464 FREE WILL AND NECESSITY 



of describing certain states of consciousness. Freedom is 

 the consciousness of choice, the feeling that we can do 

 either one thing or another ; necessity is the consciousness 

 of compulsion, the feeling that we cannot help doing some- 

 thing. Thus they are correlative states of our will, neither 

 of which can without more ado be applied either to all 

 states of will or to the behaviour of things. 



For the consciousness of either freedom or necessity is 

 an extreme and comparatively rare state of our will, and 

 does not extend over the whole of life. On the contrary, 

 by far the larger and saner portion of our lives is accom- 

 panied by no consciousness either of necessity or of free- 

 dom. 



In any properly constituted and situated human being 

 it is only rarely that he feels he " must " or " ought." Gen- 

 erally he simply acts, and no consciousness obtrudes as to 

 whether he might have acted differently, or could not have 

 helped acting as he did. We live by far the greater 

 part of our lives in accordance with our habits and our 

 principles. But as such conduct is not accompanied by 

 the consciousness either of freedom or of necessity, it can- 

 not properly be called either free or necessary. The 

 category of necessity and freedom does not apply to it, 

 and we must not delude ourselves into fancying that it 

 does, merely because ex post facto we can bring our actions 

 under that category, should occasion arise. And when 

 there is any inducement to interpret the neutral action of 

 ordinary life as either necessary or free, it is noticeable 

 that we can generally interpret our past action indiffer- 

 ently as having been either necessary or free. Wc can 

 colour our record to suit either view, and represent it 

 either as the free expansion of our nature, or as the com- 

 pulsorily determined result of previous habits. But both 

 these accounts are equally sophistical, and false in the 

 same way. They both invert the true relation of the 

 extremes to ordinary conduct. They attempt to force the 

 original and undissevered whole of normal conduct into the 

 scheme of abnormal divergences, and instead of regarding 

 " free " conduct and " necessary " conduct as special cases 

 of normal conduct, which is conscious neither of freedom 

 nor of necessity, they try to explain the latter as either free 



