The reasoning in the ‘Inquiry’ to which the author here refers, in justification of himself, is as follows:
‘Men in their first use of such phrases as these, must, cannot, unavoidable, irresistible, &c. use them to signify a necessity of constraint or restraining a natural necessity or impossibility, or some necessity that the will has nothing to do in. A thing is said to be necessary, when we cannot help it, let us do what we will. So any thing is said to be impossible to us, when we would do it, or would have it brought to pass and endeavour it, but all our desires and endeavours are in vain. And that is said to be irresistible, which overcomes all our opposition, resistance and endeavour to the contrary. And we are said to be unable to do a thing, when our utmost supposable desires and endeavours to do it are insufficient. All men find, and begin to find in early childhood, that there are innumerable things which cannot be done which they desire to do; and innumerable things, which they are averse to, that must be; they cannot avoid them, whether they choose them or no. It is to express this necessity which men so soon and so often find, and which so greatly affects them in innumerable cases, that such terms and phrases are first formed; and it is to signify such a necessity that they are first used, and that they are most constantly used in the common affairs of life; and not to signify any such metaphysical, speculative and abstract notion as that connexion [between cause and effect] in the nature and course of things, to signify which they who employ themselves in philosophical inquiries into the first origin and metaphysical relations and dependencies of things, have borrowed those terms, for want of others. But we grow up from our cradles in a use of such phrases entirely different from this, or from the one in which they are used in the controversy about liberty and necessity. And it being a dictate of the universal sense of mankind, evident to us as soon as we begin to think, that the necessity signified by these terms in the sense in which we first learn them, does excuse persons, and free them from all fault or blame, hence our idea of excusableness or faultlessness is tied to these phrases by a strong habit, which grows up with us;—or if we use the words as terms of art in another sense, yet unless we are exceeding circumspect and wary, we shall insensibly slide into the vulgar use of them, and so apply the words in a very inconsistent manner: this habitual connexion of ideas will deceive and confound us in our reasonings and discourses whenever we pretend to use the terms in that manner.’—Pages 20, 21, 290, &c.
‘It follows that when the aforesaid terms are used in cases wherein no opposition, or insufficient will or endeavour is or can be supposed, but the very nature of the supposed case (as that of willing or choosing) excludes any such opposition, will, or endeavour, these terms are then not used in their proper signification, but quite beside their use in common speech.’—Pages 21, 22.
The author has, I think, in these passages, laid open the source of most of the confusion on the subject in question. For this double meaning lurking under the word necessity has been the chief reason why persons, who were guided more by their own feelings and the customary associations of language than by formal definitions, have altogether rejected the doctrine; while persons of a more logical turn, who could not deny the truth of the abstract principle, have yet in their explanations of it, and inferences from it, fallen into the same vulgar error as their opponents. The partisans for necessity have given up their common sense, as they supposed, to their reason, while the advocates for liberty rejected a demonstrable truth from a dread of its consequences; and both have been the dupes of a word. I have been the more ready to appeal to this writer’s authority, because he is allowed on all hands to be one of the most strict, severe, and logical of all necessarians. What he has said on the subject of free-will, as consisting in perfect contingence, independent of all motive, or as implying an absolute beginning of action without any precedent determining cause might, one would imagine, have been sufficient, even if Hobbes’s reasonings had not, to banish that opinion out of the world. He has followed it through all its windings, and detected it in all its varying shades, with equal patience and sagacity. He sums up the absurdities of this notion of liberty, or of mere absolute self-will, in these words:
‘The following things are all essential to it, viz. that an action should be necessary, and not necessary; that it should be from a cause and no cause; that it should be the fruit of choice and design, and not the fruit of choice and design; that it should be the beginning of motion and exertion, and yet be consequent on previous exertion; that it should be before it is; that it should spring immediately out of indifference and equilibrium, and yet be the effect of preponderation; that it should be self-originated, also have its original from something else; that it is what the mind causes itself, of its own will, and can produce or prevent, according to its choice, or pleasure, and yet what the mind has no power to prevent, precluding all previous choice in the affair. So that an act of the will [determining itself by its own free-will], according to their metaphysical account of it, is something of which there is no idea, it is nothing but a confusion of the mind, excited by words without any distinct meaning. If some learned philosopher, who had been abroad, in giving an account of the curious observations he had made in his travels, should say, “He had been in Tierra del Fuego, and there had seen an animal, which he calls by a certain name, that begat and brought forth itself, and yet had a sire and a dam distinct from itself; that it had an appetite and was hungry before it had a being; that his master, who led him, and governed him at his pleasure, was always governed by him, and driven by him where he pleased: that when he moved, he always took a step before the first step; that he went with his head first, and yet always went tail foremost; and this though he had neither head nor tail;” it would be no impudence at all to tell such a traveller, though a learned man, that he himself had no notion or idea of such an animal as he gave an account of, and never had, nor ever would have.’—Page 281, of the Inquiry.
