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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
THE FREE-WILL CONTROVERSY.
BY
THOMAS DANCER HUTCHISON, Ex-Siz. T.C.D.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price Sixpence.
�1
�13 '2-6 IS
ON THE FREE-WILL CONTROVERSY.
HATEVER may be thought of the interest and
importance hitherto attaching to the Problem of
the Human Will, whether regarded as the subject of
religious or of metaphysical disputation, it is certain
that at no period in its history has it come forward
with such weighty and urgent claims to the serious
attention of all thinking men, as in our own immediate
times. Emerging into notoriety some fourteen hun
dred years ago, in the celebrated Pelagian controversy
concerning human freedom, it was not until the middle
of the seventeenth century that it escaped from the
dark and bewildering mists of theological discussion,
into the higher and serener atmosphere of purely
philosophical enquiry. For our own time was reserved
the further step which it was destined to take, and
whereby it has descended from the remoteness of
abstract speculation, to take its place among the
importunate problems of practical life, challenging
with an ever increasing emphasis the exertion of our
highest efforts in its solution.
Tremendous as were the issues that hung upon the
decision of the theological phase of the Free-Will
controversy, it must not be supposed that these issues
were any of them of a distinctively practical character.
Terrible and repugnant as it might well seem to be
forced to regard man “as incurably wicked—wicked
by the constitution of his flesh, and wicked by eternal
decree—as doomed, unless exempted by special grace
A
W
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On the Free-Will Controversy.
which he cannot merit, or hy any effort of his own
obtain, to live in sin while he remains on earth, and to
be eternally miserable when he leaves it,—to regard
him as born unable to keep the commandments, yet
as justly liable to everlasting punishment for break
ing them,” *—nevertheless these, and all other such
conclusions of theology, left the men by whom they
were entertained, for all practical purposes pretty much
in the same position as that in which they found them.
We do not observe that the possession of a fatalist
creed exercised any blighting or paralysing influence on
the active nature of the great leaders on the Calvinistic
side: indeed, if we are to believe Mr Froude, “they
were men possessed of all the qualities which give
nobility and grandeur to human nature,—unalterably
just when duty required them to be stern, but with the
tenderness of a woman in their hearts ; frank, true,
cheerful, humorous, as unlike sour fanatics as it is pos
sible to imagine any one.”
However stupendous, then, the questions involved in
the Arminian controversy concerning Human Freedom,
this much is certain, that these questions had, one and
all of them, little or no bearing upon the conduct of
men in this present life. As far as external behaviour
went, you would have had no grounds for distinguish
ing between Libertarian and Calvinist,—between the
man who believed himself to be the arbiter of his own
destiny, and the man who regarded himself as a mere
puppet in the hands of an irresistible and unyielding
external Power. In a word, the differences which
separated the Calvinist from the Arminian were
theological, not moral,—points of belief, and not of
practice. In matters involving considerations purely
ethical,—good or evil, virtue, responsibility, wrong
doing—the two antagonistic parties met on common
ground.
While it is thus manifest that the theological phase
* Froude, “Short Studies,” vol. ii. p. 3.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
5
of this great controversy is open to the charge of a
want of practical interest, it must at the same time be
allowed that the Problem of the Will, when viewed in
the aspect which it presents to us of the present day,
comes home to men’s business and bosoms with a
cogency and force which are unquestionable. The
main controversy now-a-days lies between those who
uphold the Principle of Determinism, or the uniformity
of Sequence between motive and action, on the one
hand, and the defenders of the metaphysical theory
*
of Free-Will, on the other. The Determinists maintain
(to use the words of one of the ablest of their number)!
that “ an invariable sequence exists between the sum
of motives present in the mind of a given individual,
and the action (or attempted action) which follows ; ”
and that consequently the phenomena of human voli
tion constitute a legitimate subject for scientific
explanation, calculation and prediction.
Thus the
great department of human action is brought under the
sway of the law of causation; and as a necessary result
following the recognition of the correlation between
mental and cerebral changes, the vast principle of the
transformation and equivalence of forces is seen to
embrace and pervade, not only the action, organic and
inorganic, of the external world, but also the widelyextended field of volitional agency, whether individual
or in the aggregate.| It may readily be imagined how
numerous and how momentous are the results of the
application of this Determinist principle or doctrine to
the subjects of morality and education; but its import
ance does not rest on this alone. It is made the basis
of a science of politics or sociology, which, applying
the laws of mind to the scientific explanation of the
* We say metaphysical theory, as opposed to the practical feeling
of freedom, which, as J. Stuart Mill points out, (Logic, Bk. vi. ch.
ii.) is in no wise inconsistent with the Determinist, or (as it is
often improperly called), the Necessitarian theory.
■f See Westminster Review for October 1873.
t Cf. Herbert Spencer’s work “ On the Study of Sociology," p. 6.
�6
On the Free-Will Controversy.
actions of mankind in the aggregate, seeks thereby to
arrive at a system of general principles for the guidance
of the politician. Nay more,—this principle is at the
very root of the science of Psychology itself; for if we
refuse to acknowledge uniformity of succession in the
phenomena of volition,—if we believe that the normal
action of motives is liable to he at any time neutralised
and superseded, in a manner wholly irregular and un
foreseeable by us,—then indeed the attempt to establish
any even approximate general principles or laws of the
association and reproduction of ideas becomes as absurd
as it would be to set about developing a science of
mechanics “ on a planet where gravitation was liable to
fits of intermission.” Annihilate the principle of
Determinism, and Mental Science becomes the baseless
fabric of a vision.
Thus it is quite clear that the principleof Determinism,
if admitted to be true, Carries with it practical results
of wide and deep importance. To the Determinist, the
ordinary notions of responsibility and punishment will
appear to be merely the vague and unreal products of
the imagination; virtue will be simply good luck, and
vice misfortune, while punishment will be regarded
simply as a means to an end—the end being the refor
mation of the criminal and the protection of society.
For him, the science of education opens a prospect of
unlimited advancement in the condition of the indi
vidual; while Sociology, through the long vista of
future years, gives glimpses of a coming golden age.
He is possessed with the idea “ of the gradual develop
ment of the human mind—of the spiritual unity of the
human race; ” and throughout the troubles and
anxieties that attend the fluctuating and often appar
ently retrogressive movement of his day, he is sustained
and cheered by a firm belief in the mighty “ human
organism, fraught with the vast results of ages, and big
with a life which stretched over myriads of years,” *
* VFesimMsier Review for October 1860, p. 308.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
7
ever slowly growing more and more unto the light of
perfect day.
It need hardly be said that all this is absolutely
incompatible with the Libertarian’s creed. He believes
that the phenomena of volition are marked out in the
strongest manner from all other phenomena whatever ;
that whereas by reason of the uniformity of sequence
which is permitted to prevail in the material world, the
whole of the vast department of physical phenomena
forms a legitimate subject for scientific explanation and
prediction, the individual and collective action of man
kind, on the contrary, admits neither “ scientific calcu
lations before the fact,” nor “scientific explanations
after the fact.” His theory maintains that there is
inherent in man a mysterious power, completely inde
pendent of motives, and capable of acting against the
preponderance of them—“ as if ” (to quote the words of
Dr Carpenter), “ when one scale of a balance is inclining
downwards, a hand placed on the beam from which the
other scale is suspended, were to cause that lighter
scale to go down.” It arrogates for man a faculty of
undetermined Choice, called forth indeed into active
operation on the presentation of some motive or
motives to the mind, but in no wise conditioned or
coerced by their influence. This notion of an undeter
mined power of choice is regarded by those who hold
the doctrine of Free Will as a necessary factor in our
common emotions of admiration, disapprobation, and
contrition. “ If there is no free choice ” (says Mr
Froude), “the praise or blame with which we regard
one another are impertinent and out of place.”
Of course, those who maintain this theory ipso facto
deny the possibility of the sciences of Psychology and
Sociology, together with the fair hopes which they
hold out to us. Mr Froude talks of the time “ when
the speculative formulas into which we have mapped
out the mysterious continents of the spiritual world
shall have been consigned to the place already thronged
�8
On the Free-Will Controversy.
with the ghosts of like delusions which have had their
day and perished ”—thus contemplating the possible
collapse of Psychology at some future day. He scouts
at the notion of a science of History (i.e., a social
science developed after the Deductive or Historic
method) so long as “ natural causes are liable to be set
aside and neutralised by what is called volition.” True,
men are “ at least half animals, and are subject in this
aspect of them to the conditions of animals. So far as
those parts of man’s doings are concerned, which
neither have, nor have had, anything moral about
them, so far the laws of him are calculable. . . . But
pass beyond them, and where are we ? In a world
where it would be as easy to calculate man’s actions by
laws like those of positive philosophy as to measure
the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule, or weigh Sirius
in a grocer’s scale.”
