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FREE WILL. 



FREE WILL. 



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man, nor yet the greater part of it, to his then determination. We 

 refer to antecedent circumstances as co-operating to this determination. 

 This is the language of all mankind ; and the language of all mankind, 

 when rightly analysed, is the true exponent of universal opinion. 

 Confused and perplexed as it often is, it contains within it implicitly 

 the elements of all philosophy. Now, when we once refer to ante- 

 cedent circumstances as affecting our determination under the motives 

 that are presented on any one occasion, we give up the theory of an 

 absolute free-will, for we make every act of will depend, in some 

 degree at least, on something prior ; and that something, again, must 

 by the like reasoning depend on something prior to it ; and thus we 

 have an infinite chain of events, and consequently we find ourselves 

 engaged in an inquiry which is beyond the reach of our capacity. 

 Thus, if, as Hartley says, " by free-will be meant a power of beginning 

 motion," no person can, consistently with his own ordinary language 

 and that of others, maintain this proposition ; if he does, he will 

 contradict himself almost as often as he speaks. 



Human actions, then, are, in some degree at least, subject to the 

 same general laws to which other events are subject. Every human 

 action has its antecedents, on which it in some degree depends ; but 

 whether every human action is as necessary, in the sense in which 

 Hume explains the term necessary, as the other phenomena which we 

 see, is precisely the matter in dispute. (Hume, Essays, ' Of Liberty 

 and Necessity.') 



When it is said that every event and every human action has its 

 antecedent on which it depends, it must not be understood that it is 

 meant, here at least, to maintain anything else than this. Such ante- 

 cedents are events which, according to our experience, precede the 

 given event uniformly, or at least with sufficient uniformity to generate 

 in our minds the notion of a certain order or continuity ; for though 

 any given antecedent event is called the cause of any event which 

 uniformly follows it in our ordinary mode of speech, we here mean to 

 express nothing more than the fact of this uniform sequence. The 

 utmost that we can say is, that the antecedent event is, according to 

 the constitution of the universe as known to us, a necessary condition 

 to the subsequent event. Neither heat, nor moisture, nor anything 

 else that we can name, is the cause or a cause of a seed vegetating and 

 producing a plant like that from which it came. Heat and other 

 things are conditions of vegetation as known to us. The efficient 

 cause can only be one, which must be perpetual, and beyond which we 

 seek for no other. This efficient cause is no law of nature, a term 

 which is incapable of all strict analysis. It is the will of God to those 

 who admit the existence and omnipotence of the Deity. To those who 

 do not, if there be such, it is something which has never yet been 

 explained. 



Now as all human actions have their antecedents, without which, 

 according to our experience, they could not be, it follows that there 

 are certain antecedents of every action which are its conditions, with- 

 out which such action would never be. This cannot be denied. It is 

 the ordinary language of mankind expressed in a different form. But 

 still it is perfectly consistent with this to speak of man exercising his 

 will, that is, operating on the motives which are presented to him. 

 On any given occasion man is subjected to various momenta, and it 

 may be admitted that each man will be directed by that which to him 

 at the time is the strongest. But if a power of estimating different 

 motives be admitted to exist in the mind, and to exist in different 

 men in different degrees, the strength of the motive is not its own 

 strength acting on the passive mind ; it is the activity of the mind 

 which according to its power comprehends the motive completely or 

 incompletely. 



It the analogy is sound between human actions and other phenomena, 

 t in other phenomena the antecedents or conditions are not causes, 

 so neither are the antecedents or conditions of human actions to be 

 viewed as their causes. Man U constantly subjected to various mo- 

 menta, motives, or circumstances, as they are often called, without 

 which he would not act as he does act. These momenta are traced 

 back by an infinite series to the first cause of all, just as in the bare 

 physical phenomena, if we trace them far enough, we must ascend to 

 a first cause. If the analogy then is complete between man's acts and 

 other phenomena, the operation of all these complicated conditions in 

 some way determines the acts of man ; but how it determines them 

 we cannot tell. There i no person who maintains the doctrine of 

 absolute free-will who will contend that man can set his will in oppo- 

 sition to that of God. It is possible to conceive that God does will to 

 let man have free action within certain limits, but not further ; and 

 all our forms of speech do either expressly or by implication admit 

 that our will is free to a certain extent, which we cannot exactly 

 define, but that it is not absolutely free. It may be objected that to 

 deny an absolute free-will destroys the distinction between actions ; 

 that it represents the Deity as the cause of vice and misery. But 

 even if it should be so, that will not prove a thing to be false which is 

 established by the sound exercise of our understanding. No such 

 consequence however does follow. To God we attribute the origin of 

 everything ; and consistently with this we must say that he permits 

 vice and misery to exist in the world. It is a consequence of man's 

 nature as he is constituted, and under the circumstances in which he 

 is placed, that he has acted and does act in such a way as to cause 

 misery to himself and others. 



It must therefore be assumed that God has, for reasons unknown to 

 us, so constituted man that he does not always act in the way that is 

 most consistent with his own happiness and the happiness of others. 

 The vicious conduct of many men in life is an object of disapprobation 

 to others, and in all societies that conduct which is injurious to the 

 existence of such societies is visited with penalties. Thus a vast 

 majority of mankind see that certain acts are injurious to the general 

 happiness, and it is one main object of society to prevent such acts. 

 As God permits society to exist, we may assume that he wills it to 

 exist, and that he wills generally the means by which society attempts 

 to secure its own existence. It is a consequence of this that he dis- 

 approves of the conduct of those whose acts endanger the existence of 

 society. We cannot say that he does not will it : it exists, and there- 

 fore is consistent with his general will. We are compelled therefore 

 to apply to him by analogy such terms as are applicable only to our 

 own limited capacities : and we say that he wills generally that all 

 things shall be as they are, but that he disapproves of some. That he 

 permits man so much liberty of action as to render it necessary for 

 society to be vigilant against the evil doers who would disturb its 

 repose, is no more an imputation upon his goodness than that he 

 permits fire, tempest, and war and pestilence and famine to thin tha 

 numbers of mankind. So far as concerns those who suffer, it is the 

 same thing whether they suffer from the hand of man, or from causes 

 over which he has no control. It is consistent with all experience to 

 say that the Deity has willed that man shall suffer pain both through 

 the agency of matter and through the agency of his fellow-men. Now 

 if we shall assume that God only wills our happiness in the sense in 

 which many persons understand it which would, according to their 

 notions, exclude all pain and suffering whatever misery happens 

 through man's misconduct must be against his general will, and can 

 only result from man having an absolute free-will, and sometimes 

 exercising it in a way different from the Deity's wishes. There is no 

 evading this difficulty. An absolute free-will in man or in any other 

 being is inconsistent with the omnipotence of the Deity, and it is, as 

 already shown, contradicted by all our observation of the mode in 

 which man is operated upon by motives and circumstances. But there 

 is nothing which prevents us from attributing to man, as we do in our 

 daily expressions, a power of determining his acts, under given circum- 

 stances, in one direction rather than in another, and in a wrong in 

 preference to a right direction. And it is further admitted by the 

 universal language of mankind, that the same man who acted wrong 

 under one set of motives, might and would have acted right if he had 

 been influenced by other motives ; and these motives to right action, 

 it is also admitted, may be and frequently are external circumstances 

 over which he has no control. It is true that a man may so discipline 

 himself, that, in any given circumstances which may arise, he may 

 have motives at his command which shall enable him to act in the 

 right direction, a power which Hartley speaks of in the passage at the 

 head of this article. But if some men can do this, all cannot ; and 

 even in the case of him who can do it, we may always trace the origin 

 of this power to some external circumstances over which he had no 

 control. Man's will then is circumscribed by the constitution of things, 

 of which he is a part. He is placed in circumstances in which he is 

 operated upon by various motives to action. If it is said that he must 

 be determined absolutely by that which is the most powerful, this is 

 only another mode of saying that of various forces tending to make 

 him move, the strongest will carry him in its own direction. But in 

 truth the words force, motive, and others of a like kind, are apt to lead 

 us to false analogies : and these terms require explanation. 



Every man believes at the time when he acts with deliberation that 

 he has a capacity for exercising a free-will. But he also knows that 

 circumstances may prevent deliberation. Thus it is a common case 

 for a man to allege that if he had not been alarmed or hurried, he 

 would have acted differently ; or in other words, he would have been 

 enabled to deliberate and decide better. No man considers it to be a 

 case where the will is properly concerned when his action is thus im- 

 peded. And there are numerous like cases in life in which in fact 

 there is no choice or deliberation, and consequently no real exercise of 

 the will. The power, then, whatever it may be, to deliberate and act, 

 is often suspended or not exercised. In most cases we act from habit 

 in the general course of life ; in other cases from impulse ; and when 

 we act from impulse, there is no deliberation or determinate will. It 

 appears then that our will is not always exercised when we act, but 

 that when it is exercised we are conscious of- a capacity to weigh 

 deliberately the various motives or grounds of action as presented by 

 our own mental activity. Now if we say that the strongest motive 

 thus presented must prevail and determine to action, we may, as 

 above observed, be misled by a false analogy. The motive may be 

 called a moving power ; and if so, it must have its effect : but to deny 

 the mind all power in itself to resist the motive, is the same thing as 

 to consider it an inert mass operated upon solely by au external force. 

 It is the same thing as to make the mind of man a recipient of sensuous 

 phenomena without any power to operate on them. The systems of 

 philosophy which view the mind as such a recipient will be consistent 

 in making it yield to the strongest motive without an effort of its own. 

 Those systems which assign to the mind a power of operating on im- 

 pressions may consistently admit a power of determining which of 

 them it will obey. 