The author seems to have hit upon the source of this erroneous account of free-will, with his usual truth of feeling. He says, almost immediately after:—‘The thing which has led men into this inconsistent notion of action, when applied to volition, as though it were essential to this internal action that the agent should be self-determined in it, and that the will should be the cause of it, was probably this: that according to the sense of mankind, and the common use of language, it is so with respect to men’s external actions; which are what originally, and according to the vulgar use and most proper sense of the word, are called actions. Men in these are self-directed, self-determined, and their wills are the cause of the motions of their bodies, and the external things that are done; so that unless men do them voluntarily, and of choice, and the action be determined by their antecedent volition, it is no action or doing of theirs. Hence some metaphysicians have been led unwarily, but exceeding absurdly, to suppose the same concerning volition itself, that that also must be determined by the will; which is to be determined by antecedent volition, as the motion of the body is; not considering the contradiction it implies.’—Ibid., page 286.
I shall proceed to state as briefly as I can my own notions of liberty and necessity, as far as they any way differ from the foregoing account.
First, then, I conceive that if by necessity be understood and only understood the connexion of cause and effect, or the constant dependence of one thing on another, in the human mind as well as in matter, that according to this interpretation all things are equally certain and necessary. On the other hand, if by liberty be meant any thing opposite to this connexion of cause and effect: that is, a positive beginning of any action or motion out of nothing, or out of a state of indifference, or from itself, I believe that there is no such thing as liberty in the mind any more than in matter. All things have their preceding determining causes, and nothing is, but what must be in the precise given circumstances. This has been demonstrated over and over again, and the contrary supposition reduced to a manifest absurdity in every possible way by Hobbes, Hume, Hartley, Edwards, Priestley, and others.
But, secondly, I conceive that the question does not stop here, because certain ideas have been annexed to these terms of liberty and necessity, both by the learned and by common men, which have nothing at all to do with the affirmation or denial of the simple connexion between cause and effect. What I shall therefore attempt will be to point out a few instances of the misapplication of the term to prove a necessity not included in the certainty of the event, and to disprove liberty in a sense in which it does not interfere with that certainty, or with philosophical necessity: that is, I shall attempt to show in what sense, in conformity with the general law to which all things are by their nature subject, man is an agent, a free agent, a moral and accountable agent; that is, deserving of reward and punishment, praise and blame, &c. Now by an agent I mean any thing that acts or has a power to operate, that is, to produce effects; by a free agent I mean one that is not hindered from acting; by a moral and accountable agent I mean one that acts from will, and is influenced by motives; by reward and punishment I mean what every one does; by praise and blame I mean our approbation or disapprobation of any agent that is conscious of our sentiments towards him, or that is capable of reflecting on his own conduct, and of being affected by what others think of it. If by an agent be meant the beginner of action, or one that produces an effect of itself, there can be no such thing; but if by an agent be meant one that contributes to an effect, there is such a thing as an agent; and the more any thing contributes to an effect and determines it to be this or that, the more it is an agent. If by freedom be meant a freedom from causes, or necessity in the abstract, there can be no freedom in this sense, but there may be and is a freedom from certain causes and from certain kinds and degrees of necessity; that is, from physical causes, or compulsion, and from absolute, unconditional necessity. If all things are equally necessary, that do not spring out of nothing, then indeed the distinction between liberty and necessity must be in all cases absurd. Again, by free-will I do not mean the power or liberty to act without motives, but with motives. The mind cannot act without an occasion or ground for acting, but this does not shew that it is no agent at all, or that it is not a free agent; that is, that its action is restrained or hindered by the action of anything else. The intellectual and voluntary powers are free, just as the corporeal are, namely, when they are free to produce certain effects, which, if excited, they can produce, as the body is free when it can move in consequence of the mind’s direction; it is no longer free when though the same reason exists for its moving, it is hindered by something else from obeying the impulse. In short, liberty is this: the power in any agent in given circumstances to operate in a certain manner, if left to itself; or perhaps more unequivocally, opportunity given to any agent to exert certain powers to produce an effect, when nothing but those powers and the absence of impediments is wanting to produce it. To be free is to possess all the requisites for acting in one’s-self, and in the circumstances, and not to be counteracted. Again if moral good and evil are supposed to be something self-created, then they are merely fictions of the mind; but if we suppose an agent to be entitled to praise or blame, reward or punishment, not because he is a self-willed, but a voluntary agent, that is to say, a being possessing certain powers and habitually and with determination exerting them to certain purposes, then there will be a foundation for this distinction in nature. To the idea of moral responsibility, it is not necessary that the agent should be the sole or absolutely first cause of the evil, for example, but that he should be one real, determining cause of it, and while he remains what he is, the same effects will follow. An agent is the author of any evil, when without him, that is, without something peculiar and essential to his disposition and character, it would not exist.
