Socrates to Theætetus: “It would be a singular thing, my lad, if each of us was, as it were, a wooden horse, and within us were seated many separate senses. For manifestly these senses unite into one nature, call it the soul or what you will. And it is with this central form, through the organs of sense, that we perceive sensible objects.”Dewey, Psychology, 21—“Knowledge and feeling are partial aspects of the self, and hence more or less abstract, while will is complete, comprehending both aspects.... While the universal element is knowledge, the individual element is feeling, and the relation which connects them into one concrete content is will.” 364—“There is conflict of desires or motives. Deliberation is the comparison of desires; choice is the decision in favor of one. This desire is then the strongest because the whole force of the self is thrown into it.” 411—“The man determines himself by setting up either good or evil as a motive to himself, and he sets up either, as he will have himself be. There is no thought without will, for thought implies inhibition.” Ribot, Diseases of the Will, 73, cites the case of Coleridge, and his lack of power to inhibit scattering and useless ideas; 114—“Volition plunges its roots into the profoundest depths of the individual, and beyond the individual, into the species and into all species.”
As God is not mere nature but originating force, so man is chiefly will. Every other act of the soul has will as an element. Wundt: “Jedes Denken ist ein Wollen.” There is no perception, and there is no thought, without attention, and attention is an act of the will. Hegelians and absolute idealists like Bradley, (see Mind, July, 1886), deny that attention is an active function of the self. They regard it as a necessary consequence of the more interesting character of preceding ideas. Thus all power to alter character is denied to the agent. This is an exact reversal of the facts of consciousness, and it would leave no will in God or man. T. H. Green says that the self makes the motives by identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another, but that the self has no power of alternative choice in thus identifying itself with one solicitation of desire rather than another; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 310. James Seth, Freedom of Ethical Postulate: “The only hope of finding a place for real free will is in another than the Humian, empirical or psychological account of the moral person or self. Hegel and Green bring will again under the law of necessity. But personality is ultimate. Absolute uniformity is entirely unproved. We contend for a power of free and incalculable initiation in the self, and this it is necessary to maintain in the interests of morality.” Without will to attend to pertinent material and to reject the impertinent, we can have no science; without will to select and combine the elements of imagination, we can have no art; without will to choose between evil and good, we can have no morality. Ælfric, A. D. 900: “The verb ‘to will’ has no imperative, for that the will must be always free.”
C. Will and permanent states.—(a) Though every act of the soul involves the action of all the faculties, yet in any particular action one faculty may be more prominent than the others. So we speak of acts of [pg 506] intellect, of affection, of will. (b) This predominant action of any single faculty produces effects upon the other faculties associated with it. The action of will gives a direction to the intellect and to the affections, as well as a permanent bent to the will itself. (c) Each faculty, therefore, has its permanent states as well as its transient acts, and the will may originate these states. Hence we speak of voluntary affections, and may with equal propriety speak of voluntary opinions. These permanent voluntary states we denominate character.
I “make up” my mind. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 152—“I will the influential ideas, feelings and desires, rather than allow these ideas, feelings and desires to influence—not to say, determine me.” All men can say with Robert Browning's Paracelsus: “I have subdued my life to the one purpose Whereto I ordained it.” “Sow an act, and you reap a habit; sow a habit, and you reap a character; sow a character, and you reap a destiny.” Tito, in George Eliot's Romola, and Markheim in R. L. Stevenson's story of that name, are instances of the gradual and almost imperceptible fixation in evil ways which results from seemingly slight original decisions of the will; see art. on Tito Melema, by Julia H. Gulliver, in New World, Dec. 1895:688—“Sin lies in the choice of the ideas that shall frequent the moral life, rather than of the actions that shall form the outward life.... The pivotal point of the moral life is the intent involved in attention.... Sin consists, not only in the motive, but in the making of the motive.” By every decision of the will in which we turn our thought either toward or away from an object of desire, we set nerve-tracts in operation, upon which thought may hereafter more or less easily travel. “Nothing makes an inroad, without making a road.” By slight efforts of attention to truth which we know ought to influence us, we may “make level in the desert a highway for our God” (Is. 40:3), or render the soul a hard trodden ground impervious to “the word of the kingdom” (Mat. 13:19).