After what has been already said, it will be readily
admitted that the decision of the Free Will question
at the present day, carries with it results of no small
practical importance, and that it is manifestly incum
bent on us to put forth our best efforts in the attempt
to solve it. In some quarters, indeed, our endeavours
would meet with small encouragement. Many persons
—notably, Professor Huxley—believe that the battle
between Libertarian and Necessitarian is destined for
ever to remain a drawn one. But it is only right that
before we acquiesce in so disheartening an opinion, we
should ourselves review with some carefulness the con
troversy as it stands at present, and try to find out
whether after all the battle does not afford us indica
tions, however faint, of a definite issue.
“The advocate of Free Will appeals to conscience
and instinct—to an b, priori sense of what ought in
equity to be. The Necessitarian falls back upon the
experienced reality of facts.” * It is admitted on all
hands that the testimony of experience is in favour of
* Froude, “ Short Studies,” vol. i. p. 4.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
9
necessity. Thus even Mr Mansel writes:—“Were it
not for the direct testimony of my own consciousness
to my own freedom, I could regard human actions only
as necessary links in the endless chain of phenomenal
cause and effect.” * This fact, when taken in connec
tion with the extremely unique and exceptional nature
of the Free Will theory (according to which there is,
as Herbert Spencer says, “ one law for the rest of the
universe, and another law for mankind ”), seems fully
to justify the enquiry whether in thus denying the
universality of the law of uniform Succession, men may
not be under the influence of some bias which misleads
their judgment. Now, it is a well known fact that
the universality of this law has often been denied, both
in ancient and in modern times, the supposed excep
tions to it being always some one or other of the more
mysterious and apparently unpredictable phenomena of
nature. Thus Sokrates denied that Astronomy or
Physical Philosophy in general were fit subjects for
human study, maintaining that these two departments
were under the immediate and special control of the
gods. We are all familiar with that type of the pietist
which sees the handiwork of an all-wise and doubt
less retributory Providence in each of the petty acci
dents of life —so long as these be advantageous to
himself or calamitous merely to his neighbour.f This
attitude of mind is well illustrated by the following
story, which Dean Stanley relates as having been told
of a late dignitary of the Church by himself :—“ A
friend,” he used to relate, “ invited me to go out with
him on the water. The sky was threatening, and I
declined. At length he succeeded in persuading me,
and we embarked. A squall came on, the boat
lurched, and my friend fell overboard. Twice he sank,
* “ Metaphysics,” p. 168.
_
>
f “Think ye that those eighteen upon the tower of Siloam fell,”
is the characteristic lesson of the Gospel on the occasion of any
sudden visitation. Yet it is another reading of such calamities
which is commonly insisted upon.”—“ Essays and Reviews,” p. 365.
�io
On the Free-Will Controversy.
and twice he rose to the surface. He placed his hands
on the prow, and endeavoured to climb in. There was
great apprehension lest he should upset the boat.
Providentially I had brought my umbrella with me.
I had the presence of mind to strike him two or three
hard blows over the knuckles. He let go his hand,
and sank. The boat righted itself, and we were saved.”
Mr Huxley reminds us of the vast difference between
our mode of accounting for the Great Plague and the
Great Fire which devastated London in the 17th cen
tury, and that which recommended itself to our ances
tors. * It can hardly be asserted even of the most
cultivated classes of this country, that there prevails
amongst them a unanimous belief in the uniformity of
physical phenomena. The Prayer Book of the Estab
lished Church of England still contains prayers for
rain and for fair weather • and a public Thanksgiving
was celebrated not long since on the recovery of the
heir to the Throne from a dangerous illness ; though
in this latter case (as Herbert Spencer points out) a
different interpretation of the issue would seem to be
indicated by the conferring of a baronetcy upon the
attendant physician. The doctrine of a particular
providence, as it is preached from our pulpits, while
conceding the prevalence of law in all those phenomena
which are familiar and thoroughly understood, main
tains that in the as yet unexplained mysteries of nature
(such as the changes of the weather, the process of
deliberative thought, &c.), the Deity may and does
direct the course of nature according to his pleasure.
We see then that there is, and always has been, in the
human mind a tendency to refer all the apparently
irregular and unforeseeable phenomena of nature to the
agency of some free and unconditioned power. Viewed
in the light of this fact, the undoubtedly complex and
(to all appearance) variable nature of volitional action
* “ Lay Sermons: Essay on the Advisableness of Improving
Natural Knowledge.”
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
11
assumes at once a deep significance in the explanation of
the origin of the Free Will hypothesis.
Another influence modifying our conceptions of the
will is to be found in the conservative power which
language exercises over our thoughts and beliefs. It
is notorious that the Libertarian theory can claim a far
higher antiquity than its rival; indeed, even during
the period in which speech was in process of formation,
some conception more or less crude of Indeterminism
must have prevailed amongst mankind. This concep
tion has by means of language become fixed and
crystallised in the general mind, to such a degree that
it is only by means of a considerable effort, and after
some practice, that we can entertain the notion of an
unbroken sequence of antecedent and consequent in the
world of human action. Thus it is seen that a potent
influence on the side of the Free-Will theory is con
stantly at work in the language of every-day life.
Here too we must call attention to the unfortunate
complication which has been introduced into the Pro
blem of the Will by the general adoption of the figure
embodied in the terms “Freedom of the Will,”
“ NecessityI’ and others of like nature. This metaphor
originated with the Stoics, who declared the virtuous
man to be free, the vicious man to be a slave. It was
subsequently adopted, and applied in a similar sense,
by Philo Judeeusand the early Christian Fathers. It
need hardly be said that this figure was addressed to
the heart rather than to the understanding; “as
regards appropriateness in everything but the associa
tions of dignity and indignity” says Professor Bain,
“ no metaphor could have been more unhappy. So far
as the idea of subjection is concerned, the virtuous man
is the greater slave of the two.” * The epithet “ free ”
was subsequently adopted by those who controverted
the Predestinarían theories of Augustine.
This
theologian taught that all men were the slaves of some
* Bain, “ Mental and Moral Science,” p. 398.’
�12
On the Free-Will Controversy;
external constraining power—the elect being subject
to irresistible grace, and the reprobate to original sin.
As opposed to this notion of earfernaZ compulsion, the
term Free-Will had a definite intelligible meaning.
Augustine maintained that for every man there existed
a certain class of motives, the due operation of which
in arousing him to volitional action was hindered by
some external force—that the elect were restrained
from sinning, and the reprobate from doing what was
good. This was evidently to suspend volitional action,
quite as much as it is suspended when men are thrown
into prison; and in opposition to this notion, any
conscious being “under a motive to act, and not
interfered with by any other being, is to all intents
free ; * and this moreover is the only meaning which
can possibly be attached to the word Freedom. But,
most unhappily, after the emergence of the theory of
determinism in the writings of Hobbes and his followers,
this term “ Freedom of the Will ” was borrowed from the
ancient theological controversy by the opponents of the
new philosophical system, and, carrying with it all the
inveterate and potent associations of dignity which had
belonged to it in its former employment, thus intro
duced an emotional bias of immense force into the
question now at issue. The Determinists were called
Necessitarians, and their antagonists were men who
upheld the Freedom of the Human Will. In conse
quence of the associations attaching to these words,
necessity and freedom, it came to pass that “ the
doctrine of causation, when considered as obtaining
between our volitions and their antecedents, was almost
universally conceived as involving more than uniform
sequence.................. Even if the reason repudiated, the
imagination retained, the feeling of some more intimate
connection, of some peculiar tie, or mysterious con
straint exercised by the antecedent over the consequent.
Now this it wras which, considered as applying to
the human will, conflicted with men’s consciousness
* Bain, “ Mental and Moral Science,” p. 398.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
13
and revolted their feelings. They were certain that, in
the case of their volitions, there was not this mysterious
constraint. They felt, that if they wished to prove
that they had the power of resisting the motive, they
could do so (that wish being, it needs scarcely be
observed, a new antecedent;) and it would have been
humiliating to their pride, and (what is of more import
ance) paralysing to their desire of excellence, had they
thought otherwise. But neither is any such mysterious
compulsion now supposed, by the best philosophical
authorities, to be exercised by any other cause over its
effect. Those who think that causes draw their effects
after them by a mystical tie, are right in believing that
the relation between volitions and their antecedents is
of another nature. But they should go further, and
admit that this is also true of all other effects and their
antecedents. If such a tie is considered to be involved
in the word necessity, the doctrine is not true of human
actions ; but neither is it then true of inanimate objects.
