And this freedom cannot be merely the freedom of simple spontaneity or voluntariness. It must be the capacity of alternative choice.[27] There could not be real choice without capacity and room to elect between different possibilities. It is a well known definition: "Free will is possessed when, the conditions of doing something being given, one can either do or not do it."[28] A capacity simply to act, even though it should be through intelligence and consciousness, in a way that can have no alternative and allows no choice or option, could not open a field of personal virtue or responsibility. Where only one thing is really made possible in action, and that one possible thing is already somehow necessitated, there can be no place for choice. It presents no sphere for the exercise of election—even though the faculty of election should exist. A field of choice and the faculty of choice imply and call for each other. Both are necessary for the freedom implied in responsibility. Human responsibility rests on the possession of a real capacity to make decision between real alternatives. Without these there could be no more place for morality among men than there is among the atoms or molecules of the chemical elements in their behavior in the laboratory.
The proof of free-will, in this sense, might be left to rest upon the fact that it is a necessary pre-supposition to the very conception of morality and of actual accountability. This accountability, recognized in conscience and exacted by the constitution of the world, is an omnipresent and inerasable reality. So must free-will also be. Freedom is part of the moral idea, and the idea falls apart and lapses into contradiction and confusion without it. The same necessity that obliges us to accept the truth of morality itself, obliges us to assert free-will as an attribute of a moral nature and a condition of moral agency.
But the truth of freedom is sustained by other proofs. It is proper to recall and fix clearly in mind several of these.
(1) The testimony of consciousness. This is clear and explicit. We are directly conscious of free choice. And there can be no evidence more immediate and authoritative than that of consciousness. It is the form of evidence in which all psychical facts, activities, powers, and laws, are made known and stand certified in our knowledge. It is the certifying element for both the form and reality of all our knowing. It is that in which we "know that we know," and without which there can be no knowledge. It is, therefore, the foundation certitude. Our systems of science, our conclusions in philosophy, our intuitions into first truths and laws, and all the confidence with which we accept truth in all these great realms of mental life, rest back on the observations, reasonings and conclusions for whose reality and order consciousness is our most fundamental voucher. To its tests and verifications all the processes of knowing must submit. No truth is even visible except in the light in which consciousness holds all our acts and forms of intelligence. No form of our knowing can be surer than this. To discredit it is to discredit that without whose help not a step in knowledge can be taken. Upon this fundamental and unsurpassable evidence rests the great fact of free-will. No person, in the simple light of his unperverted and unperplexed consciousness, doubts his free-will. He finds himself in exercise and use of it every day and every hour. He knows himself to be perpetually making decisions within his own liberty, if he knows anything. The witness to it is direct, and he holds himself, and others hold him, responsible for his choices and the deeds he does in carrying them out. He deliberately and consciously elects his way through clearly seen open alternative possibilities. If he is to believe that in reality he does not do so, he must believe that his consciousness is a perpetual fraud upon him. But thus the authority for the reality of all his psychical capacities and acts is overthrown, and he does not "know that he knows" in any of his knowing.
It is not a sufficient answer to all this, when it is said that in this way of proof we are making the testimony of consciousness reach further than it actually does. Some psychologies undertake to limit consciousness to a disclosure of simply the actual volition, or other psychical acts, and not of acts or volitions which we imagine might have been but were not. Thus, it is said, the proof of another possible choice, as an alternative to that of the actual volition, fails to be covered by the consciousness. The supposed act is outside of its reach of purview and testimony. But such a psychology is untrue to the full deliverance of the consciousness. A just and full account of it, as is clearly seen in our experience, must hold it as covering not only the act of choice, but the power to choose. The human consciousness is a self-consciousness, and in it we truly know the personal self as the power for the various forms of activity which it reveals. Not more truly are we conscious of the power really to think or feel than really to choose, among diverse possibilities. We have direct knowledge of the power of electing in the very act of election. And thus, not only the untutored consciousness, but one trained to the sharpest and deepest self-inspection, will be found a full witness to free-will as a capacity of alternative choice.
