And this inner sense of peace or discord, according as we have acted thus or thus—this immediate consciousness that it lay with us to choose aright or amiss—is both anterior and superior to all argument; it asserts itself victoriously against all merely intellectual perplexities, such as are apt to arise when we ask ourselves how man could be free to commit or not to commit an act, in view of the Divine omniscience. The contradiction seems a stubborn one, yet in practice we never feel our freedom circumscribed by it. Probably our difficulty arises largely from the mistake of applying time-relations to God at all, and thinking of eternity as an enormously long period instead of timeless Present, excluding both "unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday." We, of course, have to think under the category of time, remembering and looking forward; but the Divine modus cognoscendi excludes either of these processes, being the timeless act of One who "knoweth altogether"—in whose sight a thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years. To the Eternal Intelligence, living in an unbeginning and unending Present, "past" and "future" must be equally unmeaning; to such a One we cannot but think that all events must be equally and simultaneously present, "for all live unto Him." If we could behold the drama of existence sub specie aeternitatis, we might be able to understand how {156} Divine omniscience can co-exist with human freedom; as it is, we can only say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for us—it is high, and we cannot attain unto it." We know that we cannot know. In any case, even while the Divine omniscience may present itself to us as a necessity of thought, human freedom remains a reality of experience and a postulate of morals.[9]
There are, however, those to whom human freedom presents itself, not as a contradiction to Divine omniscience, but as a contradiction in terms. Man's choice of a course of conduct, they argue, cannot be thought of as other than {157} determined by an efficient cause; but if it is so determined, in what sense can it be free? An uncaused act is strictly speaking unthinkable; but do we not affirm that acts are uncaused when we speak of them as free—in other words, is not the only alternative to Determinism what might be called _in_determinism? The answer is (a) that every choice is certainly the result of an efficient cause; but (b) the fact of this being so interferes in no wise with the reality of liberty, nor does it contradict the universality of the law of causation. For the efficient cause is the man himself, and the fact that he can choose is attested in the very act of choice—which would not be "choice" if there were not at least two real alternatives. We do not quarrel with the obvious truth, stated by Mill, that the will is determined by motives; we contest the assumption that a "free" act is an "uncaused" act. The act is caused or determined by the free choice of a causal self; in strict parlance, indeed, we should have to say that neither acts nor wills, but only human selves, are free. The will is not self-determined, but determined by a self; and this self is able not only to choose between different motives, but to attend to one set of motives to the neglect of others, and even to create motives in order to become able to make a difficult decision.
Let us, however, guard against a possible misconstruction by saying that there is all the difference between this conception of freedom {158} and the mere spontaneity which is recognised by the followers both of Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because he wants it; he is not free in the sense that he could have wanted something different.[12] Nothing could be more frank than Mr. Picton's statements on this point—as when he speaks of the "free man's" sense that "all things are of God, and could not have been otherwise:"
Of course the obvious retort occurs, (he continues,) that if indeed everything . . . occurs by invariable sequence, all this intellectual gospel of freedom is vain, and exhortations to its acceptance thrown away. And to those who are not satisfied with the freedom of conscious spontaneity, a condition in which we do just as we want to do, though our will is a link in an endless series of untraceable sequences, I suppose this objection must still be final.[13]
The objection is undoubtedly final, because it is absolutely valid; for by freedom we mean the ability to do or leave undone, to act thus or thus, and apart from such an ability moral judgments are quite unthinkable. Where we pronounce praise or blame, the tacit {159} presupposition is always that the object of the pronouncement could have acted differently; and this Spinozism denies.
