It is now customary with the advocates of the doctrine of necessity to express it by a different word, and call it the doctrine of determinism. The purpose of changing the word is to get rid of all associations with the idea of compulsion; just so in Science it is thought better to get rid of the words cause and effect, and substitute invariable sequence, in order to get rid of the notion of some compulsion recognisable by us in the cause to produce the effect. Determinism does not say to a man 'you will be forced to act in a particular way;' but 'you will assuredly do so.' There will be no compulsion; but the action is absolutely certain. Just as on a given day the moon will eclipse the sun, so in given circumstances you will do the precise thing which it is your character in such circumstances to do. And your sense of freedom is simply the sense that the action proceeds from yourself and not from any force put upon you from without.
But this too does not solve the problem. It is true that in regard to a very large proportion of our actions the sense of freedom seems to be no more than negative. We do what it is our custom, our inclination, our character to do. We are not conscious of any force being put upon us; but neither are we conscious of using any force ourselves. We float as it were down the stream, or hurry along with a determined aim, but having no desire nor purpose to the contrary, the question of freedom or necessity never seems to arise. It is even possible and common for us not to know ourselves as well as others know us, and to do many things which an observer would predict as sure to be our actions, but which we ourselves fancy to be by no means certain. Even in these cases we sometimes awake to the fact that what we are thus allowing in our lives is not consistent with the law of duty, and, do what we may, we cannot then escape the conviction that we are to blame, and that we had power to act otherwise if only we had chosen to exert the power. But it is when a conflict arises between duty and inclination that our inner certainty of our own freedom of will becomes clear and unconquerable. In the great conflicts of the soul between the call of duty and the power of temptation there are two forces at work upon us. We are never for a moment in doubt which is ourselves and which is not ourselves; which is the free agent and which is the blind force; which is responsible for the issue, and which is incapable of responsibility. There is in this case a real sense of compulsion from without, and a real sense of resistance to that compulsion from within. It is impossible in this case to account for the sense of being a free agent, by saying that this merely means that we are conscious of no external force. We are conscious of an external force and we are conscious that this will of ours which struggles against it is not an external force, but our very selves, and this distinction between the will and the forces against which the will is striving is ineffaceable from our minds. That the will is often weak and on that account overpowered, and that after a hard struggle our actions are often determined, not by our wills but by our passions or our appetites, is unquestionable. Often has the believer to pray to God for strength to hold fast to right purpose, and often will he feel that without that strength he must inevitably fall. But he knows that whatever source may supply the strength, it is he that will have to use it, and he that will be responsible for using it or neglecting to do so.
The advocates of determinism urge that every action must have a motive, and that the man always acts on that motive which is the stronger. The first proposition may be granted at once. The freedom of the will is certainly not shown in acting without any motive at all. If there be any human action which appears to be without any motive, it is not in such action that we find human freedom. Such action, if possible at all, must inevitably be mechanical. A man who is acting from mere caprice is even more completely at the mercy of passing inclination than one who is acting from passion or from overpowering temptation. The freedom of the will is not shown in acting without motive, but in choosing between motives. But when it is further said that a man always acts from the stronger motive, the question immediately follows, what determines which is the stronger motive? It cannot be anything in the motives themselves, or all men would act alike in the same circumstances; and it is clear that they do not. It must be therefore something in the man. And if it be something in the man, it must be either his will acting at the moment, which in that case is free, or his character. But if it be his character, then follows the further question, what determines his character? If we are to maintain the uniformity of nature, we must answer by assigning the determination to the sum total of surrounding and preceding circumstances. Nothing will satisfy that law of uniformity but this; that, given such and such parents, such and such circumstances of birth and life, there must be such a character and no other. At what point is there room in this case for any responsibility? I did not on this supposition make my character; it was made for me; any one else born in my stead, and living in my stead, would of necessity have acted exactly as I have done; would have felt the same, and aimed at the same, and won the same moral victories, and suffered the same moral defeats. How can I be held responsible for what is the pure result of the circumstances in which I was born? But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. The antecedents and surroundings might have been quite the same for any one else, and yet I should have my character and he his, and our lives would have altogether differed.
