An Introduction to Philosophy Part 14

When we approach that venerable dispute touching the freedom of the will, which has inspired men to such endless discussions, and upon which they have written with such warmth and even acrimony, the very first thing to do is to discover what we have a right to mean when we call a man _free_.

As long as the meaning of the word is in doubt, the very subject of the dispute is in doubt. When may we, then, properly call a man free? What is the normal application of the term?

I raise my finger. Every man of sense must admit that, under normal conditions, I can raise my finger or keep it down, _as I please_. There is no ground for a difference of opinion so far. But there is a further point upon which men differ. One holds that my "pleasing" and the brain-change that corresponds to it have their place in the world-order; that is, he maintains that every volition can be _accounted for_.

Another holds that, under precisely the same circ.u.mstances, one may "please" or not "please"; which means that the "pleasing" cannot be wholly accounted for by anything that has preceded. The first man is a _determinist_, and the second a "_free-willist_." I beg the reader to observe that the word "free-willist" is in quotation marks, and not to suppose that it means simply a believer in the freedom of the will.

When in common life we speak of a man as free, what do we understand by the word? Usually we mean that he is free from external compulsion. If my finger is held by another, I am not free to raise it. But I may be free in this sense, and yet one may demur to the statement that I am a free man. If a pistol be held to my head with the remark, "Hands up!" my finger will mount very quickly, and the bystanders will maintain that I had no choice.

We speak in somewhat the same way of men under the influence of intoxicants, of men crazed by some pa.s.sion and unable to take into consideration the consequences of their acts, and of men bound by the spell of hypnotic suggestion. Indeed, whenever a man is in such a condition that he is glaringly incapable of leading a normal human life and of being influenced by the motives that commonly move men, we are inclined to say that he is not free.

But does it ever occur to us to maintain that, in general, the possession of a character and the capacity of being influenced by considerations make it impossible for a man to be free? Surely not. If I am a prudent man, I will invest my money in good securities. Is it sensible to say that I cannot have been free in refusing a twenty per cent investment, _because I am by nature prudent_? Am I a slave _because I eat when I am hungry_, and can I partake of a meal freely, only when there is no reason why I should eat at all?

He who calls me free only when my acts do violence to my nature or cannot be justified by a reference to anything whatever has strange notions of freedom. Patriots, poets, moralists, have had much to say of freedom; men have lived for it, and have died for it; men love it as they love their own souls. Is the object of all this adoration the metaphysical absurdity indicated above?

To insist that a man is free only in so far as his actions are unaccountable is to do violence to the meaning of a word in very common use, and to mislead men by perverting it to strange and unwholesome uses.

Yet this is done by the "free-willist." He keeps insisting that man is free, and then goes on to maintain that he cannot be free unless he is "free." He does not, unfortunately, supply the quotation marks, and he profits by the natural mistake in ident.i.ty. As he defines freedom it becomes "freedom," which is a very different thing.

What is this "freedom"? It is not freedom from external constraint. It is not freedom from overpowering pa.s.sion. It is freedom from all the motives, good as well as bad, that we can conceive of as influencing man, and freedom also from oneself.

It is well to get this quite clear. The "free-willist" maintains that, _in so far as a man is "free,"_ his actions cannot be accounted for by a reference to the order of causes at all--not by a reference to his character, hereditary or acquired; not by a reference to his surroundings. "Free" actions, in so far as they are "free," have, so to speak, sprung into being out of the void. What follows from such a doctrine? Listen:--

(1) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," I am not the author of what appear to be my acts; who can be the cause of causeless actions?

(2) It follows that no amount of effort on my part can prevent the appearance of "free" acts of the most deplorable kind. If one can condition their appearance or non-appearance, they are not "free" acts.

(3) It follows that there is no reason to believe that there will be any congruity between my character and my "free" acts. I may be a saint by nature, and "freely" act like a scoundrel.

(4) It follows that I can deserve no credit for "free" acts. I am not their author.

(5) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," it is useless to praise me, to blame me, to punish me, to endeavor to persuade me. I must be given over to unaccountable sainthood or to a reprobate mind, as it happens to happen. I am quite beyond the pale of society, for my neighbor cannot influence my "free" acts any more than I can.

(6) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," I am in something very like a state of slavery; and yet, curiously enough, it is a slavery without a master. In the old stories of Fate, men were represented as puppets in the hand of a power outside themselves. Here I am a puppet in no hand; but I am a puppet just the same, for I am the pa.s.sive spectator of what appear to be my acts. I do not do the things I seem to do. They are done for me or in me--or, rather, they are not done, but just happen.

Such "freedom" is a wretched thing to offer to a man who longs for freedom; for the freedom to act out his own impulses, to guide his life according to his own ideals. It is a mere travesty on freedom, a fiction of the philosophers, which inspires respect only so long as one has not pierced the disguise of its respectable name. True freedom is not a thing to be sought in a disorderly and chaotic world, in a world in which actions are inexplicable and character does not count. Let us rinse our minds free of misleading verbal a.s.sociations, and let us realize that a "free-will" neighbor would certainly not be to us an object of respect.

