“——And this main miracle that thou art thou,
With power on thine own act and on the world.”
Tennyson.
THERE is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, a question lying at the root of all ethics, a question which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion.”[125] This is “the question of late much agitated, Is life worth living?”[126] I confess that this question does not seem to me at all a radical or pressing one in comparison with another of which Mr. Spencer, in his Data of Ethics, takes no account whatever—the question whether we have any real choice in the way we ought to live so as to make life of value, or in other words whether there is an ‘ought’ in the business at all. Can any man regulate his own living? Is he not, even while he lives and thinks,
Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees,
as much a helpless victim of external forces as they are? Does the realm of natural law extend to human actions and volitions; and if so, must it not be an illusion to suppose that these can possess any ethical quality whatever?
A great deal of the perplexity attaching to the old problem, how to reconcile human free will with divine predestination and omniscience, has, it seems to me, been carried forward quite needlessly into the new problem of the reconciliation of free will with the reign of natural law. The problem in the old form which occupied Milton’s rebel angels has scarcely any meaning for modern thought. Human actions are a part of the world of phenomena, existing in time and space. When we think in that sphere of things we conceive the Deity as the synthesis of all things, and as the intellect can never arrive at this synthesis, it follows that we can never represent the Deity in terms of the intellect. An infinitely wise, infinitely good and powerful Being has no definable relation to the phenomenal world at all. Therefore there can be no question either of reconcilement or of opposition between the attributes of each. God has not planned beforehand the course of the world because (speaking in this sphere) God is the world—past, present, and to come; and His being is in process of completion by the world’s development. In another sphere, behind the veils of space and time, of causality and of sense, resides the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Love, approachable indeed by those who come to it “as a little child,” but evading the questionings of the intellect.
But the modern problem of Determinism and Free Will has meaning enough for us all, without bringing any transcendental relation into the question. Let us state briefly the position of the Determinists. It is held by them that every human thought—in fact, every mental change whether of the nature of volition, thought, or emotion—is a necessary effect of certain antecedent causes, just like every change in the material world. Every act of will is, on this view, the mechanically accurate resultant of two forces: (a) the particular nature of the man who wills; (b) the circumstances which supplied the occasion for the volition. It would seem to follow from this that no man can be held morally accountable for his actions. Were we sufficiently acquainted with his nature and with the course of external circumstances, we could predict his action throughout his whole lifetime as surely as we can foretell an eclipse. He is what he has been made by the circumstances of his life acting on the whole mental and temperamental make-up which he inherited from his parents. He does good or ill as a tree bears good fruit or bad according to its nature and to the treatment it has received.
The old theory of Free Will, which was content to declare that each man’s choice in any ethical situation presented to him by life was not imposed on him by the will of a Deity but was his own choice, thus making him responsible to God and man for his acts, evidently requires to be restated in view of the conception of scientific Determinism just described, which does not seek to impose on man the will of any other personal being. But when we come to restate it, the distinction between Free Will and Determinism appears to be by no means so clear and intelligible as it seemed at first sight. The essence of the Determinist theory is simply that the same man will always, under the same set of external circumstances, act in exactly the same way. But how far does the advocate of Free Will really deny this? Imagine a man whom we regard as a type of honour and integrity, a General Gordon, for instance, in the position of being offered a bribe to betray a trust reposed in him. We are quite assured that he would reject it, and that he would reject it again and again to the end of the chapter. So long as his mind and character remained unchanged, his action would never vary. Was his will therefore not free? And if so, how do we distinguish its freedom from scientific Determinism?