Morals and the Evolution of Man

by Max Simon Nordau

That is the peculiarity of theological as distinguished from scientific thought, the purest form of which is mathematics. The former never follows a train of thought to its strictly logical conclusion, but only follows a certain distance, to a point where it loses itself in an impenetrable black fog, or in a cloud of glory which dazzles the beholder. Mathematical thought, on the contrary, develops the train of thought to the bitter end, to its ultimate conclusions. These are necessarily absurd if the premises are erroneous, and their absurdity is so clear that it convincingly proves the mistake in the point of departure. Such a scrupulous confutation of self is to be expected as little from mystic visions as from arrogant dogmatism. The former obey the laws of dreams, in which the association of ideas, unfettered by logic, holds sway and strings together the most incompatible ideas to form an apparently connected series; the latter demands the privilege of being independent of the judgment of Reason, and of being tried by Faith, a judge who always decides in its favour.

Those who believe in Free Will adduce a proof of it which they derive by the method of introspection. Man, they say, will never be convinced that he is not free, that his actions are not determined by his own will alone, for he has the incontrovertible consciousness of the contrary. He is quite clear on the point that he does a thing because it is his will to do so, that he had the choice of doing it or not, that he does what he wants, that he comes to his decision owing to considerations, inclinations, moods or intentions which are perfectly known to him, if to him only. At the Sorbonne in Paris they still remember the professor—when the anecdote was told me Victor Cousin was named as the hero, but I cannot guarantee that it was he and no other—who used to say in his lecture on Free Will: "Man's will is free. There is no need to prove this by giving reasons. We feel it immediately as a truth. I will show you. I will raise my right arm. I raise it"—here he raised his right arm with a commanding gesture, kept it for a short time in this position, and added triumphantly: "You see that my will is free." His hearers broke into enthusiastic applause at this triumphant demonstration. To-day they would receive it with loud laughter.

We have learnt to seek the roots of most, perhaps of all, human actions in the subconsciousness. There they are worked out under influences which cannot be perceived by introspection and in which inborn and acquired inclinations, experiences, organic conditions at the time, instincts, attractions and repulsions play a decisive part. They rise ready made into consciousness, and the latter, not having seen them being formed, persuades itself that it has produced them spontaneously, and imagines reasons why it willed to do actions that were determined outside its sphere. The professor who authoritatively states, "I wish to raise my right arm and therefore I do it," certainly says this in all good faith, but equally certainly he is ignorant. He is not aware of the play of forces which end in his gesture. He raises his right arm, which he believes he chooses with complete freedom, because he is in the habit of using his right arm by preference; if he had been left-handed he would have announced his wish to raise his left arm, and would have been equally convinced that he had decided, with complete freedom, for his left arm. If he suffered from chronic muscular rheumatism in one of his arms, so that it would trouble him or hurt him to move it, he would unconsciously choose the other, sound arm, and maintain just as positively that he had done so with complete freedom. I have mentioned as instances two particularly crude and therefore very obvious reasons which may determine the action of this simple-minded professor without his being aware of it. But each one of our more complicated, and even of our simplest, movements is the outcome of numberless subtle causes which are partly due to the organized experiences and habits of our individual life, partly a necessary consequence of our inherited qualities, our bodily and intellectual constitution, and their origin goes back to the far distant past of our species, to the beginnings of life, we may even say to eternity. Our consciousness can tell nothing of these causes. They elude our observation and investigation and remain ever unknown to us. Renouvier is quite right when he says no understanding—and I say without his ambiguity no human understanding of the present time—can foretell the actions of another, nor indeed his own, but not because they come to pass independently of inevitable causes, but simply because these causes cannot be descried by our ignorance.

It is vain labour to try and derive the solution of the question of Free Will, or even a contribution towards it, from introspection. It is a method unsuitable for this purpose. The Greek sage well knew what a great and difficult task he set man when he admonished him: "γνῶθι σεαυτόν." That is easy to say but difficult if not impossible to do. Spinoza very happily characterized the self-deception in which the individual is plunged with regard to the part played in determining his actions by his conscious Will aided by Reason; he says that if a stone, flung by some hand, had consciousness, it would imagine it was flying of its own free will; and in another place he points out without any illustrative metaphor, that a drunk man and a child, who certainly do not act on their own initiative, also believe in the freedom of their will. It has been possible to prove experimentally how ignorant of the real motives of his actions the individual may be. It is suggested to a person who has been hypnotized that on awakening he is to carry out a certain action, something particularly absurd, unjustified and aimless being intentionally chosen. The subject of the experiment on awaking faithfully carries out the suggestion, and as he has no memory of what happened while he was in the hypnotic state, he is convinced that he is yielding to a sudden idea, a whim, but that in any case his action is determined by his own will. But since he must realize the absurdity of what he is doing, he seeks for some sufficient motive to explain it, and always finds one to his own satisfaction.