He would be as offensive an object to have in our vicinity as a "free-will" gun or a "free-will" pocketknife. He would not be a rational creature.

Our only concern need be for freedom, and this is in no danger in an orderly world. We all recognize this truth, in a way. We hold that a man of good character freely chooses the good, and a man of evil character freely chooses evil. Is not this a recognition of the fact that the choice is a thing to be accounted for, and is, nevertheless, a free choice?

I have been considering above the world as it is conceived to be by the parallelist, but, to the reader who may not incline towards parallelism, I wish to point out that these reasonings touching the freedom of the will concern the interactionist just as closely. They have no necessary connection with parallelism. The interactionist, as well as the parallelist, may be a determinist, a believer in freedom, or he may be a "free-willist."

He regards mental phenomena and physical phenomena as links in the one chain of causes and effects. Shall he hold that certain mental links are "free-will" links, that they are wholly unaccountable? If he does, all that has been said above about the "free-willist" applies to him. He believes in a disorderly world, and he should accept the consequences of his doctrine.

47. THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND THE MORAL WORLD.--I have said a little way back that, when we think of bodies as having minds, we are introduced to a world of distinctions which have no place in the realm of the merely physical. One of the objections made to the orderly world of the parallelist was that in it there is no room for the activity of minds.

Before we pa.s.s judgment on this matter, we should try to get some clear notion of what we may mean by the word "activity." The science of ethics must go by the board, if we cannot think of men as _doing_ anything, as acting rightly or acting wrongly.

Let us conceive a billiard ball in motion to come into collision with one at rest. We commonly speak of the first ball as active, and of the second as the pa.s.sive subject upon which it exercises its activity. Are we justified in thus speaking?

In one sense, of course, we are. As I have several times had occasion to remark, we are, in common life, justified in using words rather loosely, provided that it is convenient to do so, and that it does not give rise to misunderstandings.

But, in a stricter sense, we are not justified in thus speaking, for in doing so we are carrying over into the sphere of the merely physical a distinction which does not properly belong there, but has its place in another realm. The student of mechanics tells us that the second ball has affected the first quite as much as the first has affected the second. We cannot simply regard the first as cause and the second as effect, nor may we regard the motion of the first as cause and the subsequent motion of the second as its effect alone. _The whole situation at the one instant_--both b.a.l.l.s, their relative positions and their motion and rest--must be taken as the cause of _the whole situation at the next instant_, and in this whole situation the condition of the second ball has its place as well as that of the first.

If, then, we insist that to have causal efficiency is the same thing as to be active, we should also admit that the second ball was active, and quite as active as the first. It has certainly had as much to do with the total result. But it offends us to speak of it in this way. We prefer to say that the first was active and the second was acted upon.

What is the source of this distinction?

Its original source is to be found in the judgments we pa.s.s upon conscious beings, bodies with minds; and it could never have been drawn if men had not taken into consideration the relations of minds to the changes in the physical world. As carried over to inanimate things it is a transferred distinction; and its transference to this field is not strictly justifiable, as has been indicated above.

I must make this clear by an ill.u.s.tration. I hurry along a street towards the university, because the hour for my lecture is approaching.

I am struck down by a falling tile. In my advance up the street I am regarded as active; in my fall to the ground I am regarded as pa.s.sive.

Now, looking at both occurrences from the purely physical point of view, we have nothing before us but a series of changes in the s.p.a.ce relations of certain ma.s.ses of matter; and in all those changes both my body and its environment are concerned. As I advance, my body cannot be regarded as the sole cause of the changes which are taking place. My progress would be impossible without the aid of the ground upon which I tread.

Nor can I accuse the tile of being the sole cause of my demolition. Had I not been what I was and where I was, the tile would have fallen in vain. I must be regarded as a concurrent cause of my own disaster, and my unhappy state is attributable to me as truly as it is to the tile.

Why, then, am I in the one case regarded as active and in the other as pa.s.sive? In each case I am a cause of the result. How does it happen that, in the first instance, I seem to most men to be _the_ cause, and in the second to be not a cause at all? The rapidity of my motion in the first instance cannot account for this judgment. He who rides in the police van and he who is thrown from the car of a balloon may move with great rapidity and yet be regarded as pa.s.sive.

Men speak as they do because they are not content to point out the physical antecedents of this and that occurrence and stop with that.

They recognize that, between my advance up the street and my fall to the ground there is one very important difference. In the first case what is happening _may be referred to an idea in my mind_. Were the idea not there, I should not do what I am doing. In the second case, what has happened _cannot be referred to an idea in my mind_.

Here we have come to the recognition that there are such things as _purposes_ and _ends_; that an idea and some change in the external world may be related as _plan_ and _accomplishment_. In other words, we have been brought face to face with what has been given the somewhat misleading name of _final cause_. In so far as that in the bringing about of which I have had a share is my _end_, I am _active_; in so far as it is not my end, but comes upon me as something not planned, I am _pa.s.sive_. The enormous importance of the distinction may readily be seen; it is only in so far as I am a creature who can have purposes, that _desire_ and _will_, _foresight_ and _prudence_, _right_ and _wrong_, can have a significance for me.

I have dwelt upon the meaning of the words "activity" and "pa.s.sivity,"

and have been at pains to distinguish them from cause and effect, because the two pairs of terms have often been confounded with each other, and this confusion has given rise to a peculiarly unfortunate error. It is this error that lies at the foundation of the objection referred to at the beginning of this section.

We have seen that certain men of science are inclined to look upon the physical world as a great system, all the changes in which may be accounted for by an appeal to physical causes. And we have seen that the parallelist regards ideas, not as links in this chain, but as parallel with physical changes.

It is argued by some that, if this is a true view of things, we must embrace the conclusion that _the mind cannot be active at all_, that it can _accomplish nothing_. We must look upon the mind as an "epiphenomenon," a useless decoration; and must regard man as "a physical automaton with parallel psychical states."

Such abuse of one's fellow-man seems unchristian, and it is wholly uncalled for on any hypothesis. Our first answer to it is that it seems to be sufficiently refuted by the experiences of common life. We have abundant evidence that men's minds do count for something. I conclude that I want a coat, and I order one of my tailor; he believes that I will pay for it, he wants the money, and he makes the coat; his man desires to earn his wages and he delivers it. If I had not wanted the coat, if the tailor had not wanted my money, if the man had not wanted to earn his wages, the end would not have been attained. No philosopher has the right to deny these facts.

Ah! but, it may be answered, these three "wants" are not supposed to be the _causes_ of the motions in matter which result in my appearing well-dressed on Sunday. They are only _concomitant phenomena_.

To this I reply: What of that? We must not forget what is meant by such concomitance (section 39). We are dealing with a fixed and necessary relation, not with an accidental one. If these "wants" had been lacking, there would have been no coat. So my second answer to the objector is, that, on the hypothesis of the parallelist, the relations between mental phenomena and physical phenomena are just as dependable as that relation between physical phenomena which we call that of cause and effect.

Moreover, since activity and causality are not the same thing, there is no ground for a.s.serting that the mind cannot be active, merely because it is not material and, hence, cannot be, strictly speaking, a cause of motions in matter.

The plain man is entirely in the right in thinking that minds are active.

The truth is that _nothing can be active except as it has a mind_. The relation of purpose and end is the one we have in view when we speak of the activity of minds.

It is, thus, highly unjust to a man to tell him that he is "a physical automaton with parallel psychical states," and that he is wound up by putting food into his mouth. He who hears this may be excused if he feels it his duty to emit steam, walk with a jerk, and repudiate all responsibility for his actions. Creatures that think, form plans, and _act_, are not what we call automata. It is an abuse of language to call them such, and it misleads us into looking upon them as we have no right to look upon them. If men really were automata in the proper sense of the word, we could not look upon them as wise or unwise, good or bad; in short, the whole world of moral distinctions would vanish.

Perhaps, in spite of all that has been said in this and in the preceding section, some will feel a certain repugnance to being a.s.signed a place in a world as orderly as our world is in this chapter conceived to be--a world in which every phenomenon, whether physical or mental, has its definite place, and all are subject to law. But I suppose our content or discontent will not be independent of our conception of what sort of a world we conceive ourselves to be inhabiting.

If we conclude that we are in a world in which G.o.d is revealed, if the orderliness of it is but another name for Divine Providence, we can scarcely feel the same as we would if we discovered in the world nothing of the Divine. I have in the last few pages been discussing the doctrine of purposes and ends, teleology, but I have said nothing of the significance of that doctrine for Theism. The reader can easily see that it lies at the very foundation of our belief in G.o.d. The only arguments for theism that have had much weight with mankind have been those which have maintained there are revealed in the world generally evidences of a plan and purpose at least a.n.a.logous to what we discover when we scrutinize the actions of our fellow-man. Such arguments are not at the mercy of either interactionist or parallelist. On either hypothesis they stand unshaken.

With this brief survey of some of the most interesting problems that confront the philosopher, I must content myself here. Now let us turn and see how some of the fundamental problems treated in previous chapters have been approached by men belonging to certain well-recognized schools of thought.

And since it is peculiarly true in philosophy that, to understand the present, one must know something of the past, we shall begin by taking a look at the historical background of the types of philosophical doctrine to which reference is constantly made in the books and journals of the day.

[1] Ostwald, "Vorlesungen uber Naturphilosophie," s. 396. Leipzig, 1902.