1. Every thing is an agent that is any way necessary or conducing to an effect. The doctrine of second causes does not destroy agency. It no more proves that those causes do not act because something has acted before them, than that they do not exist, because something has existed before them. The theological writers on this side of the question affirm, I think improperly, that God or the first cause is the sole agent in the universe, to which all second causes are to be referred as instruments, having no real efficacy of their own. If so, all events are produced immediately by the divine agency, that is, all second causes are parts of the divine essence, and in all that we see or hear or feel, we must conceive of something far more deeply interfused, a spirit and a motion that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and breathes through all things. This doctrine is that of Spinoza: but upon this supposition second causes, as the immediate operation of the Deity are and must be real and efficient. On the other hand, if to exclude this system of pantheism, we consider the things and appearances about us as merely natural, still what are called second causes must be real and efficient causes, or they could not produce their effects. If nothing can operate but the first cause, then whatever produces effects is the Deity: but if this conclusion be thought objectionable, then we must allow other causes of events to be really and truly such in themselves: for from that which is no cause, which has no power, any more than nothing, nothing can follow. All second causes, that is, all things that exist are, therefore, either parts of the Deity or parts of nature, and in neither case can they be absolutely insignificant, worthless, null, and of no account. Dr. Priestley is for having men refer all the good in the universe to God as the author of it, and all the evil that takes place to man or to second causes. I cannot think that this is sound philosophy nor practical wisdom. The necessarians have evidently borrowed their notions of agency and second causes from the advocates for liberty: for taking up the same unfounded assumption of the libertarians, that action is the absolute beginning of motion, and that any thing short of this is no action at all, and finding that the will was not a cause in the absurd sense supposed by their adversaries, they have concluded that it was no cause at all; not considering whether a cause might not be more properly defined that which produces an effect in consistency with other things than that which produces it independently of them. Action then in any sense of the word is the same as co-operation. It may be asked, whether this account does not destroy the distinction between active and passive. I answer that it does, if by active be meant unconnected action, and by passive connected action; but not else. That is, if by action be understood the positive determinate tendency or the additional impulse to the production of any effect, and by passiveness an indifference in any agent to this or that motion, except as it is acted upon by, and transmits the efficacy of other causes, this distinction will remain as broad and palpable as ever. Any thing is so far active as it modifies and re-acts upon the original impulse; it is passive in as far as it neither adds to, nor takes from that original impulse, but merely has a power of receiving and continuing it. This I take to be the practical and philosophical meaning of the terms. This distinction therefore, applies equally to matter and mind. The explosion of gunpowder cannot be attributed entirely or principally to the spark which ignites it, because the effect is increased a thousand-fold by the inherent qualities of the gunpowder. The motion communicated by one body to another in void space is considered as the mere passive result of the former, because the effect in the second agent is simply the continuation of what it was in the first. So it is in the mind. Motives do not act upon it simply or absolutely; but according to the dictates of the understanding or the bias of the will. At one time we yield to any idle inclination that happens to prevail, and at others resist to the utmost the strongest motives. That is, the mind is itself an agent, one chief determining cause of our volitions. It is on the view taken by the mind of motives, on our disposition to attend to or neglect them, to compare and weigh them, that their effect depends. But the necessarians have always delighted to illustrate the operations of the mind in volition by referring to the impulse communicated by one billiard-ball to another, or to different weights in a pair of scales. Both which illustrations are as little applicable as possible, because in neither of them is there supposed to be the least activity of action; that is, the least capacity to resist or increase or alter the impressed force in the thing acted upon. That is, the mind in these similes is requisite as a merely passive agent, by which I mean a thing perfectly indifferent and nugatory, a mere cypher without any character of its own, that is neither good nor bad, neither deserving of praise nor blame; a cameleon, colourless kind of thing, the sport of external impulses and accidental circumstances, or of a necessity in which it has itself no share. Thus the responsibility of the mind has been taken from it, and transferred to outward circumstances, and all characters in themselves rendered alike indifferent. This is the necessary consequence of abstracting the influence of motives from the mind on which and by which they act. I prefer exceedingly to the modern instances of a couple of billiard-balls, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysophus, the stoic in Cicero, who says, ‘Ille igitur qui protrusit cylindrum dedit ei principium motionis, volubilitatem autem non dedit: sic visum objectum imprimet quidem et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem, sed assensio erit in potestate nostrâ.’ That is, suppose I push against a heavy body; if it be square it will not move: if it be cylindrical it will. What the difference of form is to the stone, the difference of disposition is to the mind. In fact, the necessarians, to maintain this doctrine of the nullity of second causes, have been forced to consider every thing as a succession of simple impulses passing from hand to hand: so that there being no fixed point, no resting-place for the imagination, we are perpetually obliged to shift the cause from one object to another: every thing has to be accounted for, and referred back to something else, and in this ceaseless whirl of fleeting causes all ideas of power or agency seem to slide from under us. Lest the mind should prove refractory, to the laws ascribed to it, they thought it most prudent to deprive it of all activity and power of resistance. They were very absurdly afraid that without this their whole scheme might be overturned, as if though the mind were freed from being the servile drudge of external impulses, it would not still follow the bent of its own nature. The above distinction will, I conceive, set the mind free from one of the shackles imposed on it by the necessarians, namely, that imbecility, helplessness, and indifference, which they have superadded to the regular connexion of cause and effect, though it makes no essential part of it. The mind, according to the advocates for free-will, is a perfectly detached, unconnected, independent cause: according to the necessarians, it is no cause at all: neither branch of the antithesis is true.