The general question is thus stated by Mr. Hobbes in the beginning of his treatise: the point is not, he says, ‘whether a man can be a free agent; that is to say, whether he can write or forbear, speak or be silent, according to his will, but whether the will to write, and the will to forbear, come upon him according to his will, or according to any thing else in his own power. I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say—I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech. In fine, that freedom which men commonly find in books, that which the poets chaunt in the theatres, and the shepherds on the mountains, that which the pastors teach in the pulpits, and the doctors in the universities, and that which the common people in the markets, and all mankind in the whole world do assent unto, is the same that I assent unto, namely, that a man hath freedom to do if he will, but whether he hath freedom to will is a question neither the bishop nor they ever thought on.’
All in which I differ from Hobbes is, that I think there is a real freedom of choice and will, as well as of action, in the sense of the author, that is, not a freedom from necessity or causes in either case, but a liberty in any given agent to exert certain powers without being controlled or impeded in their exercise by another agent.
Helvetius says, ‘It is true we can form a tolerably distinct idea of the word liberty, understood in a common sense. A man is free who is neither loaded with irons, nor confined in prison, nor intimidated like the slave by the dread of chastisement: in this sense, the liberty of a man consists in the free exercise of his power: I say of his power, because it would be ridiculous to mistake for a want of liberty the incapacity we are under to pierce the clouds like the eagle, to live under the water like the whale, or to become king, emperor, or pope. We have so far a sufficiently clear idea of the word. But this is no longer the case when we come to apply liberty to the will. What must this liberty then mean? We can only understand by it a free power of willing or not willing a thing: but this power would imply that there may be a will without motives, and consequently an effect without a cause. A philosophical treatise on the liberty of the will would be a treatise of effects without a cause.’—Helvetius on the Mind, p. 44.
Now I cannot perceive why there is any more difficulty in annexing a meaning to the word liberty, as it relates to the faculties of the mind than as it relates to those of the body, or why a treatise of the one should be a treatise of effects without a cause any more than of the other. If the distinction between liberty and necessity is lost in this case, it is not because liberty but because necessity can have no place in the will, or because we cannot easily put a padlock on the mind. If the prisoner who has his chains struck off, walks or runs, dances or leaps, is this an instance of an effect without a cause, because it is an effect of liberty, or of what Helvetius calls the free exercise of his power? Not that he can exert this power without means or motives, that is, without ground to move on, or limbs to move with, or breath to draw, or will to impel him, but ‘with all these means and appliances to boot’ he has a power to do certain things which his chains deprived him of the liberty of doing, but which the striking them off restores to him again. Why then, if liberty does not in its common sense signify an effect without a cause, but the free exercise of a power, did it not signify the same thing or something similar as applied to the mind? Has the mind no powers, or are they necessarily impeded and hindered from operating? My notion of a free agent, I confess, is not that represented by Mr. Hobbes, namely, one that when all things necessary to produce the effect are present can nevertheless not produce it; but I believe a free agent of whatever kind, is one which where all things necessary to produce the effect are present, can produce it; its own operation not being hindered by any thing else. The body is said to be free when it has the power to obey the direction of the will: so the will may be said to be free when it has the power to obey the dictates of the understanding. The absurdity of the libertarians is in supposing that liberty of action, and liberty of will have the same identical source, viz. the will; or that as it is the will that moves the body, so it is the will that moves itself in order to be free.
Mr. Locke’s chapter ‘On Power,’ in the first volume of the Essay, contains his account of liberty and necessity, and has been more found fault with than any other part of his work; I think without reason. He seems evidently to have admitted the definition of necessity, though he has avoided the name, which is not much to be wondered at, considering the misconception to which it is liable, and which can scarcely be separated from it in the closest reasoning, much less as a term of general signification. In other words, he denies the power of the mind to act without a cause or motive, or, in any manner in any circumstances, from mere indifferency and absolute self motion; but he at the same time rejects the inference which has been drawn from this principle, that the mind is not an agent at all, but entirely subject to external force or blind impulse. What he has said is little more than an expansion of Hobbes’s general description of practical liberty, ‘that it is a power to do, if we will.’ Thus, according to Mr. Locke, it would not be so absurd to give a restive horse the spur or the whip to make him go straight forward on a plain road, as it would be in order to make him leap up a precipice a hundred feet high. The one the horse has a power or liberty to do if he will, the other he has no power to do at any rate. That is, here are two sorts of impediments, one that may be overcome, and which it is right to take means to overcome, and another which cannot be overcome, and which it is therefore absurd to meddle with. To say that these two necessities are in effect the same, is an abuse of language; yet for not lumping them together in the dashing style of our modern wholesale dealers in paradox, Mr. Locke has been made the subject of endless abuse and contumely. The difference between them, as stated by this author with great force and earnestness of feeling, in truth constitutes all that men in general mean when they talk of freedom of will, and make it, as in this sense it is, the ground-work of morality. There