(2) The implications of the natural constitution of the world. Mankind are in fact framed into and held under the principle of freedom. The whole system of which man forms a part answers to the testimony of consciousness. Bishop Butler, in his immortal Analogy, has shown with resistless clearness and force that in the constitutional organism of society and the experiences of actual life free-will is assumed for human nature.[29] Both by natural and moral law men are governed as free agents. The physical order of the earth, as a place where bodily and moral welfare are conditioned on obedience to discoverable relations and principles, pre-supposes human intelligence and liberty. Nature in her ongoings requires every individual to adjust himself carefully to its laws of health, safety and happiness. There is an incessant appeal to him to use his intelligence and liberty in accordance with the demands of his ever-changing conditions and relations in life. The idea that everything takes place by necessity is not only at variance with his sense of freedom, but is found utterly inapplicable in practical living. A youth, if such a case be supposed, trained under the notion that he must not be held responsible for his acts, since they take place by necessity, would soon find his dream of irresponsibility disturbed and disallowed. At every turn he would find the inexorable forces of nature and society refusing to recognize his claim. Government, law, administration, all the various functions through which human affairs are held together in orderly movement, assume the individual's power and obligation to determine his conduct and hold him chargeable with consequences. Though supposed speculatively true, the doctrine proves false in practice. It is in fact untrue to the constitution of human life. "The thing here insisted on," says Butler, "is that under the present natural government of the world we find ourselves treated and dealt with as if we were free, prior to all consideration whether we are or not. Were this opinion, therefore, of necessity admitted to be ever so true, yet such is in fact our condition and the natural course of things, that whenever we apply it to life and practice, this application of it always misleads us, and cannot but mislead us, in a most dreadful manner, with regard to our present interests." Beyond all question, as is evident to every thoughtful person, mankind deal one with another on the pre-supposition and principle of freedom, and of the responsibility which is ethically unthinkable except on that freedom. Personal, social, and governmental relations are framed upon this principle, and are a perpetual expression of it. Men universally treat each other—and under the actual inter-relations of life cannot but treat each other—as free beings. The inference is direct and necessary that they are such, unless we concede that human life is organized into a necessary order of living that is false to their real nature and unjust in its penalties.
(3) It is to be further noted that while freedom rests thus on the direct and positive evidence of consciousness and the actual order of life, the contrary doctrine of necessity or determinism arises only from assumptions or implications of speculative thought. This is a fact that needs to be clearly and fully fixed in mind. Necessitarianism is without any direct witness of consciousness, and is not forced or even suggested by the natural sense of mankind. It is not required as a working theory for the business or natural conduct of life. It is only a product of speculation or ideal theorizing. It is constructed from different standpoints of thought. In some speculation it rests simply on certain ontological assumptions, sometimes pantheistic as in Spinozism, sometimes materialistic as in non-theistic evolutionism. In both these cases freedom disappears in the absoluteness with which the substance of the universe unfolds into all its products and manifestations.[30] In some other speculations it appears as a conclusion from certain metaphysical views of the law of causation and its supposed application in the realm of psychical activity. In this form of theory every volition is viewed as standing in the relation of a mere effect to a cause which determines the will to it, in fixed connection and force of antecedence and consequence. The volition comes, it is represented, as the necessary result—not as a real choice by self-determining personality, but produced by environment, mental structure, and disposition. Not the ego or personal self, as free spirit endowed with capacity for real election, but the environment, motives, and disposition decide and fix the volition for the person, which by an illusion of consciousness appears as done by himself. In still other speculation necessitarianism comes as an inference from conceptions formed as to the divine sovereignty and the absoluteness with which it must direct creature movement. The doctrine thus has its plausibility, not from the conscious working of the human mind or the natural order of conduct and welfare, but as theoretical conclusions from certain forms of speculative thinking. It is therefore the product of metaphysical theorizing. It is not a datum of pure psychology. It is not taught by life. It is not known as a fact. It is not called for by the practical needs of daily self-direction. It has only secondary forms of suggestion and support—the precarious evidence from special theorizing in ontology and metaphysics. And it introduces more difficulties than it shuts off, while it collides with the moral consciousness of mankind and its sense of responsibility for conduct and the formation of character. In the light of these truths it ought not to be regarded as having any validity. It is surely incredible that the doctrine of necessity should be true when the actual constitution of human life, in all its personal, social, and governmental relations, requires us to treat it as false, being practically inapplicable. Utterly beyond belief is it that while the inexorable necessities of daily behavior bind us to the principle of freedom and responsibility, there should be in the real constitution of the world no actual freedom in deciding on choices or determining our conduct.[31] Moral agency must be free agency, in open alternatives of choice. It involves both the subjective capacity to choose and a realm for its exercise in diverse possibilities.
Sensibility and Actions.
4. Powers of sensibility and action, by which the dictates of conscience may be turned into actual conduct and character, complete the moral constitution.
(1) It has already been seen (pages 44–47) that in the complex action of the conscience itself the sensibility awakened in the form of emotion, as a feeling of obligation arising from a perception of obligation. This has already shown the sensibility to be a part of the moral organization. Conscience itself includes emotion. Duty perceived becomes duty felt, if the moral life is normal; and the feeling is motive-force for the choice and the fulfillment of duty. Emotional powers are thus constituent in the structure of man's moral nature. The moral emotions are occasions for ethical choices and deeds.