All the efforts of anguished sophists to prove their thesis of the Freedom of the Will from data supplied by introspection have failed miserably. But they were forced to undertake them, for theology cannot give up the contention that man acts with free Will. It is an important part of the religious conception of the universe and of the relation in which, according to this, man stands to God.

To put it shortly, religion sees in man's life on earth a preparation for eternity. It gives him the opportunity of coming nearer to God by his own efforts and thus making himself worthy of the salvation which secures him a place in the sight of God to the end of time. Thus the life of the flesh is made a method of selection by which the sheep are sundered from the goats. God provides man with free Will for this special purpose, so that he may make use of it to choose good of his own accord and to avoid evil. This undoubtedly wearisome task is made much easier for him, because God in His goodness has given him laws, doctrines of Morality and examples which point out the way of salvation. If man makes proper use of his gifts, if in pursuance of divine admonition, he treads of his own free will the path of virtue, he acquires merit which gives him a legitimate claim to the reward of finding favour in God's eyes and to be admitted to the company of the just and pure. But if man purposely turns to evil, of which he is warned by revelation and which he has been given the power to avoid, then he is a sinner and deserves the punishment of damnation, which, however, he may yet escape if God in His mercy forgives him his sin. Therefore man holds in his hand the fate of his immortal soul. It depends on him whether this fate be salvation or damnation. He is responsible for directing it to the former or the latter. Of course, God has the power to force him to virtue and to stop him from vice. But it is not His plan to condemn man to be the slave of virtue. He wants man to choose virtue of his own accord, He wants noble souls about Him who by freedom have attained Morality.

This religious view of the universe, which deals in assertions and disdains on principle to prove even one of them to Reason by facts that can be tested, contrasts with the scientific view of the universe which asserts nothing but what can be objectively ascertained to be true, which distinguishes sharply between the account of what has been observed and can be tested by everyone and hypotheses for which it demands no belief, but only the recognition of their possibility or probability, and which it discards as soon as an ascertained fact definitely disproves them. No compromise is possible between these two views of the universe. Nothing can bridge the chasm between them. It would be superficial to say that the theme of the scientific view is realities and that of the religious one imagination. Imagination is also a reality, only of a different order to that which is called so in common parlance. It is a subjective reality; it exists only in the mind that conceives it. Reality itself is for the thinking mind only a state of consciousness, but it is an image of conditions which have an objective existence, though in another form, outside the consciousness. The supporters of religion maintain that there is an objective reality corresponding to their concepts, but this cannot be ascertained by any of the senses which the living organism has developed in order to establish a relation between the world, of which it is a part, and itself. It is perfectly useless for supporters of the one view of the universe to try and convince those of the other. Each of them moves on a different plane and is unapproachable to the other. All that can be done is to define both the one and the other as clearly as possible and prove their incompatibility.

For the scientific view of the Universe the problem of Free Will does not exist and cannot exist. All facts that science has observed force it to the assumption of causation, which does not only mean that every phenomenon is produced by a cause, is the effect of a cause and could never have occurred but for this cause, but also means that the effect represents the exact equivalent of the energy which was its cause. Thus the hypothesis of the indestructibility of the total energy in the universe is an essential part of the concept of causation, the fundamental hypothesis without which the phenomenon of the universe and the things which occur in it are simply unintelligible to Reason; and everything in and outside ourselves, everything that we perceive, becomes chaos, chance, lawless whim or miracle in the theological sense of the word.

It is inconceivable that an effect should be anything other than the reappearance in a different form of the exact quantity of energy that caused it; for if the energy of the effect exceeded that of its cause, then part of the effect would have been produced without cause; and if the energy of the effect fell short of that of the cause, then part of the energy of the cause would have been expended without producing an effect. That, however, would be the negation of causation, it would be an admission that part of the effect (i.e. an effect) could be produced without sufficient cause, i.e. out of nothing, and that a part of the cause (i.e. energy) could disappear (into nothing) without producing an equivalent effect, which is obviously absurd.

The human Will manifests itself by an action or the prevention of an action according to the impulse felt by our organism. Both these are an exercise of force, the amount of which can be measured. Indeed, inhibition, too, is a dynamical effort which represents the exact equivalent of the force with which the impulse which it has checked acted on the motory centres. The Will, therefore, expends energy which does work that can be measured. But the Will must derive this energy from some source. It therefore also only converts energy derived from the energy of the universe, the total amount of which can neither be augmented nor diminished; the Will consequently is a part of the dynamic energy of the universe, and must necessarily be subject to its mechanical law; that is, to the law of causation. It is therefore not free, but dependent, as is every phenomenon in the universe. Whoever maintains its freedom maintains that it is independent, that it is not subject to the law of causation, that it has no cause of which the elements, if they could be fully known to us, would be measurable, that it expends energy which it derives from nowhere, that it produces energy out of nothing. Whoever maintains this contradicts all experience from which the knowledge of Nature and her laws has been built up; it is obviously hopeless to expect a reasonable discussion with such a person.