A Review of Edwards's "Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will"

by Henry Philip Tappan

These consequences must, I am aware, be deduced with the greatest care and clearness. The deduction must be influenced by no passion or prejudice. It must be purely and severely logical—and such I shall endeavour to make it. I shall begin with a deduction which Edwards has himself made.

I. There is no self-determining power of will, and of course no liberty consisting in a self-determining power.

A self-determining power of will is a supposed power, which will has to determine its own volitions.

Will is the faculty of choice, or the capacity of desire, emotion, or passion.

Volition is the strongest desire, or the sense of the most agreeable at any given moment.

Volition arises from the state of the mind, or of the will, or sensitivity itself, in correlation with the nature and circumstances of the object.

Now, if the will determined itself, it would determine its own state, in relation to objects. But to determine is to act, and therefore, for the will to determine is for the will to act; and for the will to determine itself, is for the will to determine itself by an act. But an act of the will is a volition; therefore for the will to determine itself is to create a volition by a volition. But then we have to account for this antecedent volition, and it can be accounted for only in the same way. We shall then have an infinite, or more properly, an indefinite series of volitions, without any first volition; consequently we shall have no self-determiner after all, because we can arrive at no first determiner, and thus the idea of self-determination becomes self-destructive. Again, we shall have effects without a cause, for the series in the nature of the case never ends in a first, which is a cause per se. Volitions are thus contingent, using this word as a synonyme of chance, the negative of cause.

Now that this is a legitimate deduction, no one can question. If Edwards’s psychology be right, and if self-determination implies a will to will, or choosing a choice, then a self-determining power is the greatest absurdity possible.

II. It is clearly deducible from this also, that God can exercise a perfect control over his intelligent creatures, or administer perfectly a moral government consisting in the influence of motives.

To any given state of mind, he can adapt motives in reference to required determinations. And when an individual is removed from the motives adapted to his state of mind, the Almighty Providence can so order events as to bring him into contiguity with the motives.