It would be more correct to say that matter is not
bound by necessity, than that mind is so.” *
There is a further emotional influence tending to
foster the belief in Free-Will which must be briefly
noticed here. It is manifest that when men claim to
have a direct consciousness of liberty, they are thinking,
not so much of their past conduct as of their future and
yet unrealised volitions. With regard to the past, as has
already been remarked, most persons are ready to admit
that experience proves their actions to have uniformly
followed some preponderating motive. Now the con
templation of a man’s past history does not, in the
majority of cases, bring with it any keen emotions of
pride or satisfaction ; too often it is but the record of
the conquest of temporary fleeting solicitations of the
present over the permanent interests embodied in our
more comprehensive and ideal motives. Hence the
belief that our course of action will be pretty much the
* J. S. Mill, “ Logic,” Bk. vi., Chap, ii., § 2.
�14
On the Free-Will Controversy.
same in the future as it has been in the past is one
which administers a heavy blow to our feelings of self
satisfaction and of power ; and we are apt under the
influence of these feelings to imagine that in our future
course of life the higher and more permanent aims will,
through the operation of our hitherto inactive power of
Free Choice, predominate over the more sensual and
transient motives,—“ the fleeting actualities of pleasure
and pain.” Here also, then, it is evident that the
notion of an undetermined Will finds strong support in
the natural instincts of emotion.
In concluding this portion of our subject, it will be
necessary to call attention to a well-known infirmity of
thought, which plainly operates in favour of the per
sistence of Libertarianism. We allude to the strong
tendency existing in the mind to objectify, or ascribe
separate existence to, its abstractions. “ Mankind in
all ages have had a strong propensity to conclude that
wherever there is a name, there must be a distinguish
*
able separate entity corresponding to the name ; and
every complex idea which the mind has formed for
itself by operating upon its conceptions of individual
things, was considered to have an outward objective
reality answering to it. Fate, Chance, Nature, Time,
Space, were real beings, nay, even gods. In ancient
times to the vulgar and to the scientific alike, whiteness
was an entity, inhering or sticking in the white sub
stance : and so of all other qualities.” * Language
favours this fallacious tendency of the mind; the
abstract name (“alike the facility and the snare of
general expression,” as it has been aptly described), is
generally understood to denote something more than
the bare fact of similarity between a number of objects,
some mysterious entity whereby they resemble each
other as they do, and which resides in each and all
of them. We are inclined to believe that for every
name there must be a corresponding thing. In this
* Mill, “ Logic,” Bk. v., Chap, iii., § 4.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
15
manner, after that men had found it convenient to
frame a general term which should embrace all volitional
phenomena, the constant employment of this term
(velle “to will,”) easily generated a belief in some
mysterious entity or power, underlying all volitional
action, and originating within itself all those effects of
“deliberating, weighing, and choosing,” which con
stituted the most obvious common element originally
embodied in the abstract idea of Will. Just as the
Eleatic Philosophy taught that a peculiar entity or sub
stance, to sv or Oneness, inhered in all things which are
said to be one,, so did men frame for themselves
“ the conception of an underlying substantive power,
the will, from which all single acts of volition were
supposed to emanate.”*
Having now enumerated some of the principal
psychological causes for the wide and early prevalence,
and the long continuance of the doctrine of Free-Will,
we will now proceed to pass in review some of the de
finitions of freedom which have been advanced by the
upholders of this doctrine. In doing so, we shall pass
over without comment the theological phase of the
controversy, as conducted on principles, and proceed
ing by a method wholly alien to the spirit of scientific
enquiry, and we shall commence with a notice of
Descartes, who may be said to be the first of the purely
philosophical libertarians.
Descartes was a cotemporary of Hobbes, the first
philosopher who consistently taught and believed the
doctrine of Determinism. It would be a mistake, how
ever, to suppose that in writing on the subject of the
Will, Descartes had any conception of this doctrine in
his mind; for the pamphlet in which Hobbes made
known his system to the world was not published until
* Westminster Review, July 1871. Whoever desires to attain to an
adequate conception of the various causes of the genesis and per
sistence of Libertarianism, cannot do better than read the masterly
article on the subject contained in this number of the Review.
�16
On the Free-Will Controversy.
after the year 1655, while the writings in which
Descartes’ opinions concerning the Will are chiefly
found, appeared at Paris in the year 1641. As might
have been expected, then, Descartes’ doctrine of FreeWill was set up in opposition, not to Determinism, but
to that system of Necessitarianism or Fatalism with
which Bishop Butler deals in his Analogy, and which,
it need hardly be said, is altogether distinct from and
incompatible with the Determinist theory. Accord
ingly, Descartes’ definition of Freedom is such as might
be conscientiously adopted by the most scrupulous of
Determinists. “ The power of will,” he says, “ consists
in this alone, that in pursuing or shunning what is
proposed to us by the understanding, we so act that
we are not conscious of being determined to a particular
action by any external force.
*
This is a perfectly
truthful, though inadequate, definition of the Will,
and it is with strict justice that Descartes replies to
Hobbes (who had remarked on the passage quoted
above, that it assumed, without proving, the doctrine
of Free-Will) ; “I have assumed or advanced nothing
concerning Freedom, save that which we experience to
be true every day of our lives, and which the light of
nature plainly teaches us.” * That Descartes was not
far off from Determinism in his views is seen from his
remarks on Indifference. “ In order to be free,” he
says, “it is not necessary that I should be indifferent
as to the choice of one or other of two contrary things.
Nay, rather, the more I incline towards one thing
(whether because I see clearly that right and truth agree
in it, or because God has so ordered the course of my
feelings), with so much the greater freedom do I make
my choice and adhere to that thing. And assuredly the
grace of God and my natural understanding, far from
diminishing my freedom, augment it and strengthen it
rather ; so that the indifference which I feel when I
am not led away on one side more than on the other by
* Quatrième Meditation.
4 Troisième Response.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
17
the influence of any motive, is the lowest kind of
liberty, and indicates rather a defect in knowledge than
a perfection of the will. For if I always knew clearly
what was true and what was good, I would never have
to go to the trouble of deliberating what decision and
w’hat choice I should make j and so I should be per
fectly free without ever being indifferent.
*
Accord
ing to Descartes, then, “every sentient being, under a
motive to act, and not interfered with by any other
being, is to all intents free;”! and thus “the fox
impelled bv hunger, and proceeding unmolested to the
poultry yard, would be a free agent.But this, it
needs hardly be said, is precisely the teaching of De
terminism. Indeed Descartes has fallen short of that
system merely in so far as he has admitted the con
ception of a liberty of indifference. This is, of course,
to give a double sense to the word liberty, and so to
confuse the question not a little. But we have already
seen that on this point Descartes speaks with hesitation,
and we may safely agree with Professor Bain in regard
ing him as “ willing to give up the liberty of in
difference,” while anxious to establish the internal feel
ing of freedom.
While Descartes is thus to be regarded merely as the
exponent of the popular practical feeling of liberty
protesting against the paralysing creed of fatalism,. or
of an overruling and irresistible external power which
guides men’s actions irrespective of their will ; Clarke,
Price, and Reid, on the other band, have each framed
definitions of Freedom, having special reference to, and
combating, the doctrine of Determinism. Clarke and
Price agree in making freedom to consist in a power of
self-motion or self-determination, which in all animate
agents, is spontaneity, in moral agents, is liberty. How,
they asked, can it be supposed that motives are the
immediate cause of action 1 It is true that our faculty
* Quatrième Meditation,
f Bain, “ Mental and Moral Science,” page 398.
Î Bain, “Mental and Moral Science,” p. 398.
B
�18
On the Free-Will Controversy.
of self-determination is never called forth into action
save on the presentation of some end or design to the
mind. But it is unmeaning to make such ends or
motives the physical causes of action. “ Our ideas may
be the occasion of our acting, but are certainly
not mechanical efficients.” “ If,” says Clarke, “ every
action of man is to be regarded as determined by some
motive, then either abstracted notions (f.e. motives)
have a real subsistence (which would be Realism),
or else what is not a substance can put a body in
motion.”* According to Leibnitz, the will is to be
compared to a balance, whose motion one way or an
other is determined by the weights in the scales (the
motives). In the opinion of Clarke and his followers,
however, the true comparison would be to a hand
placed on either side of the beam, and determining the
motion of the scales irrespective of, and possibly in
opposition to, the preponderance of weights.
In thus assimilating Spontaneity and Freedom,
Clarke and Price laid themselves open to the severe
criticism of Sir W. Hamilton, who writes (note to
Reid on “The Active Powers”):—“The Liberty from
Go-action or Violence—the Liberty of Spontaneity—is
admitted by all parties; is common equally to brutes
and men; is not a peculiar quality of the Will; and
is, in fact, essential to it, for the will cannot possibly
be forced. The greatest spontaneity is the greatest
necessity. Thus a hungry horse, who turns of necessity
to food, is said, on this definition of liberty, to do so
with freedom, because he does so spontaneously; and,
in general, the desire of happiness, which is the most
necessary tendency, will, on this application of the
term, be the most free. The definition of liberty
given by the celebrated advocate of moral freedom,
Dr Samuel Clarke, is in reality only that of the liberty
of spontaneity.”
