Obrázky na stránke
PDF
ePub

Section I.

CHAPTER XI

FREEDOM

Deterministic Arguments

(1) BRADLEY says: "Free-Will is a mere lingering chimera. Certainly no writer who respects himself can be called upon to treat it seriously.” That style of argument, which unhappily is not confined to Bradley, I certainly shall not treat seriously.

(2) A more convincing argument is that presented by Sir Wm. Hamilton: “A determination by motives cannot to our understanding escape from necessitation. Nay, were we even to admit as true what we cannot think as possible, still the doctrine of a motiveless volition would be only casualism; and the free acts of an indifferent are morally and rationally as worthless as the preordered passions of a determined will."

The stronghold of determinism is in the last clause quoted. Indubitably, volitions which have no motive are morally and rationally worthless. But the fallacy lies in assuming that motives necessitate, compel in the same mechanical way that the impact of one moving thing impels another to move. Believers in freedom have long protested against this assumption as altogether arbitrary, an empty assertion for which no particle of proof is offered. But, from our present point of view, we may go much

farther; we can show this assumption to be not only unverifiable, but as in the highest degree improbable, irrational and even absurd. It springs from an obvious confusion of thought, a crass materialistic identifying of the psychic and the physical. Motives are thoughts and feelings: they are not things that flung into some imaginary balance would act as iron weights act. Furthermore, we have the plainest evidence that mental activities produce their results in altogether a different manner and under different laws from those that govern the action of things. Long ago Lotze pointed out something of this contrast between mechanism and thought. He says: "Two impressions, such as the ideas of red and blue, do not fuse mechanically; they do not mix with one another, disappear and so form a third-the idea violet. But the mind holds them together and yet apart, and the idea of their likeness and difference arises. So given two impressions a and a, that which arises from them is not a third impression=20, but instead there arises the idea of identity. Wundt has developed Lotze's view still farther. In the realm of the corporeal, he says, a and b are units in a common resultant c, including in part a new movement, in part transformation into heat, but always in such a way that ca+b. But take three musical notes and call their sensation values respectively x, y and z: the result will be not x+y+, but harmony, a greater and qualitatively different result. So in motives, let m be a motive for, and n a motive against some volition, the result

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

will be not m-n, but may be a double or three-fold

m or n.

What Lotze and Wundt began I have developed still further. Their outlook shows an evident difference between the methods of mechanism and those of thought. But the difference might prove to be only a superficial one which concealed an underlying identity. But I have conclusively shown that this difference is not merely on the surface or incidental, but fundamental and all-inclusive. I have proved it to be the primary and unfailing prerogative of our mentality that it is always able to reverse in thought the actual movement of physical processes. The course of nature is irreversible from cause to effect; but reason is not thus bound; it moves at will in either direction from cause to effects or from effects to causes. Moreover, this reverse movement is the paramount one, the source of the mind's highest activities and most sublime achievements. As we have seen in Chapter IX, this passage, from observed results to their causes, universals or laws, is the secret of Induction-and therefore the source of that modern science which is lifting mankind to such wondrous summits of knowledge and power.

Finally this double movement of the mind is the evident revelation of moral freedom. It makes it not only perfectly comprehensible, but also inevitable that two alternatives should forever hover over human existence. Man has thus always to choose whether he shall be moved by momentary impulse, as other animals are, or whether he will be guided

by his insight into the universal, the infinite, the eternal.

(3) It is, perhaps, some dim glimpse of this greatest of all truths, or at least some recoil from the absurdity of supposing that human wills were moved by impact like billiard-balls, that has led many determinists to deny causality altogether in any proper sense of the term. Necessitation, they urge, is a mere fiction; it means nothing but invariable sequence and predictibility. Thus Mill says: "If necessity means more than this abstract possibility of being foreseen, if it means any mysterious compulsion apart from simple invariability of sequence, I deny it as strenuously as any one. "1 And in his Logic he is still more explicit: "We are certain that in the case of our volitions there is not this mysterious constraint. We know that we are not compelled as by a magical spell to obey any particular motive. . It would be humiliating to our pride and paralyzing to our desire for excellence, if we thought otherwise." But surely that is a pitiful evasion, an effort to escape by raising a cloud of verbal dust. (a) For it has been proved in Chapter VI. that sequence, like any other temporal relation, implies causality or necessitation; without, that, succession would be utterly meaningless and unintelligible. (b) Again necessitation is implied in the qualifying term, "invariable"; for what is invariable is necessitated to remain what it is. (c) Confronted

'Mill, Examination, Hamilton's Philosophy, II. p. 300. 'Logic, Book VI. ch. 2, § 2.

by Reid's objection that day is not the cause of night, although it is invariably succeeded by night, Mill adds another proviso-namely, that the sequence must be unconditional. In other words, night is not caused by day, because it is caused by something else. That seems a curious way of disproving causality or necessitation.

All this serves to show how closely the denial of freedom is bound up with the denial of causality.

(4) Another evasion very much in vogue among determinists is an appeal to what they describe as "the law of causation." Höffding, for instance, assails freedom with an argument the gist of which is as follows: "Determinism asserts the continuity of the development of consciousness; it asserts the causal connection in the department of the will. Indeterminism, which teaches the existence of causeless acts of the will, absolutely destroys the inner connection and the inner continuity of conscious life." To this I have three distinct answers to make, each final and inappellable.

(a) Firstly, free volitions are not causeless. Höffding, like most determinists, has simply abolished all real causation and substituted for it the idea of uniform sequence. He says expressly that the law of causation is merely derivative, an offshoot from the law of continuity2 or identity. In other words, he abstracts from everything but an endless series of motions, each one transformed into

'Höffding, Psychology, p. 346.

"Höffding, History of Modern Philosophy,

« PredošláPokračovať »