It is clear that determinism does not get us out of the difficulty. Here, too, as in regard to the necessary truths of mathematics, and in regard to the relativity of all our knowledge, the theory has purchased completeness by the cheap expedient of calling one of the facts to be accounted for a delusion. Such a solution cannot be accepted. In spite of all attempts to explain it away, the fact that we think ourselves free and hold ourselves responsible remains, and remains unaffected.
But let us examine how far the difference between the scientific view and the religious view of human action extends.
Observation certainly shows that a very large proportion of human action, much even of that which appears at first sight to be more especially independent of all law, is really as much regulated by laws of nature as the movements of the planets. I have already pointed out how often an observer can predict a man's actions better than the man himself, and how often the will is certainly passive and consents instead of acting. In these cases there is no reason whatever to deny that nature and not the will is producing the conduct. And not only so, but that which seems most irregular, the kind of action that we call caprice, there is very often just as little reason to call free, as to assign free-will as the cause of the uncertainties of the weather. But it is not in observing individuals so much as in observing masses of men that we get convincing proof that men possess a common nature, and that their conduct is largely regulated by the laws of that nature. That amongst a given large number of men living on the whole in the same conditions from year to year, there should be every year a given number of suicides, of murderers, of thieves and criminals of various kinds, cannot be accounted for in any other way than by the hypothesis that like circumstances will produce like conduct. So, too, in this way only can we account for such a fact as the steadiness in the proportion of men who enter any given profession, of men who quit their country for another, of men who remain unmarried all their lives, of men who enter a university, of men who make any particular choice (such as these) which can be tested by figures. Now, this argument is unanswerable as far as it goes; but it succeeds, like all the other arguments for the uniformity of nature, in establishing the generality, and not at all the universality of that uniformity. Indeed, it falls far short of proving as much uniformity in human action as is proved in the action of inanimate things. The induction which proves the uniformity of the laws of mechanics, of chemistry, of physics, is so far greater than the induction which proves the uniformity of human conduct, that it is hardly possible to put the two side by side. When we turn from abstract arguments to facts, the doctrine of necessity is unquestionably unproven.
And this agrees with the result of a careful examination of the facts of human consciousness from the opposite point of view. We cannot but acknowledge that when we look very closely we find a very large proportion of our own actions to be by no means the result of an interference by the will. A large proportion is due to custom; a large proportion to inclination, of which the will takes no special notice, and is not called on by the conscience to notice; a large proportion to inclinations which we know that we ought to resist, but we do not resist; a much smaller proportion, but still some, to passions and appetites against which we have striven in vain; only a very small proportion to deliberate choice. There is, in fact, no irresistible reason for claiming freedom for human action except when that action turns on the question of right or wrong. There is no reason to call action free that flows from inclination or custom, or passion, or a desire to avoid pain, or a desire to obtain pleasure. The will claims to be free in all these cases, but it is free in the sense that it might be exerted; and so, since it is not exerted, the action is not free. But when, at the call of duty, in whatever form, the will directly interferes, then and then only are we conscious not only that the will is free, but that it has asserted its freedom, and that the action has been free also.
