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

by Henry Philip Tappan

But the real point in dispute is this: “Is the will necessarily determined, or not?”

The inherent nature of cause may be so constituted and fixed, that the nisus by which it determines itself to produce phenomena, shall take place according to invariable and necessary laws. This we believe to be true with respect to all physical causes. Heat, electricity, galvanism, magnetism, gravitation, mechanical forces in general, and the powers at work in chemical of affinities, produce their phenomena according to fixed, and, with respect to the powers themselves, necessary laws. We do not conceive it possible for these powers to produce any other phenomena, under given circumstances, than those which they actually produce. When a burning coal is thrown into a mass of dry gunpowder, an explosion must take place.

Now, is it true likewise that the cause which we call will, must, under given circumstances, necessarily produce such and such phenomena? Must its nisus, its self-determining energy, or its volition, follow a uniform and inevitable law? Edwards answers yes. Will is but the sensitivity, and the inherent nature of the will is fixed, so that its sense of the most agreeable, which is its most original nisus or its volition, follows certain necessary laws,—necessary in relation to itself. If we know the state of any particular will, and its correlation to every variety of object, we may know, with the utmost certainty, what its volition will be at a given time, and under given circumstances. Moral necessity and physical necessity differ only in the terms,—not in the nature of the connexion between the terms. Volition is as necessary as any physical phenomenon.

Now, if the will and the affections or sensitivity are one, then, as a mere psychological fact, we must grant that volition is necessary; for nothing can be plainer than that the desires and affections necessarily follow the correlation of the sensitivity and its objects. But if we can distinguish in the consciousness, the will as a personal activity, from the sensitivity,—if we can distinguish volition from the strongest desire or the sense of the most agreeable,—then it will not follow, because the one is necessary, the other is necessary likewise, unless a necessary connexion between the two be also an observed fact of consciousness. This will be inquired into in another part of our undertaking. What we are now mainly concerned with, is Edwards’s argument against the conception of a will not necessarily determined. This he calls a contingent determination of will. We adopt the word contingent; it is important in marking a distinction.

Edwards, in his argument against a contingent determination, mistakes and begs the question under discussion.

1. He mistakes the question. Contingency is treated of throughout as if identical with chance or no cause. “Any thing is said to be contingent, or to come to pass by chance or accident, in the original meaning of such words, when its connexion with its causes or antecedents, according to the established course of things, is not discerned; and so is what we have no means of foreseeing. And especially is any thing said to be contingent or accidental, with regard to us, when it comes to pass without our foreknowledge, and beside our design and scope. But the word contingent is used abundantly in a very different sense; not for that whose connexion with the series of things we cannot discern so as to foresee the event, but for something which has absolutely no previous ground or reason with which its existence has any fixed and certain connexion.” (p. 31.)

Thus, according to Edwards, not only is contingent used in the same sense as chance and accident, in the ordinary and familiar acceptation of these words, but it is also gravely employed to represent certain phenomena, as without any ground, or reason, or cause of their existence; and it is under this last point of view that he opposes it as applied to the determination of the will. In part 2, sec. 3, he elaborately discusses the question—“whether any event whatsoever, and volition in particular, can come to pass without a cause of its existence;” and in sec. 4,—“whether volition can arise without a cause, through the activity of the nature of the soul.”

If, in calling volitions contingent,—if, in representing the determination of the will as contingent, we intended to represent a class of phenomena as existing without “any previous ground or reason with which their existence has a fixed and certain connexion,”—as existing without any cause whatever, and therefore as existing by chance, or as really self-existent, and therefore not demanding any previous ground for their existence,—it seems to me that no elaborate argument would be required to expose the absurdity of our position. That “every phenomenon must have a cause,” is unquestionably one of those primitive truths which neither require nor admit of a demonstration, because they precede all demonstration, and must be assumed as the basis of all demonstration.

By a contingent will, I do not mean a will which is not a cause. By contingent volitions, I do not mean volitions which exist without a cause. By a contingent will, I mean a will which is not a necessitated will, but what I conceive only and truly to be a free will. By contingent volitions, I mean volitions belonging to a contingent or free will. I do not oppose contingency to cause, but to necessity. Let it be supposed that we have a clear idea of necessity, then whatever is not necessary I call contingent.

Now an argument against contingency of will on the assumption that we intend, under this title, to represent volitions as existing without a cause, is irrelevant, since we mean no such thing.