But while Clarke and Price, by incautiously identi* For an explanation of the misconception involved here, see
Bain “ Mind and Body,” pp. 76, 132.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
19
fying spontaneity and liberty, were guilty of confusing
together the freedom of self-determination with the
freedom which is opposed to external constraint (z.e.,
the “ liberty from co-action ” of Hamilton, Reid is
careful to withhold from the brute creation the posses
sion of any faculty analogous to our volitional power.
Reid, Clarke, and Price, however, unite in regarding
this power as a faculty of self-determination. “ By the
liberty of a Moral Agent,” says Reid, “I understand
a power over the determinations of his own will.” “A.
free agent,” says Clarke, “when there is more than one
perfectly reasonable way of acting (i.e., when there is
a perfect equilibrium of motives), has still within itself,
by virtue of its self-motive principle, a power of acting.”
This notion of a self-determining agent has been criti
cally examined both by Edwards and Hamilton, a brief
outlineof whose remarks on the subjectwill next hegiven.
Edwards starts by proclaiming the inconceivability
of such a notion as that of self-determination. The
Will, he says, is said to determine its own acts. Now,
it is manifest that it can do this solely by means of an
act of volition; for (to quote Hamilton’s words) “it is
only through a rational determination or volition that
we can freely exert power.” But if this be so, then it
follows that every free volitional act requires a preceding
volition to constitute it free; and so on ad infinitum.
This evidently is to bring the matter to an absurdity.
If it be answered that the act of determining the
volitional action, and the act of willing, are one and
the same, then the obvious rejoinder is, that a freeaction is determined by nothing, and is entirely un
caused. Self-determinism, therefore, is a misnomer,
and the correct name for such a creed is Indeterminism.
Now Indeterminism teaches that the actions of our will
do not originate in any causes. It therefore contradicts
the law of causality. But if this law be made void,
then the foundation of all reasoning—nay, the only
possible proof for the existence of God—will have
vanished; and there will remain nothing save the
�20
On the Free-Will Controversy.
fleeting thoughts present to our consciousness, of the
existence of which we can be certain.
*
Nor is Sir William Hamilton less emphatic when he
exposes the inconsistent and inconceivable character of
Heid’s definition of Freedom. “ According to Reid,” he
writes, “ Moral Liberty does not merely consist in
doing what we will, but in the power of willing what
we will. For a power over the determinations of our
will supposes an act of will that our will should deter
mine so and so. . . . But here question upon question
remains (and this ad infinitum)—Have we a power (a
will) over such anterior will ? And until this question
shall be distinctively answered, we must be unable to
conceive the possibility of the fact of Liberty!’
To those Libertarians who endeavoured to evade the
charge of denying causality by affirming that the per
son was the cause of his volitions, Hamilton puts the
question :—“Is the person an original undetermined
cause of the determination of his will ? If he be not,
then he is not a free agent, and the scheme of Necessity
is admitted. If he be, in the first place, it is imposs
ible to conceive the possibility of this ; and, in the
second, if the fact, though inconceivable, be allowed, it
is impossible to see how a cause, undetermined by any
motive, can be a rational, moral, and accountable cause.”
But while Sir William Hamilton insisted so unspar
ingly on the inconceivability of the liberty of a moral
agent as defined by Reid, and on the fact that, if
conceived, it could only he conceived as morally worth
less, it is nevertheless notorious that he regarded this
* “To show that any doctrine contradicted the law of cause and
effect was, Edwards conceived, a perfect reductio ad dbsurdum. He
did not anticipate that anyone would impugn the universality of
cause and effect.” Some Libertarians, endeavouring to save the
law of causation by a verbal quibble, asserted that the soul was the
cause of its volitions. “Edwards answers, that this may explain
why the soul acts at all, but not why it acts in a particular manner.
And unless the soul produce diverse acts, it cannot produce diverse
effects, otherwise the same cause, in the same circumstances, would
produce different effects at different times.”—Bain, Mental and
Moral Science, page 417.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
2I
definition as correct, and that he was a strenuous
upholder of the doctrine of self-determination. Hamil
ton adopts a peculiar attitude towards the controversy
of the Will, and his positions on this subject cannot he
understood without a reference to his general philo
sophical system. In this system a very prominent
place is assigned to what he calls the Law of the
Conditioned, which is expressed thus :—“ All that is
conceivable in thought lies between two extremes,
which, as contradictory of each other, cannot both be
true, but of which, as. mutual contradictories (by the
Law of Excluded Middle), one must.’’ This law
Hamilton illustrates by adducing our conceptions of
Space and Time. “ Space must be bounded or not
bounded, but we are unable to conceive either alter
native. We cannot conceive space as a whole, beyond
which there is no further space. Neither can we
conceive space as without limits. Let us imagine space
never so large, we yet fall infinitely short of infinite
space. But finite and infinite space are contradictories ;
therefore, although we are unable to conceive either
alternative, one must be true and the other false. The
conception of Time illustrates the same law. Starting
from the present, we cannot think past time as
bounded, as beginning to be. On the other hand, we
cannot conceive time going backwards without end ;
eternity is too big for our imaginations. Yet time had
either a beginning or it had not. Thus ‘ the con
ditioned or the thinkable lies between two extremes or
poles ; and these extremes or poles are each of them
unconditioned, each of them inconceivable, each of
them exclusive or contradictory of the other.’ ” *
To apply this doctrine to the subject of the Will;
the two unconditioned extremes or poles are here
represented by the contradictory doctrines of Deter
minism and Casualism (or the self-determinist theory
of Liberty). These two contradictory schemes are
* Bain’s Compendium of Mental and Moral Science, Appendix
B, p. 68.
�'ll
On the Free-Will Controversy.
equally inconceivable. “ For, as we cannot compass
in thought an undetermined cause, an absolute com
mencement-—the fundamental hypothesis of the one ;
so we can as little think an infinite series of determined
causes—of relative commencements,—the fundamental
hypothesis of the other. The champions of the opposite
doctrines are thus at once resistless in assault and
impotent in defence. The doctrine of Moral Liberty
cannot be made conceivable, for we can only conceive
the determined and the relative. All that can be
*
done is to show, (1.) That, for the fact of Liberty, we
have immediately or mediately, the evidence of con
sciousness ; and (2.) that there are, among the
phenomena of mind, many facts which we must admit
as actual, but of whose possibility we are wholly unable
to form any notion/’ Thus according to Hamilton,
the inconceivability of the self-determinist scheme is
counterbalanced by a co-equal inconceivability in the
doctrine of determinism, and the scale is turned in
favour of self-determinism by the testimony, mediate
or immediate, of consciousness.
If Sir William Hamilton has displayed no small
stringency in his destructive criticisms upon the defini
tions of Freedom coming from Clarke and Reid, and
has thus saved his adversaries a considerable amount
of trouble by vigorously demolishing his friends, his
own peculiar doctrines, on the other hand, have been
subjected to an examination no less searching and no
less destructive, by the illustrious philosopher recently
gone from among us, John Stuart Mill. In one of the
concluding chapters of his masterly work, the
“ Examination of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy,”
Mill enters upon a minute and exhaustive discussion
on the subject of the Will, and of the Libertarian
theories of it. After severely censuring Hamilton for
his attempt to give a fictitious importance to his
doctrine of Freedom by representing it as affording the
* It has already been pointed out that Hamilton rejects the
evasive quibble that the soul is the cause of our volitions.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
23
only valid argument in support of the existence of God,
he proceeds :—“ Let us concede to Hamilton the co
equal inconceivability of the conflicting hypothesis, an
uncaused commencement and an infinite regress. But
this choice of inconceivabilities is not offered to us in
the case of volitions only. We are held, as he not only
admits but contends, to the same alternative in all
cases of causation whatever. But we find our way out
of the difficulty, in other cases, in quite a different
manner. In the case of every other kind of fact, we
do not elect the hypothesis that the event took place
without a cause : we accept the other supposition, that
of a regress, not indeed to infinity, but either generally
into the region of the unknowable, or back to a
universal cause, regarding which, as we are only con
cerned with it in relation to what it preceded, and not
as itself preceded by anything, we can afford to make
a plain avowal of our ignorance.” Now why do we
thus, in all cases save only our volitions, accept the
alternative of regress 1 “ Apparently it is because the
causation hypothesis, inconceivable as he ” (Hamilton)
“ may think it, possesses the advantage of having
experience on its side. And how or by what evidence
does experience testify to it 1 Not by disclosing any
nexus between the cause and the effect, any sufficient
reason in the cause itself why the effect should follow
it. No philosopher now makes this supposition, and
Sir W. Hamilton positively disclaims it. What
experience makes known, is the fact of an invariable
sequence between every event and some special com
bination of antecedent conditions, in such sort that
wherever and whenever that union of antecedents
exists, the event does not fail to occur. Any must in
the case, any necessity, other than the unconditional
universality of the fact, we know nothing of. Still
this a posteriori “does,” though not confirmed by an
a priori “must,” decides our choice between the two
inconceivables, and leads us to the belief that every
event within the phenomenal universe, except human
�24
On the Free-Will Controversy.
volitions, is determined to take place by a cause. Now
the so-called Necessitarians demand the application of
the same rule of judgment to our volitions. They
maintain that there is the same evidence for it. They
affirm as a truth of experience that volitions do, in
point of fact, follow determinate moral antecedents with
the same uniformity and . . . with the same certainty
as physical effects follow their physical causes. . . .
