction from naturalistic ethics, reveals most clearly the degradation of our nature, at the same time that it discloses the remedy in Christ: “If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).
Mind, Oct. 1882:567—“Kant seems to be in quest of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the absence of determination by motives. The error of the determinists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal abstraction of the [pg 510]man from his thoughts, and interprets the relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality which exists between two things in nature. The point to be grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, and that consequently he is in every instance self-determined.... Indeterminism is tenable only if an ego can be found which is not an ego already determinate; but such an ego, though it may be logically distinguished and verbally expressed, is not a factor in psychology.” Morell, Mental Philosophy, 390—“Motives determine the will, and so far the will is not free; but the man governs the motives, allowing them a less or a greater power of influencing his life, and so far the man is a free agent.” Santayana: “A free man, because he is free, may make himself a slave; but once a slave, because he is a slave, he cannot make himself free.” Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, 51, 65—“This almost overwhelming cumulative proof [of necessity] seems, however, more than balanced by a single argument on the other side: the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate volition. It is impossible for me to think, at each moment, that my volition is completely determined by my formed character and the motives acting upon it. The opposite conviction is so strong as to be absolutely unshaken by the evidence brought against it. I cannot believe it to be illusory.”
G. Inferences from this view of the will.—(a) We can be responsible for the voluntary evil affections with which we are born, and for the will's inherited preference of selfishness, only upon the hypothesis that we originated these states of the affections and will, or had a part in originating them. Scripture furnishes this explanation, in its doctrine of Original Sin, or the doctrine of a common apostasy of the race in its first father, and our derivation of a corrupted nature by natural generation from him. (b) While there remains to man, even in his present condition, a natural power of will by which he may put forth transient volitions externally conformed to the divine law and so may to a limited extent modify his character, it still remains true that the sinful bent of his affections is not directly under his control; and this bent constitutes a motive to evil so constant, inveterate, and powerful, that it actually influences every member of the race to reäffirm his evil choice, and renders necessary a special working of God's Spirit upon his heart to ensure his salvation. Hence the Scripture doctrine of Regeneration.
There is such a thing as “psychical automatism” (Ladd, Philos. Mind, 169). Mother: “Oscar, why can't you be good?” “Mamma, it makes me so tired!” The wayward four-year-old is a type of universal humanity. Men are born morally tired, though they have energy enough of other sorts. The man who sins may lose all freedom, so that his soul becomes a seething mass of eructant evil. T. C. Chamberlain: “Conditions may make choices run rigidly in one direction and give as fixed uniformity as in physical phenomena. Put before a million typical Americans the choice between a quarter and a dime, and rigid uniformity of results can be safely predicted.” Yet Dr. Chamberlain not only grants but claims liberty of choice. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 155-160—“Though volitions are largely determined by other and external causes, it does not follow that they are determined necessarily, and this makes all the difference between the theories of will as bond or free. Their intrinsic character as first causes protects them from being coerced by these causes and therefore from becoming only the mere effects of them. The condition to the effective operation of a motive—as distinguished from a motor—is the acquiescence of the first cause upon whom that motive is operating.” Fichte: “If any one adopting the dogma of necessity should remain virtuous, we must seek the cause of his goodness elsewhere than in the innocuousness of his doctrine. Upon the supposition of free will alone can duty, virtue, and morality have any existence.” Lessing: “Kein Mensch muss müssen.” Delitzsch: “Der Mensch, wie er jetzt ist, ist wahlfrei, aber nicht machtfrei.”