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

by T. W. Rolleston

Two or more motives, then, fully present to consciousness, form the conditions under which alone the Will can be said to act. This is in accord with the whole scheme of evolution. The presence of certain conditions gradually evokes the faculty or organ which deals with them. But here an important question arises. When these motives differ from each other morally, can the Will be said ever to choose the evil one? Has it any moral bent? And if not, what is the use of it?

There is no doubt that the ascription to the Will of a certain moral character, and that a very lofty one, is characteristic of nearly all thinkers who accept its existence at all. “Ill for him,” writes Tennyson in lines of Sophoclean dignity,

“Who, bettering not with time
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,”

as though evil came from the corruption and slackness of Will, not from its wrong direction.

In the ethics of Plato it was a cardinal principle that men did evil only through ignorance. Make the soul conscious of goodness, and it could not fail to follow it. Yet it seems that this doctrine, strongly as it appeals to the moral sense of man, would, if held with philosophic rigour, really make the Will unfree. No man can truly choose the good who is unable to choose the evil. The Platonic doctrine may, however, be fully accounted for, and even put in a form in which it can, to a great extent, be justified, if we give weight to the following considerations. Moral action is usually recognized in the renunciation of a strong personal gratification for the sake of some social or other altruistic end. Now in such cases we are always sure that the two motives have been duly present, the moral motive, for otherwise it would not have been followed, and the personal motive, for these are common to all living things, they are at the base of our being, and our own experience tells us only too well how insistent and powerful such motives are. The volitional character of such an act is therefore manifest. But if the lower motive be followed, the significance of the event is more obscure. For we all understand these lower motives,[129] and they are fairly uniform over the whole of humanity. We can always take for granted that they are present in full force. The martyr undoubtedly hates the idea of being burnt. But we are not so sure of the other class of motives. We cannot in every case feel certain (unless the event has verified it) that they were distinctly in view, for man’s moral nature is still only at the beginning of its development, we are still far from having evolved anything like a universal moral code, not to speak of the instincts for obeying it. We are inclined to assume, therefore, and I think we are perfectly right in assuming, that when the Will appears in human action it is far more often to good purpose than to evil. In order that it may be free to act on any ethical question, there must be a sufficient degree of ethical development; the character of moral worth must have been impressed upon the spirit. In the strength and stay which it affords to such a spirit, the faculty of Will is most clearly recognized and honoured.

We are now in a position to meet one of the gravest of the objections which have been brought against the doctrine of Free Will. If temperament and circumstance, it is urged, determine human action, there is, of course, no place for the Will—it is a mere illusion. But if Will is present and is supreme, how can temperament and circumstance play the part they manifestly do—how does the history of man come to present, as we have seen, an aspect so strikingly similar to that of the orderly evolution of physical organisms under natural law? If you bring in Will at all as an arbiter of human action, do you not thereby drive out everything else?

The answer will be clear to those who accept the foregoing analysis of the elements of choice. The Will is neither a faculty of perception nor a faculty of judgment, but a power of free choice. Free as it is, it can only act on what is presented to it; and here, beyond question, it is subject to serious limitations. Every man has round his soul, as it were, a refracting medium, through which the external objects that excite the Will to action must normally pass before they reach the centres of decision and control. And this medium is probably never quite the same in any two individuals. Often it is very widely different. The sight of an unguarded heap of treasure may appear to one man simply in the aspect of a perfectly legitimate opportunity for enriching himself. To another man it may come as a violent temptation to do what he knows in his soul to be wrong. A third, equally needy, equally capable of enjoying all that wealth represents, may never have a thought on the subject except that of protecting the treasure for its true owner. The object is the same, the physical perception of it is the same, but the ‘apperception’ in each case is as different as Peter Bell’s perception of the “primrose by the river’s brim” was from that of Wordsworth. This difference is caused by the modifying influence of temperament, training, all that forms a man’s disposition, whether acquired or inherited. It is as though each man moved in an atmosphere, an aura of his own which colours all the objects of his thought. Whether every invitation to action that can be presented to the Will must necessarily pass through this aura is a very obscure question and one on which I do not at present wish to dogmatize. But it is certain that the great majority pass through it.

Thus on every occasion where the Will is exercised, it has to act not only on the facts which are perceived but as they are perceived. Now so far as the influence of what is called apperception is concerned we are in the realm of natural law. Each man, to that extent, is unquestionably under the dominion of his environment, that is to say of geographic, historic, social, and other influences which affect whole communities, and which vary but slowly when they vary at all. The Will, in fact, acts within the framework of nature and its laws exactly as does that directive agency to which, in the view of the writer, is to be attributed the phenomenon of progressive evolution from lower forms of life to higher forms, that is, from forms which admit of less life to those which admit of more. The Will is really this directive agency coming into consciousness in Mind.

In all life, whether human, animal, or material, there is an element of change and an element of constancy. Between these poles it moves and has its being, nor could life, as we know it, exist for a moment if either of these two opposing but complementary principles were withdrawn. We have now seen that with a full belief in the innovating and incalculable quality of the Will, with the infinite vistas which that belief opens up to human hope and effort, there is yet ample room for the opposing and equally necessary element in life, the element of constancy, uniformity, law. Human Will does not come into nature as a catastrophic force—it develops pari passu with the development of consciousness; and it will naturally be found in its highest development where the whole nature is most wholesomely attuned to the purposes of the cosmic Will.

We have now to notice certain grave objections which every student of modern science and philosophy will expect to see dealt with by a defender of the principle of Free Will.