[127] Oxford and Cambridge Review, June, 1907. Sic also Bishop Berkeley, Alciphron, Dial. VII, 19, “A man is said to be free, so far forth as he can do what he will.” Berkeley’s analysis of this statement is substantially the same as that in the text.
[128] Herbert Spencer, translating these physical terms into their psychic equivalents, declares that the illusion of Free Will “consists in supposing that at each moment the ego is something more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists” (Psychology, I, p. 500). The pivot of the doctrine is the word aggregate. We have seen that the most primitive living organism is something more than that. Cf. p. [119] note.
[129] Of course they are only relatively lower—there are no essentially ‘low’ motives in life at all.
[130] The Will to Believe—‘The Dilemma of Determinism,’ p. 145 sqq.
[131] Pragmatism, pp. 287-8. Compare Bishop Berkeley. “To me it seems, that if we begin from Things particular and concrete, and thence proceed to general Notions and Conclusions, there will be no Difficulty in this Matter. But if we begin with Generalities, and lay our Foundation in abstract Ideas, we shall find ourselves entangled and lost in a Labyrinth of our own making.” Alciphron, Dial. vii. 20. Berkeley had fully apprehended the Determinist position; see vii. 16.
[132] p. 129, 5th edition, 1878. There is an evident fallacy in Mill’s position. The Deity who could make a hell and sentence men to it for not worshipping him could not also have created the conscience which would resist him. The authorship of the moral sense and of hell are not to be combined in our conception of the divine. But Mill, of course, in this flash of rhetoric, was merely taking popular religious conceptions as he found them.
[133] p. 298.
[134] Plato, in that great dialogue, the Phaedo, has a noteworthy passage on those who when once betrayed by Reason are apt to fall into unbelief or superstition, just as those who, when they have found bad faith among men, may fall into cynicism:—
“Would it not, Phaedo,” said Socrates, “be a lamentable condition, when a certain thesis is true, firm, and intelligible, if a man supporting something of the kind should find arguments which seemed true at one time to be false at another, and in the end, instead of blaming himself or his own want of skill, should, in his ill-temper, make haste to shuffle off the blame from his own shoulders to Reason itself, and spend the rest of his life in hating and slandering it, being deprived of the truth and science of things?”
“By Zeus,” said I, “it would be lamentable.”