The relation of the will to the conduct falls under four distinct heads: for sometimes the will simply concurs with the inclination; sometimes it neither concurs nor opposes; sometimes it opposes but is overpowered; sometimes it opposes and prevails. In the first case, inclination of some kind or other prompts the man to action. The inclination, whether set up by an external object of desire or by an internal impulse of restlessness or blind craving or the like, comes clearly from the nature, and is not free choice. There is no reason to believe that it is not in most cases, possibly in all cases, under the dominion of fixed law. It may be as completely the product of what has preceded it as the eclipse of the sun. And if the will concurs in the inclination, it is needless to discuss the question whether the will acts or not. The conduct is the same whether the will adds force to the inclination or is simply passive. The freedom of the will may in this case be considered as negative. So, too, may the freedom of the will be considered negative in the second case, which is that of the will neither concurring with inclination nor opposing it. In this case there may be a distinct consciousness of freedom in the form of a sense of responsibility for what inclination is permitted to do. A man in this case knows that he is free, perhaps knows that he ought to interfere and control the conduct. But as he does not interfere, the freedom of the will is not asserted in act. And it is possible that, as far as all external phenomena are concerned, there may be no breach in uniformity of sequence. This, however, can hardly be in the third case, which is when the will and the inclination are opposed, and the will is overpowered. Although the inclination prevails, yet the struggle itself is an event of the most important kind, and is sure to leave traces on the character, and to be followed by consequences. In this case we are distinctly conscious of a power to add force to that one of the contending opposites which is most identified with our very selves, and we know whether we have added that force or not. And not only may we add this force directly from within; we may and we often do go outside of ourselves to seek for aids to add still more force indirectly, and we do for this purpose what we should not do otherwise. We dwell in thought on the higher aims which are the proper object of will; we read what sets forth those higher aims in their full beauty; we seek the words, the company, the sympathy of men who will, we are sure, encourage us in this the higher path. And, on the other hand, we turn away from the temptation which gives strength to the evil inclination, and if we cannot escape from its presence we endeavour to drive the thought of it from our minds. All this action is not for the sake of anything thus done, but for the sake of its indirect effect on the struggle in which we are engaged. Whenever there is a struggle, we are not only conscious that the will is free, but that it is asserting its freedom. In these struggles there is not a mere contest between two inclinations. We are distinctly conscious that one of the combatants is our very selves in a sense in which the other is not. But, nevertheless, when all has been said, it still remains in this case that the will is beaten and inclination prevails, and the conduct in the main is determined by the inclination, which is under the dominion of the law of uniformity, and not by the will, which claims to be free. The fourth case in which the will prevails may, of course, make a momentous breach in the uniformity of sequence of the conduct. But in far the largest number of cases the struggle is very slight, and the difference between the will and the inclination is not, taken alone, of grave importance in the life. And in those instances in which the struggle is severe and the resulting change is great, it is very often the case that the way has been prepared, as it were in secret, by the quiet accumulation of hidden forces of the strictly natural order ready to burst forth when the fit opportunity came. In the great conversions which have sometimes seemed by their suddenness and completeness to defy all possibility of reduction to natural law, there are often nevertheless tokens of deep dissatisfaction with the previous life having swelled up slowly within the soul for some time, even for some long time beforehand. The inclination to go on in evil courses has been broken down at last, not merely by the action of the will, but by the working of the machinery of the soul.
To this it must be added that the action of the will is such that it very often happens that, having been exerted once, it need not be exerted again for the same purpose. A custom is broken down, an exceedingly strong temptation has been overpowered, and its strength so destroyed that its return is without effect. Or sometimes the act of the will takes the form of deliberately so arranging the circumstances of life that a dreaded temptation cannot return, or if it return cannot prevail; the right eye has been plucked out, the right hand cut off, and the sin cannot be committed even if desired. While therefore the will is always free, the actual interference of the will with the life is not so frequent as to interfere with the broad general rule that the course of human conduct is practically uniform. In fact the will, though always free, only asserts its freedom by obeying duty in spite of inclination, by disregarding the uniformity of nature in order to maintain the higher uniformity of the Moral Law. The freedom of the human will is but the assertion in particular of that universal supremacy of the moral over the physical in the last resort, which is an essential part of the very essence of the Moral Law. The freedom of the will is the Moral Law breaking into the world of phenomena, and thus behind the free-will of man stands the power of God.
When the real claim of the will for freedom has been clearly seized by the mind, it becomes apparent that there is no real collision between what Science asserts and what Religion requires us to believe. Science asserts that there is evidence to show that an exceedingly large proportion of human action is governed by fixed law. Religion requires us to believe that the will is responsible for all this action, not because it does, but because it might interfere. Science is not able, and from the nature of the case never will be able to prove that the range of this fixed law is universal, and that the will never does interfere to vary the actions from what without the will they would have been. Science will never be able to prove this, because it could not be proved except by a universal induction, and a universal induction is impossible. At present there is no approximation to such proof. Religion, on the other hand, does not call on us to believe that the will often interferes, but on the contrary is perpetually telling us that it does not interfere as often as it ought. Revealed religion, indeed, has always based its most earnest exhortations on the reluctance of man to set his will to the difficult task of contending with the forces of his nature, and on the weakness of the will in the presence of those forces.