Kant regarded freedom as an exception to the law of natural causality. But this freedom is not phenomenal but noumenal, for causality is not a category of noumena. From this freedom we get our whole idea of personality, for personality is freedom of the whole soul from the mechanism of nature. Kant treated scornfully the determinism [pg 511]of Leibnitz. He said it was the freedom of a turnspit, which when once wound up directed its own movements, i. e., was merely automatic. Compare with this the view of Baldwin, Psychology, Feeling and Will, 373—“Free choice is a synthesis, the outcome of which is in every case conditioned upon its elements, but in no case caused by them. A logical inference is conditioned upon its premises, but it is not caused by them. Both inference and choice express the nature of the conscious principle and the unique method of its life.... The motives do not grow into volitions, nor does the volition stand apart from the motives. The motives are partial expressions, the volition is a total expression, of the same existence.... Freedom is the expression of one's self conditioned by past choices and present environment.”Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3:4—“Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy: For use can almost change the stamp of nature, And either curb the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.” 3:2—“Purpose is but the slave to memory; Of violent birth but poor validity.” 4:7—“That we would do, We should do when we would; for this would changes And hath abatements and delays as many As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.”Goethe: “Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet, Befreit der Mensch sich der sich überwindet.”
Scotus Novanticus (Prof. Laurie of Edinburgh), Ethica, 287—“The chief good is fulness of life achieved through law by the action of will as reason on sensibility.... Immorality is the letting loose of feeling, in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality.... In immorality, will is defeated, the personality overcome, and the subject volitionizes just as a dog volitionizes. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, 456, quotes Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 133—“Will is not the cause of anything. It is like the verdict of a jury, which is an effect, without being a cause. It is the highest force which nature has yet developed—the last consummate blossom of all her marvellous works.” Yet Maudsley argues that the mind itself has power to prevent insanity. This implies that there is an owner of the instrument endowed with power and responsibility to keep it in order. Man can do much, but God can do more.
H. Special objections to the deterministic theory of the will.—Determinism holds that man's actions are uniformly determined by motives acting upon his character, and that he has no power to change these motives or to act contrary to them. This denial that the will is free has serious and pernicious consequences in theology. On the one hand, it weakens even if it does not destroy man's conviction with regard to responsibility, sin, guilt and retribution, and so obscures the need of atonement; on the other hand, it weakens if it does not destroy man's faith in his own power as well as in God's power of initiating action, and so obscures the possibility of atonement.
Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát: “With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. The result of subjectivism is in theology antinomianism; in literature romanticism; in practical life sensuality or sensualism, as in Rousseau, Renan and Zola. Hutton, review of Clifford in Contemp. Thoughts and Thinkers, 1:254—“The determinist says there would be no moral quality in actions that did not express previous tendency, i. e., a man is responsible only for what he cannot help doing. No effort against the grain will be made by him who believes that his interior mechanism settles for him whether he shall make it or no.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:342—“Your unique voices in the divine symphony are no more the voices of moral agents than are the stones of a mosaic.” The French monarch announced that all his subjects should be free to choose their own religion, but he added that nobody should choose a different religion from the king's. “Johnny, did you give your little sister the choice between those two apples?” “Yes, Mamma; I told her she could have the little one or none, and she chose the little one.” Hobson's choice was always the choice of the last horse in the [pg 512]row. The bartender with revolver in hand met all criticisms upon the quality of his liquor with the remark: “You'll drink that whisky, and you'll like it too!”
Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 22—“There must be implicitly present to primitive man the sense of freedom, since his fetichism largely consists in attributing to inanimate objects the spontaneity which he finds in himself.” Freedom does not contradict conservation of energy. Professor Lodge, in Nature, March 26, 1891—“Although expenditure of energy is needed to increase the speed of matter, none is needed to alter its direction.... The rails that guide a train do not propel it, nor do they retard it; they have no essential effect upon its energy but a guiding effect.” J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 170-203—“Will does not create force but directs it. A very small force is able to guide the action of a great one, as in the steering of a modern steamship.” James Seth, in Philos. Rev., 3:285, 286—“As life is not energy but a determiner of the paths of energy, so the will is a cause, in the sense that it controls and directs the channels which activity shall take.” See also James Seth, Ethical Principles, 345-388, and Freedom as Ethical Postulate, 9—“The philosophical proof of freedom must be the demonstration of the inadequacy of the categories of science: its philosophical disproof must be the demonstration of the adequacy of such scientific categories.” Shadworth Hodgson: “Either liberty is true, and then the categories are insufficient, or the categories are sufficient, and then liberty is a delusion.” Wagner is the composer of determinism; there is no freedom or guilt; action is the result of influence and environment; a mysterious fate rules all. Life: “The views upon heredity Of scientists remind one That, shape one's conduct as one may, One's future is behind one.”
