Reader. Do you adopt this view?
Büchner. Of course. “Man is a product of nature in body and mind. Hence not only what he is, but also what he does, wills, feels, and thinks, depends upon the same natural necessity as the whole structure of the world” (ibid.)
Reader. Then free-will, according to you, would be a mere dream; political and religious freedom would be delusions; free-thinkers could never exist; and, what may perhaps strike you most of all, Free-masons would be actual impossibilities.
Büchner. “The connection of nature is so essential and necessary that free-will, if it exists, can only have a very limited range” (ibid.)
Reader. What! Do you mean that free-will can exist, if “what man does, wills, feels, and thinks depends upon the same natural necessity as the whole structure of the world”? Can you reconcile necessity and freedom?
Büchner. “Human liberty, of which all boast,” says Spinoza, “consists solely in this, that man is conscious of his will, and unconscious of the causes by which it is determined” (ibid.)
Reader. This answer does not show that liberty and necessity can be reconciled. It would rather show, if it were true, that there is no liberty; for if the human will is determined by any cause distinct [pg 418] from itself, its volition cannot be free. Accordingly, your assertion that “free-will, if it exist, can only have a very limited range,” is inconsistent with your principle of natural, essential, and universal necessity, and should be changed into this: “Free-will cannot exist, even within the most limited range.” If you admit the principle, you must not be afraid of admitting the consequence; or if you shrink from the consequence, it is your duty to abandon the principle from which it descends.
Büchner. “The view I have expressed is no longer theoretical, but sufficiently established by facts, owing to that interesting new science, statistics, which exhibits fixed laws in a mass of phenomena that until now were considered to be arbitrary and accidental. The data for this truth are frequently lost in investigating individual phenomena, but, taken collectively, they exhibit a strict order inexorably ruling man and humanity. It may without exaggeration be stated that at present most physicians and practical psychologists incline to the view in relation to free-will that human actions are, in the last instance, dependent upon a fixed necessity, so that in every individual case free choice has only an extremely limited, if any, sphere of action” (p. 240).
Reader. “Limited, if any”! It is strange that you hesitate to say which of the two you mean to advocate. Why do you not say clearly, either that free-will has a certain sphere of action, or that it has no existence at all? Instead of explaining your opinion on this point, you try to obscure the question. Individual free-will is to be ascertained by the statistics of the individual, not by that of the collection.
When a crowd moves towards a determinate spot, individuals are carried on to the same spot, be they willing or unwilling, by the irresistible wave that presses onward. So also when any collection of men, from a nation to a family, lives under the same laws, experiences the same wants, enjoys the same rights, and holds the same practical principles, the general movement of the mass carries in the same direction every individual member of the collection, by creating such conditions all around him as will morally compel his following the general movement. But this is only moral necessity, against which man can rebel in the same manner as he can rebel against the divine or the human law; whereas our question regards the existence or non-existence of a physical necessity, physically binding the human will, and determining every one of its actions. Hence, even were it true that “a strict order inexorably rules humanity”—that is, the collection of human beings—it would not follow that the individual will is inexorably ruled by a physical necessity.