Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

by T. W. Rolleston

We shall find that while the statement of the Determinist position is quite easy and simple, the statement of Free Will, the explanation of what we really mean when we talk of the will being ‘free,’ is, when we look closely into it, a matter of much intricacy. Believers in Free Will, says J. S. Mill in his essay ‘On Social Freedom,’ are those who “believe, in fact, that they themselves can, within certain limits, do what they please.”[127] This is, indeed, the answer which comes at once to the lips of the average man when Socratically interrogated as to what he means by Free Will. But the nature of the limits is just the critical part of the question. I cannot fly because I please. I cannot write a line of poetry because I please. Can I live a saintly life because I please? Perhaps not, it may be replied; but after all Free Will does not essentially mean the external fact of doing, it means the internal act of choosing—let us substitute the word ‘choose’ for the word ‘do’ and see what we arrive at. Very well, then; I can choose what I please: let us try this formula. But at once we perceive that this is a tautological expression, for what I ‘please’ to do is simply what I choose. So the formula is finally stripped to this bare expression, ‘I can choose.’ But now the Determinist will say, ‘Who denies it?’ The psychological process known as ‘choosing’ is within every one’s experience. The question as to what governs the choice remains untouched. The core of the problem, then, has been found to lie not in the word ‘do,’ not in the word ‘please,’ not in the word ‘choose.’ Where is it then? It is not in ‘can,’ for ‘I can choose’ adds nothing philosophically to the contents of ‘I choose.’

The core of the problem is the word ‘I.’ And until we have settled what ‘I’ am, we shall not reach a clear issue between Free Will and Determinism.

So the test which we have applied to human actions with a view to finding out whether they conform to law as do physical phenomena or not—the test, namely, whether they always come out the same under the same circumstances or not—breaks down. The ‘circumstances’ include the man himself, and the question ‘What is a man?’ turns out to be the real point at issue.

The Determinist usually belongs to a school which has a clear and simple answer to this question. Man, for him, is a complex of vessels, nerves, ganglia, and molecular configurations of brain matter responding to external stimuli as uniformly and inevitably as a plant. Consciousness is merely a sort of by-product of this mechanism, which would go on just the same without it.[128]

But this view is in direct contradiction to the deepest and clearest deliverance of human consciousness, which affirms that I am a deliberative and ruling Mind, and bids me regard my Will as Reason in action. I seem to know this so intimately and profoundly that if it is an illusion there appears to be nothing else in the world of which I can ever venture to feel sure. We know the outside world only at two removes. The external object has first to impress itself in some as yet unexplained manner on our physical organism, and the latter has then in a manner equally mysterious to produce a state of consciousness in the observer. But consciousness, in Man, can turn upon and interrogate itself; it is subject and object in one; and its deliverances, so far as they go, so far as they are pure deliverances of consciousness with no argumentative deduction subtly mingled with them, are the truest things we know or ever can know. I do not see how they can possibly be brought to the test by any other kind of knowledge: they are the test of everything.

We find, then, that when we talk of ‘free’ choice as the prerogative of man what we mean at bottom is the choice of a self-determining Mind. We find, also, that while for every event in the physical world we are obliged to assume an antecedent cause, we are under no such obligation as regards Mind. When we have traced any sequence of causes and effects up to a Mind, we require to go no further. We can conceive a self-determining Mind. If man is such, or so far as he is such, his will is what we call free.

But to say that we are profoundly conscious of the existence of our will does not by any means get rid of the difficulties connected with this belief, and it is incumbent on us either to attempt a solution of them or frankly to dismiss them as, for the present, insoluble.

If possible, to begin with, we must obtain a clear idea of the difference of the will from other forms of vital action.

At one end of the ascending scale of organic life we see an animalcule swimming in the direction in which it is attracted by food. At the other end, we find a man in the full flush of conscious life going deliberately to a shocking death rather than deny his faith or break a trust. What is the essential difference between the action of the animalcule and that of the martyr? To the Determinist there is none. Both are alike the inevitable response to certain stimuli from the outside world acting on a certain nervous system. But there is one difference in the circumstances of the action which will be admitted by all. The animalcule has no choice. The martyr has. The animalcule-consciousness has not been developed to the point at which it can take in alternative courses of action and compare them with one another. It is doubtful to me whether any of the lower animals or even of the lower races of man can really do this. At any rate there can clearly be no Will where there is no distinct consciousness of at least two possible courses of action. The Will, therefore, must be regarded as coming for the first time into action when a certain stage in the development of consciousness has been reached, the stage at which man is fully conscious of more than one motive. Furthermore, even when the consciousness has been developed to this point we cannot recognize a true act of will unless, on that particular occasion, two or more motives were fully present. For instance, a lad brought up in a thieves’ kitchen, when he sees an opportunity for stealing a purse, cannot properly be said to have any counter-motive to the theft. And common sense, without having philosophically analyzed the matter, quite recognizes this position of affairs and graduates the moral responsibility of every criminal action roughly in accordance with the facilities which the subject has had for ‘knowing better.’