Whether they must do so, I acknowledge myself to be
entirely ignorant, be the phenomenon moral or
physical; and I condemn accordingly the word
necessity as applied to either case. All I know is that
they tZo.”*
The testimony of experience, then, which is admitted
on all hands to be in favour of (so called) Necessity, is
that on which the Determinists ground their system.
The Libertarians, on the other hand, agree in claiming
the evidence of consciousness as making for their side.
“We have by our constitution,” says Reid, “a natural
conviction or belief that we act freely.” In his notes
to Reid’s essay on the Active Powers, Hamilton
hesitates between regarding the sense of freedom as an
ultimate datum of consciousness, and treating it as
involved in our consciousness of the law of moral
obligation or responsibility; in his lectures on Meta
physics, however, he speaks of it more plainly as a fact
of which we are directly conscious. Is it really the
case, then, asks Mill, that the admitted testimony of
man’s universal experience, is hopelessly at variance
with the testimony of his consciousness 1 If this be so,
then is the mental philosopher in an unenviable plight
indeed. But let us examine more nearly what is meant
by the testimony of consciousness. “To be conscious
of free-will, must mean, to be conscious before I have
decided that I am able to decide either way. Exception
may be taken, in limine, to the use of the word
consciousness in such an application. Consciousness
tells me what I do or feel. But what I am able to do,
* “ Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy,” p. 500.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
25
is not a subject of consciousness. Consciousness is
not prophetic; we are conscious of what is, not of
what will or can be. We never know that we are able
to do a thing except from having done it or something
equal or similar to it. . . . If our so-called conscious
ness' of what we are able to do is not borne out by
experience, it is a delusion. It has no title to. ciedence
but as an interpretation of experience, and if it is a
false interpretation it must give way.” Our so-called
consciousness of, or belief in, freedom,, therefore, must
be an interpretation of our past experience, t.e., with
regard to foregone acts of deliberation and choice, we
must be conscious that we could have decided the
other way ; “ but, the truth is, not unless we preferred
that way. 'When we imagine ourselves acting .differ
ently from what we did, we think of a change in the
antecedents, as by knowing something that we did not
know. Mill therefore altogether disputes the assertion
that we are conscious of being able to act in opposition
to the strongest present desire or aversion.”*
Having in this manner pointed out the error of those
who claim the testimony of consciousness in support of
the Freedom or Indeterminatensss of the will, Mill
proceeds to consider the other position assumed by
Hamilton, viz., that the fact of freedom is involved m
our consciousness of moral obligation or responsibility.
To quote Hamilton’s words
“ Our consciousness of
the m oral law, which, without a moral liberty in man,
would be a mendacious imperative, gives a decisive
preponderance to the doctrine of freedom over the
doctrine of fate. AVe are free in act, if we are account
able for our actions.” Now this is the main argument
of the Indeterminist; it seeks to establish the doctrine
of free-will by representing it as inextricably involved
in the common conception of accountability or moral
desert, so that the two must stand or fall togethei.
There is not a writer on the side of Libertarianism who
has not dwelt with emphasis upon this argument.
* Bain, “ Mental and Moral Science,” p. 427.
�26
On the Free-Will Controversy.
Thus Reid writes, “Let us suppose a man necessarily
determined in all cases to will and to do what is best
to be done • he would surely be innocent and inculp
able. But as far as I am able to judge, he would not
be entitled to the esteem and moral approbation of
those who knew and believed this necessity. . . . On
the other hand, if a man be necessarily determined to
do ill, this case seems to me to move pity, but not dis
approbation. He was ill because he could not be
otherwise. Who can blame him ? Necessity has no
law.” “If there is no free choice,” writes Mr Froude,
“ the praise or blame with which we regard one another
are impertinent and out of place.”* “ Man,” says
Hamilton in another place, “ is a moral agent only as
he is unaccountable for his actions—in other words, as
he is the object of praise or blame ; and this he is only
inasmuch as he has prescribed to him a rule of duty,
and as he is able to act, or not to act, in conformity
with its precepts. The possibility of morality thus
depends on the possibility of liberty • for if a man be
not a free agent he is not the author of his actions, and
has, therefore, no responsibility,—no moral personality
at all.”
Now, in order to determine whether freedom from
causation is involved in the notion of moral responsi
bility, we shall be obliged to subject that notion to a
careful analysis. What, then, is meant by the feeling
of responsibility 1 Simply a conviction that if we
committed certain actions, we should deserve punish
ment for so doing. A sense of responsibility is pre
cisely identical with a sense of the justice of punish
ment. Now, punishment presupposes Law, of which
it is the sanction, i.e., to ensure obedience to which it
is inflicted on the disobedient. Accountability, then,
or responsibility, involves a sense of the justice of Law;
and the question before us resolves itself into this—Is
it necessary to assume that human voluntary action is
undetermined by any moral antecedents, in order to
* Quoted before on p. 7.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
27
justify the institution of law and punishment ? So far
is this from being the case, that (to use the words of
Herbert Spencer) “if there is no natural causation
throughout the actions of incorporated humanity,
government and legislation are absurd. Acts of Par
liament may, as well as not, be made to depend on the
drawing of lots or the tossing of a coin; or, rather,
there may as well be none at all.” * The exigencies of
human society require that restrictions should be placed
upon the conduct of the individuals who together make
it up ; this justifies the institution of Law. The justi
fication of Punishment absolutely necessitates the
assumption that men’s actions follow the law of cause
and effect. “Unless pain, present or prospective,
impels human beings to avoid whatever brings it, and
to perform whatever delivers from it, punishment has
no relevance, whether the end be the benefit of the
society, or the benefit of the offender, or both to
gether.” f It may be asked—“ Is it just to punish a
man for what he cannot help ? Certainly it is, if
punishment is the only means by which he can be
enabled to help it. Punishment is inflicted as a
means towards an end—that is to say, if our volitions
are not determined by motives, then punishment is
without justification. If an end is justifiable, the sole
and necessary means to that end must be justifiable.
Now the Necessitarian theory proceeds upon two ends
-—the benefit of the offender himself and the protection
of others. To punish a child for its benefit, is no
more unjust than to administer medicine.” $
Such is a brief outline of Mill’s answer to the
position of Hamilton, that freedom is involved in our
consciousness of moral responsibility. Those who wish
to examine the arguments on both sides in detail, will
find them in the 26th chapter of Mill’s “ Examination
of Sir W. Hamilton’s Philosophy,” and in the admir* “Study of Sociology,” p. 46.
t Bain, “ Compendium,” p. 404,
+ Bain, “ Compendium," p. 428.
�28
On the Free-Will Controversy.
able remarks on “ Liberty and Necessity,” contained in
the lltli chapter of Bain’s “Exposition of the Will,”
to be found in his invaluable “ Compendium of Psy
chology and Ethics.” We have seen that in demolish
ing this position of his opponent, Mill has established
the very opposite principle, viz., that the doctrine of
Determinism is necessarily implicated in the notion of
moral agency or responsibility. This, however, does
not hinder but that there should be some truth in the
assertion that the common notion of responsibility
involves in it the hypothesis of a free and undeter
mined will. For, according to the common conception
of moral desert, there is inherent in moral evil or
wrong-doing a heinousness and a perniciousness quite
unique, irrespective of its consequences; and it is
obviously difficult to reconcile with this view the hypo
thesis of a will determined by the strongest motive,
seeing that the peculiar pravity which is the essential
characteristic of moral evil ought in the natural course
of things to exercise a deterring influence stronger than
any counter-influence arising from the prospect of pos
sible advantage to be gained thereby. Accordingly,
the notion of a free and undetermined will, raised
above the influence of motive, and resolving on a course
of wickedness in spite of the dissuasive considerations
suggested by the horrible nature of wrong-doing, was
called in to explain the phenomena of man’s moral
frailty; and this notion soon generated a conception of
punishment as of a kind of vengeance, rightly and duly
inflicted upon the ill-doer, without regard to any bene
ficial results accruing to himself or to society. Now,
this vague notion of the nature of punishment is wholly
incompatible with the definition of it which has been
already given, and which is admitted on all hands to
embody some at least, if not all, of the elements con
tained in the positive signification of the word “ pun
ishment.” On the Determinist theory of volition,
therefore, the vulgar notions of virtue and of vice, as
qualities to be lauded and reprobated irrespective of
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
29
their consequences, as well as the conception of punish
ment as a righteous retribution for ill-doing, apart from
any consideration of the useful ends to be served by it,
must disappear altogether. Virtue is « a great happi
ness but no merit in the vulgar sense of the term;
and vice is “ a great misfortune, but no demerit. *
We have now concluded our review of the great
controversy of the Will. Starting with the considera
tion of the question as it stands at the present day, we
saw how numerous and how momentous are the practi
cal issues involved in its solution. We then went on
to enquire whether any, and if so, what psychological
or other causes there were, which would exercise a dis
turbing influence in the decision of this question, and,
as a result, we found that there were many and potent
emotional and other agencies at work in generating and
fostering the belief in an indeterminate will. ± .inally,
we have passed in review the leading definitions of
pree-Will which have been advanced on the side of
Indeterminism, and have given a brief outline of the
destructive criticism of these definitions which has pro
ceeded from Edwards, Hamilton, and Mill.successively.