We trace willing in God back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his infinite personality. If man is made in God's image, why we may not trace man's willing also back, not to motives and antecedents, but to his finite personality? We speak of God's fiat, but we may speak of man's fiat also. Napoleon: “There shall be no Alps!”Dutch William III: “I may fall, but shall fight every ditch, and die in the last one!”When God energizes the will, it becomes indomitable. Phil. 4:13—“I can do all things in him that strengtheneth me.” Dr. E. G. Robinson was theoretically a determinist, and wrongly held that the highest conceivable freedom is to act out one's own nature. He regarded the will as only the nature in movement. Will is self-determining, not in the sense that will determines the self, but in the sense that self determines the will. The will cannot be compelled, for unless self-determined it is no longer will. Observation, history and logic, he thought, lead to necessitarianism. But consciousness, he conceded, testifies to freedom. Consciousness must be trusted, though we cannot reconcile the two. The will is as great a mystery as is the doctrine of the Trinity. Single volitions, he says, are often directly in the face of the current of a man's life. Yet he held that we have no consciousness of the power of a contrary choice. Consciousness can testify only to what springs out of the moral nature, not to the moral nature itself.
Lotze, Religionsphilosophie, section 61—“An indeterminate choice is of course incomprehensible and inexplicable, for if it were comprehensible and explicable by the human intellect, if, that is, it could be seen to follow necessarily from the preëxisting conditions, it from the nature of the case could not be a morally free choice at all.... But we cannot comprehend any more how the mind can move the muscles, nor how a moving stone can set another stone in motion, nor how the Absolute calls into existence our individual selves.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 308-327, gives an able exposé of the deterministic fallacies. He cites Martineau and Balfour in England, Renouvier and Fonsegrive in France, Edward Zeller, Kuno Fischer and Saarschmidt in Germany, and William James in America, as recent advocates of free will.
Martineau, Study, 2:227—“Is there not a Causal Self, over and above the Caused Self, or rather the Caused State and contents of the self left as a deposit from previous behavior? Absolute idealism, like Green's, will not recognize the existence of this Causal Self”; Study of Religion, 2:195-324, and especially 240—“Where two or more rival preconceptions enter the field together, they cannot compare themselves inter se: they need and meet a superior: it rests with the mind itself to decide. The decision will not be unmotived, for it will have its reasons. It will not be unconformable to the characteristics of the mind, for it will express its preferences. But none the less is it issued by a free cause that elects among the conditions, and is not elected by them.”241—“So far from admitting that different effects cannot come from the same cause. I even venture on the paradox that nothing is a proper cause which is limited to one effect.” 309—“Freedom, in the sense of option, and will, as the power of deciding an alternative, have no place in the doctrines of the German schools.” 311—“The whole [pg 513]illusion of Necessity springs from the attempt to fling out, for contemplation in the field of Nature, the creative new beginnings centered in personal subjects that transcend it.”
See also H. B. Smith, System of Christ. Theol., 236-251; Mansel, Proleg. Log., 113-155, 270-278, and Metaphysics, 366; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 60; Abp. Manning, in Contem. Rev., Jan. 1871:468; Ward, Philos. of Theism, 1:287-352; 2:1-79, 274-349; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:69-96; Row, Man not a Machine, in Present Day Tracts, 5: no. 30; Richards, Lectures on Theology, 97-153; Solly, The Will, 167-203; William James, The Dilemma of Determinism, in Unitarian Review, Sept. 1884, and in The Will to Believe, 145-183; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 90-159; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310; Bradley, in Mind, July, 1886; Bradford, Heredity and Christian Problems, 70-101; Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 229-254; Ladd, Philos. of Conduct, 133-188. For Lotze's view of the Will, see his Philos. of Religion, 95-106, and his Practical Philosophy, 35-50.