In the above chapter I must not be understood as pretending to settle the thorny question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in a limited region, can be used to contradict freedom of the will, under generalised conditions, in the Universe as a whole.
Nevertheless there are things which may perhaps be usefully said, even on the larger and much-worn topic of the present note. If we still endeavour to learn as much as possible from human analogies, examples are easy:—
An architect can draw in detail a building that is to be; the dwellers in a valley can be warned to evacuate their homesteads because a city has determined that a lake shall exist where none existed before. Doubtless the city is free to change its mind, but it is not expected to; and all predictions are understood to be made subject to the absence of disturbing, i.e. unforeseen, causes. Even the prediction of an eclipse is not free from a remote uncertainty, and in the case of the return of meteoric showers and comets the element of contingency is not even remote.
But it will be said that to higher and superhuman knowledge all possible contingencies would be known and recognised as part of the data. That is quite possibly, though not quite certainly, true: and there comes the real difficulty of reconciling absolute prediction of events with real freedom of the actors in the drama. I anticipate that a complete solution of the problem must involve a treatment of the subject of time, and a recognition that "time," as it appears to us, is really part of our human limitations. We all realise that "the past" is in some sense not non-existent but only past; we may readily surmise that "the future" is similarly in some sense existent, only that we have not yet arrived at it; and our links with the future are less understood. That a seer in a moment of clairvoyance may catch a glimpse of futurity—some partial picture of what perhaps exists even now in the forethought of some higher mind—is not inconceivable. It may be after all only an unconscious and inspired inference from the present, on an enlarged and exceptional scale; and it is a matter for straightforward investigation whether such prevision ever occurs.
The following article, on the general subject of "Free Will and Determinism," reprinted from the Contemporary Review for March 1904, may conveniently be here reproduced:—
The conflict between Free Will and Determinism depends on a question of boundaries. We occasionally ignore the fact that there must be a subjective partition in the Universe separating the region of which we have some inkling of knowledge from the region of which we have absolutely none; we are apt to regard the portion on our side as if it were the whole, and to debate whether it must or must not be regarded as self-determined. As a matter of fact any partitioned-off region is in general not completely self-determined, since it is liable to be acted upon by influences from the other side of the partition. If the far side of the boundary is ignored, then an observer on the near side will conclude that things really initiate their own motion and act without stimulation or motive, in some cases, whereas the fact is that no act is performed without stimulus or motive; even irrational acts are caused by something, and so also are rational acts. Madness and delirium are natural phenomena amenable to law.
But in actual life we are living on one side of a boundary, and are aware of things on one side only; the things on this side appear to us to constitute the whole universe, since they are all of which we have any knowledge, either through our senses or in other ways. Hence we are subject to certain illusions, and feel certain difficulties,—the illusion of unstimulated and unmotived freedom of action, and the difficulty of reconciling this with the felt necessity for general determinism and causation.
If we speak in terms of the part of the universe that we know and have to do with, we find free agencies rampant among organic life; so that "freedom of action" is a definite and real experience, and for practical convenience is so expressed. But if we could seize the entirety of things and perceive what was occurring beyond the range of our limited conceptions we should realise that the whole was welded together, and that influences were coming through which produced the effects that we observe.
Those philosophers, if there are any, who assert that we are wholly chained bound and controlled by the circumstances of that part of the Universe of which we are directly aware—that we are the slaves of our environment and must act as we are compelled by forces emanating from things on our side of the boundary alone,—those philosophers err.
This kind of determinism is false; and the reaction against it has led other philosophers to assert that we are lawlessly free, and able to initiate any action without motive or cause,—that each individual is a capricious and chaotic entity, not part of a Cosmos at all!