We have seen that our consciousness, which has been
so triumphantly appealed to by the supporters of free
will, does not in truth, when closely interrogated, yield
any evidence whatever in. favour of that doctrine ; and
that the testimony of experience, which is universally
regarded as a sufficient ground for the belief m the law
of°causality as holding throughout the pheenomenal uni
verse (volitional acts alone being excepted), is admitted
by everybody to be altogether in favour of Determinism,
i.e. of the law of causality as extending over the field
of human action also. We have noticed, however, that
the theory of Determinism involves the sacrifice of the
common notions of moral excellence and depravity;
and it is precisely here (as has been shown by the writer
in the Westminster Review) that the strength of Libertar
ianism lies. Men are indignant when it is insinuated
* Westminster Review, October 1873, p. 311,
�50
On the Free-Will Controversy.
that the popular beliefs with regard to merit and demerit,
responsibility, and punishment, are in great part the
products of lying imagination. They refuse to allow
any moral excellence to actions performed unconsciously
under the constraining influence of unreflecting love or
sympathy. Mr Mivart declares that “acts unaccom
panied by mental acts of conscious will directed towards
the fulfilment of duty ” are “ absolutely destitute of
the most incipient degree of real or formal goodness.”*
According to Reid, a man necessarily determined by
the constitution of his nature to will and to do what is
best to be done, “ would not be entitled to the esteem
and moral approbation of those who knew and believed
this necessity.” “ What was by an ancient author said
of Cato, might indeed be said of him :■—he was good be
cause he could not be otherwise. But this saying if
understood literally and strictly is not the praise of
Cato, but of his constitution, which was no more the
work of Cato than his existence?’ Now, in the first
place, be it remarked that this view of moral excellence,
as involving free and undetermined choice of the good,
excludes not only the man who does good without
thinking about it, but the Deity also, from the category
of beings possessed of a claim to our moral approbation.
We are compelled to think of God as necessarily good;
to attribute to Him the power of moral evil is, as
Hamilton has pointed out, to detract from his essential
goodness. Precisely in the same sense as Cato was
said to be good, because he could not be otherwise, so
is God declared to be, in virtue of his nature, necessarily
determined to goodness. “ As Euripides hath it, h
(hoi ri dpuciiv differpbv, ovx, iislv
According to the
Libertarian definition of moral excellence, then, we
shall be obliged to deny that God possesses any moral
attributes at all, or else to detract from his essential
goodness by admitting the possibility of his becoming
* “On the Genesis of Species,” quoted by Huxley, “Critiques,”
&c. p. 287.
Hamilton, note to Reid’s Essay on the Active Powers.
�On the Free-Will Controversy.
31
evil; and it need hardly be said that this is a corollary
of their doctrine from which most Libertarians would
recoil with horror. But, not to press this point any
further—can it be possible that we are to regard all
actions prompted by unreflecting sympathy and affection
as “ absolutely destitute of the most incipient degree of
real or formal goodness ?” Surely not; the unanimous
verdict of mankind forbids it. The perfect ideal of a
virtuous character is that of the man whose actions
invariably have for their spring and source an instinc
tive feeling of sympathy for his fellow-men, irrespective
of any selfish considerations. Or do Mr Mivart and
those who agree with him think to persuade us that
the mother who rushes forward to save her child’s life
at the sacrifice of her own—that a Howard and a
Nightingale, whom the importunate promptings of their
inn er nature nrge irresistibly forth from the refinements
and the pleasures of domestic life, to all the horrors
and miseries of an existence passed in the midst of
prisons, lazar-houses, and hospitals that these are
creatures devoid of any “ title to our esteem or moral
approbation?” Such a doctrine only requires to be
fully and definitely stated, in order to be instantly and
unequivocally repudiated.
Our space will not permit us to enter upon a con
sideration of the various collateral arguments urged by
the two sides of this great controversy of the wifi. For
a full account of these, the reader is referred to the
admirable “ History of the Free-Will Controversy,” to
be found in Professor Bain’s Compendium of Mental
and Moral Science. We will merely add, in conclusion,
that the Determinist hypothesis has always been practi
cally recognised by men in their dealings with one
another. It has been already shown that the institution
of Law presupposes the fact of a uniform connection
between pain and the action necessary to avoid it, that
is, of the law of uniform succession in our acts and
their moral antecedents. Nor does the conduct of
individuals towards one another show less clearly the
�22
On the Free-Will Controversy.
conviction of such a principle of uniformity. For ex
ample (to quote an instance from J. Stuart Mill), “Men
often regard the doubt what their conduct will be, as
a mark of ignorance of their character, and sometimes
even resent it as an imputation.”* Indeed, not only
is prevision concerning the conduct of others constantly
necessary, in virtue of the interdependence of human
beings aggregated in society j it is also no less easy and
sure than the prevision of physical phenomena. “ If,
in crossing a street, a man sees a carriage coming upon
him, you may safely assert that, in nine hundred and
ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, he will try to get
out of the way. ... If he can buy next door a com
modity of daily consumption better and cheaper than
at the other end of town, we may affirm that, if he does
not buy next door, some special relation between him
and the remoter shopkeeper furnishes a strong reason
for taking a worse commodity at greater cost of money
and trouble.” f Finally, what logical justification of
sympathy can there be—how is it possible to reconcile
reason and fellow-feeling, save on the hypothesis of
determinism 1 Is it not in this creed that we find the
strongest incentive to mercy, charity, long-suffering—
to “hatred of the sin, and yet love for the sinner j in
a word, to all that is highest and noblest in the charac
ter of man as a social being ? May the day soon come
—and perhaps it is not far distant—when a public and
practical recognition shall be given to this great prin
ciple, and when the popular sanction shall establish a
basis and a system of psychology so fruitful in beneficial
result, not only in Legislation, but in the Sciences of
Morality and Education also. This paper will not
have been written in vain, if it should arouse any to
the earnest and sincere examination of the great sub
ject with which it has dealt.
* Mill, “ Logic,” Book VI., chapter it, §2.
f Spencer, “Study of Sociology,” page 38.
�INDEX TO MR SCOTT’S PUBLICATIONS,
ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.
The following Pamphlets and Papers may be had on addressing
rt letter enclosing the price in postage stamps to Mr THOMAS
SCOTT, No. 11, The Terrace, Farquhar Road, Upper Norwood,
London, S.E.
pricd.
®
s.
ABBOTT, FRANCIS E., Editor of 1 Index,’ Toledo, Ohio, U.S.A.
The Impeachment of Christianity. With Letters from Miss F. P. Cobbe ana
Prof. F. W. Newman, giving their reasons for not calling themselves Christians 0
ANONYMOUS.
Address
on the
Necessity
3
-------- 0 3
Truths for the Times
of
3
6
0
G
6
3
»
3
G
9
0
1
1
0
0
0
1
- 0
0
’ 0
Free Inquiry and Plain Speaking,
A. I. Conversations. By a Woman, for Women. Parts I., II., and III., 6d. each
A Few Self-Contradictions of the Bible ------
Modern Orthodoxy and Modern Liberalism
Modern Protestantism. By the Author of “The Philosophy of Necessity.
Nine Years a Curate - .
'
,
One Hundred and One Questions to which the Orthodox, &c. Per dozen
On Public Worship
----Our First Century
--Primitive Church History - .
'
Sacred History as a Branch of Elementary Education. Part I.—Its Influence
on the Intellect. Part II.—Its Influence on the Development of the Con
1 0
science. 6d each Part
-_
1 0
The Church and its Reform. A Reprint -----The Church: the Pillar and Ground of the Truth The Opinions of Professor David F. Strauss
_
The Twelve Apostles
Via Catholica; or, Passages from the Autobiography of a Country Parson
Parts I., II., and III., Is. 3d. each Part
.
