2 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 



FREEDOM OF WILL EMPIRICALLY CONSIDERED. 



By John Bascom, D. D. LL. D., President University of Wisconsin. 



It is not our present purpose to present again the proofs of 

 liberty in human action. These proofs are so primitive in 

 their charater, approach so nearlythe first principles of rea- 

 son, that later discussions of them between the defenders of 

 philosophical systems do not often subserve any purpose of 

 conviction. 



The object we now have in view is a consideration of lib- 

 erty as it offers itself in experience, first, in the relation of 

 the mind to the brain; and, second, in the reaction between 

 the powers of the mind and the products of those powers in 

 the world about it. If we were to grant liberty theoreti- 

 cally, should we find its exercise possible under our present 

 experience? This is the question we wish to answer. 



It will not be amiss to remind ourselves in starting of the 

 nature of the interests involved in this discussion of liberty. 

 Moral facts are supreme facts in human society. The axi- 

 omatic principle on which these rest in the general mind is. 

 Responsibility is commensurate with power. This involves 

 at once choice as the indispensable condition of virtue. We 

 are not considering in morals a balance of tendencies, but a 

 balancing of tendencies — a dealing of the mind with tend- 

 encies. No adverse statement at this point has weakened 

 the general convictions on which morality proceeds, or pre- 

 sented itself as more than an ingenious evasion of them. 

 Virtue and liberty rise and fall together; whatever the one 

 loses the other loses also. 



The same relation belongs to truth and liberty. Truth is 

 to be inquired into and sought out. It may be attained, and 

 it may be missed. That movement of mind, therefore, which 

 is to be occupied with this work of inquiry, must be flexible 

 and spontaneous; must be at liberty to guide itself by the 

 purely intellectual laws of logic. If thought is in any way 

 subjected to forces beyond itself it can no longer shape itself 

 freely to its own conditions. Conclusions reached under a 



