462 FREE WILL AND NECESSITY 



once, than when it is confessed to after a tortuous course 

 of prolonged evasion, and what is the advantage of a 

 round-about path in coming to a result which indeter- 

 minists saw to be inevitable from the first ? 



§ 5. This result is a serious one. It is a serious shock 

 to our confidence in the power of reason to discover that 

 the contrary theories of the nature of the will both involve 

 the same absurdity. Shall we then draw the agnostic con- 

 clusion that the question is insoluble, and indicates a per- 

 manent debility of the human intellect ? Or rather, that 

 the question has been wrongly put, and that the absurdity 

 of our conclusions indicates some flaw in our premisses ? 



Nor is such flaw far to seek. 



The whole method of applying the conception of caus- 

 ation to the will is radically invalid. 



For let us remember the origin of causation. The cate- 

 gory of causation, in its application to the world, is a bold 

 piece of " anthropomorphism " originally, and springs from 

 the animistic theory of physical action (ch. iii. § 11). It is 

 an attempt to construe the Becoming of nature upon the 

 analogy of the working of our own wills, and the will is 

 thus the original and more definite archetype, of which 

 causation is a derivative, vaguer and fainter ectype. To 

 explain the will, therefore, by causation is a simple con- 

 fusion, literally an explanation of ignotiiin per ignotitis, 

 and the only answer to the assertion that conduct is neces- 

 sarily caused by motives is the question — what is meant 

 by causation and necessity ? 



§ 6. And whenever these terms are examined it appears 

 that so far from being an exception to the universal law of 

 causation, the freedom of the will is the only case in which 

 causation denotes a real fact and is more than a theory, 

 an assumption we find it necessary to make, if the world is 

 to be regarded as intelligible. 



And similarly with necessity, it turns out that strictly 

 speaking necessity and freedom are cojTelative, and apply 

 only to the will. 



For necessity, in whatever way it is taken, is something 

 subjective, an affection of our minds, and to attribute it to 

 nature is a boldly optimistic and anthropomorphic assump- 

 tion, which ignores the possibility that the operations of 