6
6
G
- 3
- 0
-
Woman’s Letter
0
0
0
9
3
AN EX-CLERGYMAN.
What is the Church of England ? A Question for the Age.
BARRISTER, A. Notes on Bishop Magee’s Pleadings for Christ
Orthodox Theories of Prayer
0
0
0
0
-
BASTARD, THOMAS HORLOCK. Scepticism and Social Justice
BENEFICED CLERGYMAN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
The Chronological Weakness of Prophetic Interpretation The Evangelist and the Divine The Gospel of the Kingdom ------BENTHAM, JEREMY. The Church of England Catechism Examined. Reprint
BERNSTEIN, A.
Legends of Abraham, Isaac, and
On the Religious Education
Natural Religion, versus Revealed Religion
On Eternal Torture On The Atonement
-
Origin of
the
BESANT, Mrs A.
BRAY, CHARLES.
Jacob Critically
of Children -
*
c, .
"
"
Illusion and Delusion ; or Modern Pantheism versus Spiritualism,
The Reign of Law in Mind as in Matter. Parts I. and II., 6d each
BROOK, W. 0. CARR. Reason versus Authority -
1
0
6
0
1
1
0
1
Examined 1 0
~ 0 3
"
*
*
-
"
0 6
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1 0
- 0 3
BROWN, GAMALIEL.
An Appeal to the Preachers of all the Creeds
Sunday Lyrics -------The New Doxology
----CANTAB, A. Jesus versus Christianity
------
0 3
0 3
0 3
0 6
CARROLL, Rev. W. G., Rector of St Bride’s Dublin.
The Collapse of the Faith or, the Deity of Christ as now taught by the
Orthodox
~
i -j
CLARK, W. G., M.A., Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
A Review of a Pamphlet, entitled, “The Present Dangers of the Church of
0 6
CLERGYMAN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.
An examination of Liddon’s Bampton Lecture
Letter and Spirit
-----
0
O
6
G
�List of Publications—continued.
CLERGYMAN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND—continued.
The Analogy of Nature and Religion—Good and Evil The Question of Method, as affecting Religious Thought Rational Piety and Prayers foe Fair Weather -
CONWAY, MONCURE, D.
The Spiritual Serfdom of the Laity. With Portrait
The Voysey Case
-
»
-
-
-
-08
« o 3
OS
-
-
-
- 0 6
-
-
-
.08
COUNTRY PARSON, A.
The Thirty-Nine Articles
and the
Creeds,—Their Sense and their Non-Sense.
Parts I., II., and III. 6d. each Part
COUNTRY VICAR, A.
-
-
-
-
-
«16
Criticism the Restoration of Christianity. Review of a paper by D: Lang 0 6
The Bible for Man, not Man for the Bible
-06
CRANBROOK, The late Rev. JAMES.
On the Formation of Religious Opinions On the Hindrances to Progress in Theology
The Tendencies of Modern Religious Thought God’s Method of Government,
On Responsibility,
.
.
DEAN, PETER. The Impossibility of knowing what is Christianity Dk CARPENTER at Sion College ; or
The View of Miracles Taken by Men of Science DUPUIS. Christianity a form of the great Solar Myth F. H. I. Spiritual Pantheism -
FOREIGN CHAPLAIN.
The Efficacy of Prayer, a Letter to Thomas Scott
Everlasting Punishment. A Letter to Thomas Scott,
FORMER ELDER IN A SCOTCH CHURCH. On Religion
GELDART, Rev E. M. The Living God
GRAHAM, A. D.
On Faith Cruelty and Christianity : A Lecture,
HANSON, Sir R- D., Chief-Justice of South Australia.
Science and Theology -
-
-
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-
-
-
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HARE, The Right Rev FRANCIS, D.D., formerly Lord Bishop of Chichester.
The Difficulties and Discouragements which attend the Study of the
Scriptures
-06
HENNELL, SARA S.
On The Need of Dogmas in Religion. A letter to Thos. Scott
- 0 6
HINDS, SAMUEL, D.D., late Bishop of Norwich.
Another Reply to the Question, “What have we got to Rely on, if we
cannot rely on the Bible?”
- 0 •
A Reply to the Question, “Apart from Supernatural Revelation, What
is the
Prospect of Man’s Living after Death?”
-
-
-
- 0 ©
A Reply to the Question—“Shall I seek Ordination in the Church of
England ?”
------The Nature and Origin of Evil. A Letter to a Friend
-
HOPPS, Rev J. PAGE.
Thirty-nine Questions on
the
Thirty-nine Articles. With Portrait
JEVONS, WILLIAM.
The Book
of
-.06
- 0 6
Common Prayer Examined
Parts I. and II. 6d. each Part
-
in the
-
Claims of Christianity to the Character of
The Prayer Book Adapted to the Age
-
Light of
-
a Divine
-
-
- fl 8
the Present
-
-
-
-
Age.
- 1 0
Revelation, Considered 0 6
-
-03
KALISOH, M. Ph.D.,
Theology of the Past and the Future. Reprinted from Part I. of his Commen
tary on Leviticus. With Portrait -10
KIRKMAN. The Rev THOMAS P., Rector of Croft, Warrington.
.
Church Cursing and Atheism
-10
On Church Pedigrees. Parts I. and II. With Portrait. 6d. each Part - 1 0
On the Infidelity of Orthodoxy. In Three Parts. 6d. each Part
- 1 6
Orthodoxy’ from the Hebrew Point of View. Parts I. and II. 6d. each,
-10
LAKE, J. W. The Mythos of the Ark
-06
Plato, Philo, and Paul; or, The Pagan Conception of a “Divine Logos,” shewn
to have been the basis of the Christian Dogma of the Deity of Christ, -
LA TOUCHE, J. D., Vicar of Stokesay, Salop.
-10
The Judgment of the Comm'ittee of Council in* the Case of Mr. Voyset - - 0 3
�List of Publications—continued.
s. d.
LAYMAN, A, and M.A., of Trinity College, Dublin.
0 6
Law and the Creeds '
~
0 6
Thoughts on Religion and the Bible
MAR?L!fio?v^^D AS Devout Obedience to the Laws of the Universe - 0 fi
0 fi
The Religious Faculty : Its Relation to the other Faculties, and its Penis,
0 6
The Cardinal Dogmas of Calvinism traced to their origin,
M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge.
Pleas for Free Inquiry. Parts I., II., III. and IV. 6d. eash Part
MACKAY, CHARLES, LL.D. The Souls of the Children MACLEOD, JOHN
2 0
0
Jewish Literature
and
-
-
*
With Portrait
The Utilization of the Church Establishment
-
-
Three5Notices of the “Speaker’s Commentary,” translated from the Dutch
of Dr. A. Kuenen,
TVT P T ptter bv The Dean of Canterbury on Science and Revelation
NEALE, EDWARD VANSITTART.
6
6
6
0
0
Modern Education: or, the Use and Abuse of the
Bible in the Schoolroom
How to Complete the Reformation.
3
1
0
0
Recent Theological Addresses. A Lecture
MAITLAND, EDWARD.
G
6
0 6
Does Morality depend on Longevity ?
Genesis Critically Analysed, and continuously arranged; with Introductory
Remarks
-
-
-------- 1 0
The Mythical Element in Christianity
------ 1 0
0 3
The New Bible Commentary and the Ten Commandments
NEWMAN, Professor E. W.
Against Hero-Making in Religion James and Paul
On the Causes of Atheism.
With Portrait
On the Relations of Theism to Pantheism ; and On the Galla Religion
On the Historical Depravation of Christianity Reply to a Letter from an Evangelical Lay Preacher The Bigot and the Sceptic The Controversy about Prayer
The Divergence of Calvinism from Pauline Doctrine
The Religious Weakness of Protestantism
The True Temptation of Jesus. With Portrait
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil The Two Theisms
-----Ancient Sacrifice,
OLD GRADUATE. Remarks on Paley’s Evidences
OXLEE, The Rev JOHN. A Confutation of the Diabolarchy -
0 6
0 C
0 6
0 6
0 3
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
PADRE OF THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH.
0
The Unity of the Faith among all Nations
PARENT AND TEACHER, A. Is Death the end of all things for Man? - 0
pyj-y T0IA ~N~ A
A Dialogue by way of Catechism,—Religious, Moral, and Philosophical
1
Parts I. and II. 6d. each Part
'
'
'
The Pentateuch, in Contrast with the Science and Moral Sense ot our Age
Part I.—Genesis, Is. fid. Part II.-Exodus, Is. Part III.-Leviticus, Is. 4
Numbers, Is.,
--------PRESBYTER ANGLICANUS.
