Now when we have shown that, as a fact of consciousness and experience, a personal, spiritual cause is adequate to several results, we are entitled in reason and justice to protest against any attempt to push the inquiry a step farther. We have attained an ultimate fact, and we have no right to cast doubt upon its authority by raising perplexing questions as to the how or why of that which is. This is precisely the method by which the atheist Holyoake would invalidate the argument for the existence of the infinite First Cause. He subjects the Deity to this universal law of causality, and asks, What caused the Creator to create? "The atheist holds that the universe is an endless series of causes and effects ad infinitum, and therefore the idea of a first cause is an absurdity and a contradiction." The "infinite series" of Edwards and of Holyoake are constructed on the same principle. They both ask a cause for the cause.
When, therefore, it is asked, What causes the will to effect one volition rather than another? our answer is, Nothing whatever!
"Of its own effect, WILL, in its proper conditions, is not a partial, but a full and adequate cause. Put your finger upon any effect (volition) and ask, What caused this result exclusively of the others? and the reply is, The will, or the agent in willing. Ask then what caused the will in its conditions to cause the volition, and the reply is, Nothing. Nay, you are a bad philosopher in asking; for for its own effect will or the willing agent is a complete cause: as complete a cause as any cause whatever; and every complete cause produces its effect UNCAUSEDLY. The volition, like every other effect, is completely accounted for when a complete cause is assigned. To ask what caused the complete cause to produce the effect is to ask the cause of causation."[534]
But such an "alternative" power, the necessitarian affirms, is incomprehensible and inexplicable. To which we need only reply in the language of Hamilton, "The scheme of freedom is not more incomprehensible than the scheme of necessity."[535] "Omnia exeunt in mysterium"—there is nothing the absolute ground of which is not a mystery. In saying so much, however, we by no means grant the affirmation of Hamilton that "we are unable to conceive an absolute commencement [of being or motion]; we can not therefore conceive a free volition."[536] This is not admitted by Mansel, the disciple and annotator of Hamilton, as flowing even from his mental "law of the conditioned." "It may be true, as a fact, that no material atom has been added to the world since the first creation; but the assertion, however true, is certainly not necessary. The Power which created once must be conceived as able to create again, whether that ability is actually exercised or not. The same conclusion is still more evident when we proceed from the consideration of matter to that of mind. Of matter we maintain that the creation of new portions is perfectly conceivable as a result, if not as a process. Every man who comes into the world comes into it as a distinct individual, having a personality and consciousness of his own; and that personality is a distinct accession to the number of persons previously existing.... I believe that every new person that comes into the world is, as a person, a new existence."[537] So a volition is a new existence, an absolute origination, "a beginning of motion" which has its source in the primordial power of the human spirit as spirit. The fact is undeniable, the mode is inexplicable. But the inconceivability of the mode in which the will creates a volition no more renders the fact doubtful than the impossibility of conceiving how a new and distinct self-conscious personality comes into existence invalidates the fact that "I exist, and know myself as a distinctly existing being."
2. The Psychological Argument.—This may be briefly stated in the following terms:
It is a fact of observation and experience that motives do stand to the will in the relation of causes which necessitate volition. They have an exact mathematical commensurability, and their prevalence is in the precise ratio of their antecedent intrinsic strength. If motives are wanting, there can be no choice; but when the same motives are presented to the same mind, it obeys them with such remarkable uniformity that human actions may be reduced to statistical tables as reliable and as accurate as tables of mortality.
We might here at once, and with justice, enter our caveat against the attempt to invalidate a primitive datum of consciousness by alleged deductions from the exterior phenomena of human life and history. A primitive datum of consciousness is unquestionable and infallible. A process of induction is liable to the interpolations of error. The latter is therefore a lesser authority than the former, and a merely derivative assurance can not be argued against an ultimate fact. We must regard it as a philosophic canon that an experience cognition can not conflict with an intuitive belief. The exterior phenomena of life and history, properly interpreted, must harmonize with the interior facts and laws of the human mind, for what is history but the development, under the conditions and relations of time, of the primitive powers, ideas, and laws of humanity? If, then, consciousness attests the presence in man's spiritual nature of a power, in the same circumstances, to choose either of several ways, we may confidently expect that the phenomena of the moral world will not belie that testimony. Now it is a palpable fact that an unbroken law of continuity and uniformity pervades the material universe. It is locked up in an unchangeable status. There is no deviation and no progression. All things remain as they were since the beginning. The fundamental fact lying at the basis of this undeviating uniformity of nature is that material causes are unipotent, and shut up to one solely possible mode of effectuation.[538] And it is equally palpable that the phenomena of the moral world, the sphere of human life and history, reveal contingency, diversity, alteriety, and progression. Humanity has not revolved in cycles, neither has it run in the inflexible grooves of an anterior causation, nor remained in the dead-lock of an unchangeable status. History is not an inflexible frame-work in which all events have been shaped by necessity; it is a development of the inherent powers and capabilities of humanity, and it teaches us that new trains of causes have been originated, and new conditions have been superinduced by man. The ground-fact which underlies all the diversity, contingency, and progress which appear in the moral world is that volitional causes are equipotent and efficient for any one of the several results.[539] In moral development the progressive principle is just the freedom of the will. The facts of the inner and outer world are therefore in harmony.
The theory of the necessitarian assumes that the will is a mere passivity, a simple conductor of the impulse which motive power exerts, a mere transition-point where ideal force is transformed into physical force, and desires, inclinations, moral convictions, divine influences become necessary acts. Motives thus prevail by their antecedent intrinsic power just as physical forces prevail in mechanical and vital dynamics. And, proceeding upon this assumption, he labors to construct a science of Ethology in which he would anticipate human action by statistics, and show how individual character must be in accordance with physical and mental causation. Whereas consciousness asserts that the will "is not a bleak mechanical thing." It is a free alternative power. It is a full, complete, adequate cause. It is spirit, not matter.
Now it is freely granted that the mind acts in view of motives, acts in accordance with motives, acts in a certain qualified sense under the influence of motives; but the freedomist emphatically denies that the will is necessitated to action by motives. Motives may be reason for action, conditions under which will acts, but they are not causes of action. They may solicit, invite, urge to action, but they can not constrain, compel, and force action.[540]
Motives have no fixed correlation to the will. They address themselves to the feelings, the judgment, the conscience, and not directly and immediately to the will. They may awaken desire, fear, inclination, preference, a sense of obligation; but these are all states of the intellect and sensibility, and may coexist in the same mind with a state of indetermination and non-differentiation in the will. That which is desirable may appeal to the feelings, that which is eligible to the judgment, that which is obligatory to the conscience, and these may excite the mind in different degrees of intensity; but none of them have power to move the will. We may be able intellectually to perceive that some motives are intrinsically "higher" than others, that some have a prevolition power to excite all minds more intensely than others; but they do not prevail and secure action in any ratio with their supposed à priori strength. They can only become real motives for the will by its voluntary placing its interest in them and making them objects of its choice.[541] All the actual strength which a motive has is derived from the action of the will. On this subject we offer the following propositions: