THE RELATION OF MOTIVES TO FREEDOM. 
EDWARD H. MERRELL, DD., LL. D. 
Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Ripon College. 
The elucidation of the subject of this paper demands first of all 
that we have a clear view of the nature of liberty, as applied to 
the acts of the will. Not to descend to needless detail, let it be 
noted that the mind has three forms of volitional activity, any 
one of which can be readily discriminated from another, and all 
of which with their relations must be understood in order to 
hold any clear knowledge of the nature of freedom. Following, 
therefore, the old definition of faculty, namely, the capacity of 
the mind for any of its distinguishable kinds of activity, we 
should say that there are three faculties of will, or volitional ac¬ 
tivity, instead of one. We must note, also, that while these 
forms of activity are interdependent, they are not all in the 
same sense free. Indeed, only one of them is strictly free, the 
freedom of the other two being a derived liberty from the first. 
To give these faculties names and briefest possible definition, 
let us call the first Ultimate Choice , the second Proximate Choice , 
and the third Executive Volition. The Ultimate Choice is the 
mind’s acceptance of an end for what is intrinsic in it. A Prox¬ 
imate Choice is the mind’s acceptance of an end because that 
end is seen to be promotive of another end ulterior to itself; a 
choice necessitated as long as the ulterior end is maintained. An 
Executive Volition is the mind’s active effort to accomplish, exe¬ 
cute, carry out choices, and attain ends, an effort necessitated un¬ 
less the end antecedently selected and chosen for accomplishment 
shall be abandoned. The freedom, therefore, of proximate 
choices and executive volitions is derived, and does not belong 
to the acts in themselves, to the acts per se. To limit the free¬ 
dom of the mind to the ability to execute its own purposes, is 
to give it merely the freedom of a stone, when unobstructed, to 
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