I think that I have now established the verbal ambiguity that I undertook to bring home to Kant’s account of Free Will; I have shown that in his exposition this fundamental term oscillates between incompatible meanings. But it may, perhaps, be thought that the defect thus pointed out can be cured by a merely verbal correction: that the substance of Kant’s ethical doctrine may still be maintained, and may still be connected with his metaphysical doctrine. It may still be held that Reason dictates that we should at all times act from a maxim that we can will to be a universal law, and that we should do this from pure regard for reason and reason’s law, admitting that it is a law which we are free to disobey; and it may still be held that the reality of this moral freedom is to be reconciled with the universality of physical causation by conceiving it as a relation between the agent’s noümenal self—independent of time-conditions—and his character as manifested in time; the only correction required being to avoid identifying Freedom and Goodness or Rationality as attributes of agents or actions.

I should quite admit that the most important parts both of Kant’s doctrine of morality, and of his doctrine of Freedom may be saved:—or I should perhaps rather say that the latter may be left to conduct an unequal struggle with the modern notions of heredity and evolution: at any rate I admit that it is not fundamentally affected by my present argument. But I think that a good deal more will have to go from a corrected edition of Kantism than merely the “word” Freedom in certain passages, if the confusion introduced by the ambiguity of this word is to be eliminated in the manner that I have suggested. I think that the whole topic of the “heteronomy” of the will, when it yields to empirical or sensible impulses, will have to be abandoned or profoundly modified. And I am afraid that most readers of Kant will feel the loss to be serious; since nothing in Kant’s ethical writing is more fascinating than the idea—which he expresses repeatedly in various forms—that a man realises the aim of his true self when he obeys the moral law, whereas, when he wrongly allows his action to be determined by empirical or sensible stimuli, he becomes subject to physical causation, to laws of a brute outer world. But if we dismiss the identification of Freedom and Rationality, and accept definitely and singly Kant’s other notion of Freedom as expressing the relation of the human thing-in-itself to its phenomenon, I am afraid that this spirit-stirring appeal to the sentiment of Liberty must be dismissed as idle rhetoric. For the life of the saint must be as much subject—in any particular portion of it—to the necessary laws of physical causation as the life of the scoundrel: and the scoundrel must exhibit and express his characteristic self-hood in his transcendental choice of a bad life, as much as the saint does in his transcendental choice of a good one. If, on the other hand, to avoid this result, we take the other horn of the dilemma, and identify inner freedom with rationality, than a more serious excision will be required. For, along with ‘Neutral’ or ‘Moral’ Freedom, the whole Kantian view of the relation of the noümenon to the empirical character will have to be dropped, and with it must go the whole Kantian method of maintaining moral responsibility and moral imputation: in fact, all that has made Kant’s doctrine interesting and impressive to English advocates of Free Will (in the ordinary sense), even when they have not been convinced of its soundness.

INDEX

THE END

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FOOTNOTES

[1] I did not mean to exclude the supposition that two or more alternatives might under certain circumstances be equally right (1884).