are certain powers which the mind has of governing not only the actions of the body, but of regulating its own thoughts and desires, and it is to make us exert these powers that all the distinctions, rules and sanctions of morality have been established. It must be ridiculous to attempt to make us do, what upon the face of the thing it was known we could not do; yet it is on this literal and unqualified interpretation of the term, as implying a flat impossibility of the contrary, an utter incapacity and helplessness in the mind, a concurrence of causes foreign to the will itself, and irresistible in their effect, and with which it must therefore be in vain to contend, that most of the consequences from the doctrine of necessity have been built; such as that reward and punishment are absurd and improper, that virtue and vice are words without a meaning, that the assassin is no more a moral or accountable agent than the dagger which he uses, and many others of the same stamp. The sword and the assassin would be equally moral and accountable agents, if they were both equally accessible to moral motives, that is, to reward and punishment, praise and blame, &c.; but they are not. This seems to be a distinction of great pith and moment. It is said to be a mere difference of words; at least it makes all the difference whether such motives as reward and punishment, praise and blame, should be applied or not, and this one should think was a difference of practice. It is objected, indeed, that still both are equally necessary agents. But this appears to me to be a confusion of words. It is in vain to exhort flame not to burn, or to be angry with poison for working: and it would be equally in vain to exhort men to certain actions or to resent others, if exhortation and resentment had no more effect upon them, that is, if they were really governed by the same sort of blind, physical, unreasoning, unresisting necessity. In fact, the latest necessarians have abandoned the true, original, philosophical meaning of the term, in which it implies no more than the connection between cause and effect, and have substituted for it the prejudiced notion of their adversaries, who confound it with mechanical necessity, ‘fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute,’ or the unconditional fiat of omnipotence.
The following extracts which I shall condense as much as I can consistently with the nature of the argument, will shew the view which Mr. Locke has taken of this subject. I would only observe, by the by, that I so far agree with Hobbes and differ from Mr. Locke, in thinking that liberty in the most extended and abstract sense is applicable to material as well as voluntary agents; moral liberty, i.e. freedom of will evidently is not, because such agents have no such faculty.
‘All the actions that we have any idea of,’ says my author, ‘reducing themselves to these two, viz. thinking and moving, so far as a man has a power to think or not to think, to move or not to move, according to the preference or direction of his own mind, so far is a man free. Wherever any performance or forbearance are not equally in a man’s power, wherever doing or not doing will not equally follow upon the preference of his mind, directing it, there he is not free, though perhaps the action may be voluntary. Where any particular action is not in the power of the agent, to be produced by him according to his volition, there he is not at liberty; that agent is under necessity. So that liberty cannot be where there is no thought, no volition, no will; but there may be thought, there may be volition, there may be will, where there is no liberty. A little consideration of an obvious instance or two may make this clear.
‘A tennis-ball, whether in motion by the stroke of a racket, or lying still at rest, is not by any one taken to be a free agent. If we inquire into the reason, we shall find it is because we conceive not a tennis-ball to think; and consequently not to have any volition, or preference of motion to rest or vice versâ; and therefore has not liberty, is not a free agent, but both its motion and rest come under our idea of necessity, and are so called. Likewise a man falling into the water (a bridge breaking under him) has not herein liberty, is not a free agent. For though he has volition, though he prefers his not falling to falling, yet the forbearance of that motion not being in his power, the stop or cessation of that motion follows not upon his volition; and therefore therein he is not free. So a man striking himself or his friend by a convulsive motion of his arm, no body thinks he has in this liberty, every one pities him as acting by necessity and constraint.’
Here I will just stop to observe that the stanch sticklers for necessity, who make up by an excess of zeal for their want of knowledge, would read this passage with a smile of self-complacent contempt, and remark profoundly that whether the man struck his friend on purpose, or from a convulsive motion, he was equally under necessity, and the object of pity. Now whether he is an object of pity, I shall not dispute; but I conceive he is also an object of anger in the one case which he is not in the other, because anger will prevent a man’s striking you again, but will not cure him of St. Vitus’s dance. It is to this sort of indiscriminate, blind, senseless necessity which neutralizes all things and actions, and under the pretence of establishing the operation of causes, destroys the distinction between the different degrees and kinds of necessity, to which I do not profess myself a convert.
To return.—‘As it is in the motions of the body,’ proceeds Mr. Locke, ‘so it is in the thoughts of our minds: where any one is such, that we have power to take it up or lay it by, according to the preference of the mind, there we are at liberty. Yet some ideas to the mind, like some motions to the body, are such as in certain circumstances it cannot avoid, nor obtain their absence by the utmost effort it can use. A man on the rack is not at liberty to lay by the idea of pain, and divert himself with other contemplations. And sometimes a boisterous passion hurries our thoughts, as a hurricane does our bodies, without leaving us the liberty of thinking on other things which we would rather choose. But as soon as the mind regains the power to stop or continue, begin or forbear any of these motions of the body without, or of the mind within, according as it thinks fit to prefer either to the other, we then consider the man as free again.’