‘But freedom,’ says my author, ‘unless it reaches farther than this, will not serve the turn; and it passes for a good plea that a man is not free at all, if he is not as free to will, as he is to act what he wills. Concerning a man’s liberty, there yet therefore is raised this farther question, whether a man be free to will? And as to that I imagine that a man in respect of willing, when any action in his power is once proposed to his thoughts as presently [that is, immediately] to be done, cannot be free. The reason whereof is very manifest; for it being unavoidable that the action depending on his will should exist or not exist, and its existence or non-existence following perfectly the determination of his will, he cannot avoid willing the existence or non-existence of that action; it is absolutely necessary that he will the one, or the other, i.e. prefer the one to the other, since one of them must necessarily follow.’—Page 246.
This seems to be the weak part of Mr. Locke’s reasoning, and is the only place, as I remember, where he has considered the certainty of the event as inconsistent with the practical liberty for which he contends. At this rate, it must be given up altogether: there can be no such thing as liberty. For in all cases whatever, one determination must happen rather than another. In all cases whatever, we must choose either one way or another, or suspend our choice. Suspense and deliberation, as Helvetius and others have justly remarked, are in this sense equally necessary with precipitation of judgment. The actual or final event is in both cases the necessary consequence of preceding causes, but that does not destroy freedom of choice in either case, if the event depends upon the exercise of choice, whether the time allowed for the mind to choose in, be longer or shorter. If by liberty be meant the uncertainty of the event, then liberty is a nonentity: but if it be supposed to relate to the concurrence of certain powers of an agent in the production of that event, then it is as true and as real a thing as the necessity to which it is thus opposed, and which consists in the exclusion of certain powers possessed by an agent from operating in the producing of any event. At the same time it must be granted, that the power of deliberation is the most valuable privilege of our rational nature, and the great enlargement of the discursive faculty of the will. Mr. Locke seems only to have erred in mistaking a difference of degree or extent for one of kind. The practical truth of the distinction is undeniable. His words are:—
‘The mind having in most cases, as is evident from experience, a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires, and so all, one after another, is at liberty to consider the objects of them, examine them on all sides, and weigh them with others. In this lies the liberty man has; and from the not using of it right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, and faults, which we run into in the conduct of our lives, and our endeavours after happiness: whilst we precipitate the determination of our wills, and engage too soon before due examination. For during the suspension of any desire, before the will be determined to action, we have an opportunity to examine, view, and judge of the good or evil of what we are going to do; and when upon due examination we have judged, we have done our duty, all that we can or ought to do, in pursuit of our happiness; and it is not a fault, but a perfection of our nature, to desire, will, and act, according to the last result of a fair examination. This seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that which is (I think improperly) called free-will.’—Essay, vol. i. p. 264.
Moral liberty, it should seem then, all the liberty which a man has or which he wants, does not after all consist in a power of indifferency, or in a power of choosing, without regard to motives, but in a power of exciting his reason and of obeying it. There are two general positions advanced by the author in the course of this inquiry, to neither of which I can agree; namely, that action always proceeds from uneasiness, and that we are perfect judges of present good and evil. With respect to the first, it is true indeed that nothing can be an object of desire till we suffer uneasiness from the want of it, but it is just as true, that the want of any thing does not cause uneasiness in the mind, unless it is first an object of desire, or unless the prospect of it gives us pleasure. As to the second position, that we cannot be deceived in judging of our actual sensations, it would be true, if the sensation and the judgment formed upon it were the same, but they neither are nor can be. Let any person smell to a rose, and look at a beautiful prospect or hear a fine piece of music at the same instant, and try to determine which of them gives him most pleasure. If he has the least doubt or hesitation, the principle laid down by Mr. Locke cannot pass for an axiom. From not accurately distinguishing between sensation and judgment, some writers have been led to confound good and evil with pleasure and pain. Good or evil is properly that which gives the mind pleasure or pain on reflection, that is, which excites rational approbation or disapprobation. To consider these two things as either the same or in any regular proportion to each other, is I think to betray a very superficial acquaintance with human nature. Yet in defiance of the necessary distinction between the faculties by which we feel and by which we judge, these moralists have laid it down as a fundamental rule that all pleasures which are so in themselves are equally good and commendable; yet as these ideas relate solely to the reflex impression made by certain things on the understanding, to insist that we shall judge of them by an appeal to the senses, is unwisely to overturn the principle of the division of labour among our faculties, and to force one to do the office of another. For this there seems no more reason than for attempting to hear with our fingers, to see a sound, or feel a colour.
‘Oh! who can paint a sun-beam to the blind;
Or make him feel a shadow with his mind.’
Yet the absurdity of the attempt arises only from the inaptitude of the organ to the object.