The word “character” meant originally the mark of the engraver's tool upon the metal or the stone. It came then to signify the collective result of the engraver's work. The use of the word in morals implies that every thought and act is chiseling itself into the imperishable substance of the soul. J. S. Mill: “A character is a completely fashioned will.” We may talk therefore of a “generic volition” (Dewey). There is a permanent bent of the will toward good or toward evil. Reputation is man's shadow, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than himself. Character, on the other hand, is the man's true self—“what a man is in the dark” (Dwight L. Moody). In this sense, “purpose is the autograph of mind.” Duke of Wellington: “Habit a second nature? Habit is ten times nature!” When Macbeth says: “If 'twere done when 'tis done, Then 'twere well 'twere done quickly,” the trouble is that when 'tis done, it is only begun. Robert Dale Owen gives us the fundamental principle of socialism in the maxim: “A man's character is made for him, not by him.” Hence he would change man's diet or his environment, as a means of forming man's character. But Jesus teaches that what defiles comes not from without but from within (Mat. 15:18). Because character is the result of will, the maxim of Heraclitus is true: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων—man's character is his destiny. On habit, see James, Psychology, 1:122-127.
D. Will and motives.—(a) The permanent states just mentioned, when they have been once determined, also influence the will. Internal views and dispositions, and not simply external presentations, constitute the strength of motives. (b) These motives often conflict, and though the soul never acts without motive, it does notwithstanding choose between motives, and so determines the end toward which it will direct its activities. (c) Motives are not causes, which compel the will, but influences, which persuade it. The power of these motives, however, is proportioned to the strength of will which has entered into them and has made them what they are.
“Incentives come from the soul's self: the rest avail not.” The same wind may drive two ships in opposite directions, according as they set their sails. The same external presentation may result in George Washington's refusing, and Benedict [pg 507]Arnold's accepting, the bribe to betray his country. Richard Lovelace of Canterbury: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage.” Jonathan Edwards made motives to be efficient causes, when they are only final causes. We must not interpret motive as if it were locomotive. It is always a man's fault when he becomes a drunkard: drink never takes to a man; the man takes to drink. Men who deny demerit are ready enough to claim merit. They hold others responsible, if not themselves. Bowne: “Pure arbitrariness and pure necessity are alike incompatible with reason. There must be a law of reason in the mind with which volition cannot tamper, and there must also be the power to determine ourselves accordingly.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 135—“If necessity is a universal thing, then the belief in freedom is also necessary. All grant freedom of thought, so that it is only executive freedom that is denied.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 239-244—“Every system of philosophy must invoke freedom for the solution of the problem of error, or make shipwreck of reason itself.... Our faculties are made for truth, but they may be carelessly used, or wilfully misused, and thus error is born.... We need not only laws of thought, but self-control in accordance with them.”
The will, in choosing between motives, chooses with a motive, namely, the motive chosen. Fairbairn, Philos. Christian Religion, 76—“While motives may be necessary, they need not necessitate. The will selects motives; motives do not select the will. Heredity and environment do not cancel freedom, they only condition it. Thought is transcendence as regards the phenomena of space; will is transcendence as regards the phenomena of time; this double transcendence involves the complete supernatural character of man.” New World, 1892:152—“It is not the character, but the self that has the character, to which the ultimate moral decision is due.” William Ernest Henly, Poems, 119—“It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:54—“A being is free, in so far as the inner centre of its life, from which it acts, is conditioned by self-determination. It is not enough that the deciding agent in an act be the man himself, his own nature, his distinctive character. In order to have accountability, we must have more than this; we must prove that this, his distinctive nature and character, springs from his own volition, and that it is itself the product of freedom in moral development. Matt. 12:33—‘make the tree good, and its fruit good’—combines both. Acts depend upon nature; but nature again depends upon the primary decisions of the will (‘make the tree good’). Some determinism is not denied; but it is partly limited [by the will's remaining power of choice] and partly traced back to a former self-determining.” Ibid., 67—“If freedom be the self-determining of the will from that which is undetermined, Determinism is found wanting,—because in its most spiritual form, though it grants a self-determination of the will, it is only such a one as springs from a determinateness already present; and Indifferentism is found wanting too, because while it maintains indeterminateness as presupposed in every act of will, it does not recognize an actual self-determining on the part of the will, which, though it be a self-determining, yet begets determinateness of character.... We must, therefore, hold the doctrine of a conditional and limited freedom.”
E. Will and contrary choice.—(a) Though no act of pure will is possible, the soul may put forth single volitions in a direction opposed to its previous ruling purpose, and thus far man has the power of a contrary choice (Rom. 7:18—“to will is present with me”). (b) But in so far as will has entered into and revealed itself in permanent states of intellect and sensibility and in a settled bent of the will itself, man cannot by a single act reverse his moral state, and in this respect has not the power of a contrary choice. (c) In this latter case he can change his character only indirectly, by turning his attention to considerations fitted to awaken opposite dispositions, and by thus summoning up motives to an opposite course.