The same remark applies to the teaching of that modern Absolute Idealism which declares, with Green, that man is his motives, and that he is "free" inasmuch as it is by his own motives that he is governed. It would be as accurate to call an automatic machine "free" on the ground that it is by its own works that it is moved. This is only, as Professor William James aptly calls it, "soft Determinism." If the automaton could decide to slacken or increase its rate of speed, to go or to stop as it liked and where it liked—above all, if it could aim at and devise improvements in its own mechanism so as to make itself a better automaton—it would then be appropriate to speak of it as free; only it would no longer be appropriate to call it an automaton. And similarly it is only if man is able to determine his course of action—if he can "choose" in any real sense, i.e., in the sense that he might choose differently, if he wished to do so—that it can be anything but an abuse of language to speak of him as free; for only in that case can he be an object of approbation or condemnation. If he is merely the sum-total of his motives, he is as little free to act other than he does as a number of chemical elements combined in certain proportions are free to form anything but a definite chemical substance. As {160} Mr. Balfour has well expressed it,[14] "It may seem at first sight plausible to describe a man as free whose behaviour is due to 'himself' alone. But without quarrelling over words, it is, I think, plain that whether it be proper to call him free or not, he at least lacks freedom in the sense in which freedom is necessary in order to constitute responsibility. It is impossible to say of him that he 'ought,' and therefore he 'can,' for at any given moment of his life his next action is by hypothesis strictly determined." But the freedom of which we are conscious—e.g., in every experience of conflict between inclination and duty—is something altogether different; we know that we can yield or resist, choose between, reinforce, and if necessary make, our motives.[15]
{161}
But is not sin, it is sometimes asked, inevitable per se, and in that sense natural to man, and if so, how can we be blamed for what we could not avoid? And again, is there not some truth in the statement that much that we call evil has been incidental to the progress of the race, just as the discords produced by the learner on a musical instrument are necessary incidents in the process which will teach him by and by to charm the ear with the perfect harmony? Such questions are frequently put forward; let us see if we are able to clear away the misunderstandings to which they bear witness.
(1) Admitting that a free moral being must be able in theory to choose the wrong as well as the right, it should in the first place be observed that the possibility of that or any course does not render it inevitable for him to take it, and it is only the possibility that is given. But it may be justly argued that since as a matter of fact all men sin, we cannot pretend that we are merely dealing with a theoretical possibility, but must pronounce sin to be de facto natural to man as well as inevitable—for who has ever avoided it? Let us observe what follows: this, and no more, that sin is "natural" only in the sense in which disease is "natural"—viz., as a disorder to which the human frame may become subject, but nevertheless a disorder. As physical disease entails a diminution of physical life, so sin entails a diminution of {162} our moral and spiritual life, an alienation of the soul from God; and while anyone may thus choose to describe sin—the wilful misuse of faculties lent us for other ends—as natural, it is significant that the result of sin is quite _un_natural, viz., a state of disunion between the soul and God. So much is this the case that the aim of all religion is to bring about a cessation of this unhappy state, and to effect the healing of the discord created by man's transgression. True religion treats sin, not as an error to be explained away, but as a wall of partition to be broken down; the essential aim of religion is atonement, man's reconciliation to God.
(2) But it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, then, sin be claimed as constituting part of the Divine plan? And if such was the case once, may it not be the case still? Here we are dealing with a very obvious confusion; for while man is in a low and undeveloped state, a good many acts which would be sins if committed by people on a higher level, have not that character at all. It is quite impossible, e.g., to read the Homeric poems and find in them any trace or indication that deceit, war and massacres are {163} regarded with so much as moral distaste; the men of the Homeric age had simply not risen to that moral height, and it would be futile to judge them by the standards of a more advanced civilisation. Undoubtedly, in its slow evolution from sub-human origins, the race passes through long sub-moral stages during which the animal instincts—"moods of tiger or of ape"—are still in the ascendant; it is only gradually that man becomes aware of certain practices with shame, disgust or remorse, and it is only then that we can begin to speak of the indulgence of the passions which prompt those practices as "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin, or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind, acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even when our moral perceptions have thus been quickened, we shall not always "rule our province of the brute" with a strong hand—true also that, owing to our earthly nature, "in many things we all stumble;" but so far from viewing these failures complacently, they ought to spur us to more earnest endeavours to leave our lower inheritance behind. The truth {164} concerning the "inevitableness" of sin was stated by our Lord when He said, "It must needs be that occasions"—viz., of stumbling—"come; but woe to that man through whom the occasion cometh." Sin as such, as an "occasion," is inevitable; but for any particular sin, for acting contrarily to the known best, the individual is responsible—and greatest of all is the responsibility of one who knowingly and of design becomes an "occasion of stumbling" to another, making sin more difficult to avoid, or positively inciting another to wrong-doing. We do not forget the inequalities of moral endowment, nor do we leave out of sight that a temptation which for one man scarcely so much as exists may prove well-nigh irresistible to another; but the judgment upon each is in the wise and Fatherly hands of Him who knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust.