4^0 FREE WILL AND NECESSITY. 



nizes when he says, " It 7uhsI be so, Plato thou reasonest 

 well," and also from the moral necessity he feels when he 

 says, " I 7n?is^ speak the truth." Indeed, if we construed 

 the last of these assertions in terms of physical necessity, 

 it would manifestly be nonsense, for if it were physically 

 necessary to speak the truth, lying would be impossible. 



Perhaps, however, we may dismiss logical and moral 

 necessity from the present discussion, as they do not often 

 enter into the determinist argument, like physical necessity. 

 But the latter is itself hopelessly ambiguous. 



It signifies not only compitlsion but also calcidability^ and 

 is applied not only to the overpowering of a conscious 

 being by superior force, but to the supposed causal con- 

 nection between phenomena. And while it is in the former 

 sense that it is fatal to morals and productive of fatalism, 

 it is in the latter that it sustains a successful combat with 

 libertarianism. 



§ 3. To say that the will is free, it is urged, is to make 

 it an exception to the universal law of causation. The 

 argument is a crushing one — until it strikes us to examine 

 into the credentials of the " universal law of causation," 

 and its application to the case. As soon as we do, it 

 appears that the difficulty lies not in the nature of the will 

 at all, but in the conception of causation, and that liber- 

 tarians and determinists, so long as they uncritically accept 

 it, are bound to assert precisely the same thing at the end, 

 viz. indeterminism. And the only difference between them 

 is that while the indeterminist frankly admits this at the 

 outset, the determinist refuses to confess that he succumbs 

 to the same difficulty until he is driven into a corner. 



§ 4. Thus the indeterminist asserts that motives do not 

 determine the will, they are not the only factors which 

 enter into an act of will. There is in such an act an ele- 

 ment of freedom, which is not subject to the principle of 

 causation, and of which no further account can be given. 

 Whereat the determinist grows indignant and talks of the 

 infraction of universal laws, etc. But if pressed he will be 

 found ultimately to assert the very same thing. 



Granted that motives cause acts of the will precisely 

 as any other physical cause causes its effect, it is yet no 

 real explanation of a thing to say that it is caused by 