Among simple ideas Mr. Locke reckons that of power. It were to be wished that he had given it as simple a source as possible, viz. the feeling we have of it in our own minds, which he sometimes seems half inclined to do, instead of referring it to our observation of the successive changes which take place in matter. It is by this means alone, that is, by making it an original idea derived from within, like the sense of pleasure or pain, and quite distinct from the visible composition and decomposition of other objects, that we can avoid being driven into an absolute scepticism with regard to cause and effect. For Hume has, I think, demonstrated that in the mere mechanical series of sensible appearances, there is nothing to suggest this idea, or point out the indissoluble connection of one event with another, any more than in the flies of a summer. We get this idea solely from the exertion of muscular or voluntary power in ourselves: whoever has stretched forth his hand to an object, must have the idea of power. Under the idea of power I include all that relates to what we call force, energy, weakness, effort, ease, difficulty, impossibility, &c. Accordingly, I should conceive that no man of strong passions, or great muscular activity would ever give up the idea of power. Hume, who seems to have discarded it with the least compunction, was an easy, indolent, good-tempered man, who did not care to stir out of his arm-chair; a languid, Epicurean philosopher, of a reasonable corpulency, who was hurried away by no violent passions, or intense desires, but looked on most things with the same eye of listlessness and indifference. He was one of the subtlest and most metaphysical of all metaphysicians. And perhaps he was so for the reason here stated. The Scotch in general are not metaphysicians: they have in fact always a purpose, they aim at a particular point, they are determined upon something beforehand. This gives a hardness and rigidity to their understandings, and takes away that tremulous sensibility to every slight and wandering impression which is necessary to complete the fine balance of the mind, and enable us to follow all the infinite fluctuations of thought through their nicest distinctions.
To return to the doctrine of necessity. I shall refer to the authority of but one more writer, who has indeed exhausted the subject, and anticipated what few remarks I had to offer upon it: I mean Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise on the Will. This work, setting aside its Calvinistic tendency with which I have nothing to do, is one of the most closely reasoned, elaborate, acute, serious, and sensible among modern productions. No metaphysician can read it without feeling a wish to have been the author of it. The gravity of the matter and the earnestness of the manner are alike admirable. His reasoning is not of that kind, which consists in having a smart answer for every trite objection, but in attaining true and satisfactory solutions of things perceived in all their difficulty and in all their force, and in every variety of connexion. He evidently writes to satisfy his own mind and the minds of those, who like himself are intent upon the pursuit of truth for its own sake. There is not an evasion or ambiguity in his whole book, nor a wish to produce any but thorough conviction. He does not therefore lead his readers into a labyrinth of words, or entangle them among the forms of logic, or mount the airy heights of abstraction, but descends into the plain, and mingles with the business and feelings of mankind, and grapples with common sense, and subdues it to the force of true reason. All philosophy depends no less on deep and real feeling than on power of thought. I happen to have Edwards’s ‘Inquiry concerning Freewill,’ and Dr. Priestley’s ‘Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity,’ bound up in the same volume: and I confess that the difference in the manner of these two writers is rather striking. The plodding, persevering, scrupulous accuracy of the one, and the easy, cavalier, verbal fluency of the other, form a complete contrast. Dr. Priestley’s whole aim seems to be to evade the difficulties of his subject, Edwards’s to answer them. The one is employed according to Berkeley’s allegory, in flinging dust in the eyes of his adversaries, while the other is taking true pains in digging into the mine of knowledge. All Dr. Priestley’s arguments on this subject are mere hackneyed common-places. He had in reality no opinion of his own, and truth, I conceive, never takes very deep root in those minds on which it is merely engrafted. He uniformly adopted the vantage ground of every question, and borrowed those arguments which he found most easy to be wielded, and of most service in that kind of busy intellectual warfare to which he was habituated. He was an able controversialist, not a philosophical reasoner.
Dr. Priestley states in his ‘Illustrations’ and in his letter to Dr. Horsley, that the difference between physical and moral necessity is merely verbal. He says, speaking of the connexion between cause and effect in the mind, ‘Give me the thing and I will readily give up the name.’ It appears to me that Dr. Priestley was quite as much attached to the name as to the thing, and that the philosophical principle of necessity, without its unpopular title, would have afforded him but little satisfaction. Now the obnoxiousness of the name, and in my opinion, almost all the difficulty and repugnance which the generality of men find in admitting the doctrine arises from the ambiguity lurking under the term necessity, which includes both kinds of necessity, moral and physical, and with which Dr. Priestley delights to probe the prejudices of his adversaries, thinking the differences of moral and physical necessity a mere question of words, and that provided there are any laws or any causes operating upon the mind, it is of no sort of consequence what those laws or causes are. It is the same inability to distinguish between one cause and another which creates the vulgar prejudice against necessity, and which is exposed in a very satisfactory manner by the author of the ‘Inquiry into the Will.’ He says, in a letter written expressly to vindicate himself from having confounded moral with physical necessity, ‘On the contrary, I have largely declared that the connexion between antecedent things and consequent ones which takes place with regard to the acts of men’s wills, which is called moral necessity, is called by the name of necessity improperly; and that all such terms as must, cannot, impossible, unable, irresistible, unavoidable, invincible, &c. when applied here, are not applied in their proper signification, and are either used nonsensically, and with perfect insignificance, or in a sense quite diverse from their original and proper meaning, and their use in common speech; and that such a necessity as attends the acts of men’s wills, is more properly called certainty than necessity. I think it is evidently owing to a strong prejudice in persons’ minds, arising from an insensible habitual perversion and misapplication of such-like terms, that they are ready to think that to suppose a certain connexion of men’s volitions without any foregoing motives or inclinations, is truly and properly to suppose such a strong irrefragable chain of causes and effects as stands in the way of, and makes utterly vain, opposite desires and endeavours, like immovable and impenetrable mountains of brass; and impedes our liberty like walls of adamant, gates of brass, and bars of iron: whereas all such representations suggest ideas as far from the truth, as the East is from the West. I know it is in vain to endeavour to make some persons believe this, or at least fully and steadily to believe it: for if it be demonstrated to them, still the old prejudice remains, which has been long fixed by the use of the terms necessary, must, &c. the association with these terms of certain ideas, inconsistent with liberty, is not broken, and the judgment is powerfully warped by it; as a thing that has been long bent and grown stiff, if it be straightened, will return to its former curvity again and again.’