.
.
m
„f
Eternal Punishment. An Examination of the Doctrines held by theCleigj oi
the Church of England
-------- 0
0
The Doctrine of Immortality in its Bearing on Education
fi
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ROBERTSON, JOHN, Coupar-Angus.
Intellectual Liberty’
The Finding of the Book
0 fi
- •
-------- 2 O
SCOTT, THOMAS.
O 9
Basis of a New Reformation V____
Commentators and Hierophants ; or, The Honesty of Christian Commentatoi s
in Two Parts. 6d. each Part
-
-
Miracles and Prophecies
Original Sin
Practical Remarks on “The Lord’s Prayer.”
1
0
0
t 0
0
G
6
6
�List of Publications—continued.
s. d.
SCOTT, THOMAS—continued.
of Ripon on the Physical Resurrection of Jesus, in its Bearing
0 6
on the Truth of Christianity
4 4
The English Life of Jesus. A New Edition
0 fi
The Tactics and Defeat of the Christian Evidence Society
The Dean
STRANGE, T. LUMISDEN, late Judge of the High Court of Madras.
A Critical Catechism. Criticised by a Doctor of Divinity, and defended by
T. L. Strange
--------- 0
Clerical Integrity
--------- 0
Communion with God ----- 0
0
The Bennett Judgment
The Bible; Is it “The Word of God?”
------ 0
2
The Speaker’s Commentary Reviewed
The Christian Evidence Society'
------- 0
0
The Exercise of Prayer,
SUFFIELD, Rev. ROBERT RODOLPH.
The Resurrection An Easter Sermon at the Free Christian Church, Croydon - 0 3
Five Letters on Conversion to Roman Catholicism 0 3
TAYLOR, P. A., M.P. Realities ------VOYSEY, The Rev. CHAS. On Moral Evil
----- 0
W. E. B.
0 6
An Examination of some Recent Writings about Immortality 0 6
The Province of Prayer,
- *
WHEELWRIGHT, Rev. GEORGE.
The “ Edinburgh Review” and Dr Strauss
Three Letters on the Voysey Judgment
Society’s Lectures,
-
WIFE OF BENEFIOED CLERGYMAN.
On the Deity’ of Jesus. Parts I. and II., 6d. each Part
WORTHINGTON, The Rev W. R.
On the Efficacy
of
- 0 3
Christian Evidence
and the
Opinion in Matters of Religion
0 6
0
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
0 6
Two Essays : On the Interpretation of the Language of the Old Testament, and
Believing Yvithout Understanding ZERFFI, G. G., Ph.D.
The Vedas and the Zend-Avesta : The First Dawn of Awakening Religious Con
sciousness in Humanity
-
0
fi
3
SCOTT’S “ ENGLISH LIEE OF JESUS.”
Tn One Volume, 8ro, bound in doth, post free, Is. 4d.,
SECOND EDITION OF
THE ENGLISH LIFE OF JESUS.
RECENTLY PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR,
THOMAS SCOTT,
11 THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Notice.—Post Office Orders to be made payable to Thomas Scott,
Westow Hill Office, Upper Norwood, London, S.E.
Friends to the cause of “ Free Inquiry and Free Expression," are
earnestly requested to give aid in the wide dissemination of these
publications.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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On the free-will controversy
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Hutchison, Thomas Dancer
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Place of publication: London
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Notes: Cover title: The free-will controversy. Publisher's list on unnumbered pages at the end. Includes bibliographical references. Date of publication from KVK. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Thomas Scott
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[1874]
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Free will
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Free Will and Determinism
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national SECULAR SOOT'™
tJil£
THE DOCTRIKE
HUMAN- AUTOMATISM.
A LECTURE
(WITH ADDITIONS}
delivered before
THE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
On Sunday Afternoon, 7th March, 1875.
BY
w. B. CARPENTER, LL.D., M.D.,
F.R.S., F.L.S., F.G.S.
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE,
AND REGISTRAR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON. 1
LONDON:
PUBLISHED BY THE SUNDAY LECTUBE SOCIETY,
18 75,'
Price Threepence.
�SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
To provide for the delivery on Sundays in the Metropolis, and to
encourage the delivery elsewhere, of Lectures on Science—
physical, intellectual, and moral,—History, Literature, and
Art; especially in their bearing upon the improvement and
social well-being of mankind.
THE SOCIETY’S LECTURES
ARE DELIVERED AT
ST. GEORGE’S HALE, LANGHAM PLACE,
On SUNDAY Afternoons, at FOUR o’clock precisely
(Annually—from November to May).
Twenty-eour Lectures (in three series), ending 2nd May, 1875, will
be given.
Members’ £1 subscription entitles them to an annual ticket (trans
ferable, and admitting to the reserved seats), and to eight single
reserved-seat tickets available for any lecture.
Tickets for each series (one for each lecture), as below :—
To the Shilling Reserved Seats—5s. 6d.
To the Sixpenny Seats—2s., being at the rate of Threepence
each lecture.
For tickets apply (by letter) to the Hon. Treasurer, Wm. Henry
Domville, Esq., 15 Gloucester Crescent, Hyde Park, W.
Payment at the door
One Penny
Sixpence ■—and (Reserved
Seats) One Shilling.
�IS MAN AN AUTOMATON?
Ladies and Gentlemen,—In. introducing to you the
■question which is to be the subject of my address this
evening—the question, Is Man an Automaton ?■—it is
perhaps well that I should define, at the commencement,
the sense in which I intend to use these words ; and it will
be more convenient to take the second first—What do I
mean by an Automaton ? The word automaton is derived
■from two Greek words, which mean self-moving. Well, of
•course, man is a self-moving being, and in that sense he is
an automaton. But the word automaton, as we use it, has
& different signification. It means a structure which moves
by a mechanism, and which can only move in a certain
way. I.might take as illustrations various automata which
are exhibited from time to time—I remember to have seen
in my boyhood many remarkable collections. But I will
draw my illustration from this very hall in which we are
met. The great organ behind me is blown, I understand,
by water power. You know, I daresay, that formerly
organs were blown by manual or human power. The
bellows-blower had before him what is called a “ tell-tale,”
a little weight so hung as to indicate the amount of wind in
the organ; and his business was to work the bellows so as
■always to keep the “ tell-tale ” below a certain point On
the other hand, by a piece of mechanism constructed for
the purpose with a great deal of skill, the organ is now
blown by water-pressure. The water-pressure so acts, that
when the organist requires a large supply of wind, as when
he is playing loud through a great many pipes, the bellows
�4
move faster ancl supply that wind ; while, on the otherhand, when he plays softly, and little wind is required, the
bellows move more slowly. If that apparatus were incased
in the frame of a human figure, and made to work the
bellows-handle up and down, we should call it an auto
maton.
.
Now, let us see on what the working of that automaton
depends. It depends, in the first place, upon its structure.
The mechanist who has constructed that apparatus has soarranged the play of its various parts, that it shall work
with the' power communicated to it, in accordance with the
oro-anist’s requirements. Then its working depends upon
the force supplied by the water-pressure; that force being •
made, by the construction of the machine, to exert itself
in moving the bellows at the rate determined by the playing
of the organist. Without a sufficient water-pressure the
machine will not work; and when the organist ceases to
touch the keys, the movement of the ■ bellows comes to a>
stand. There you have then a machine which is moved,
on the one hand, by a certain power, and the action of
which is regulated by another set of circumstances external
to itself. Now that is, I think, what we mean by an
automaton—a machine which has within itself the power
of motion, under conditions fixed for it, but not by it A
watch, for instance, is an automaton. You wind it upand give it the power of movement; while you make it
regulate itself by its balance, which you can so adjust as to
make it keep accurate time. Any piece of mechanism of
that sort, self-moving and self-regulating, is an automaton.
But then all these machines are made to answer certain
purposes, and cannot go beyond. They are entirely de
pendent, first, upon their original construction, secondly,
upon the force which is applied to them, and thirdly, upon
the conditions under which that force is .made to act. -^he
question then is, whether Man is a machine of that kind .
his original constitution, derived from his ancestry, in the
first place, shaping the mechanism of his body; and in the
second place, the circumstances acting upon him through the
whole period of his growth, and modifying the formation ot
his body, also, in the same manner, determining the con
stitution of his mind. Are we to regard the whole subse-
�5
(mental aS Wel1 as bodily) of eacp individual,
with his course of action in the world, as a necessary
consequence or resultant of these conditions—as strictly
•determined by his inherited and acquired organisation, and
-by the external circumstances which act upon it?
We must now consider what we understand by Man. I
do not mean Man according to the zoologist’s definition—
• a Vertebrate animal, belonging to the class Mammalia,
older Bimana, genus and species Homo sapiens ; but Man
as he is familiarly known to us, and as we have to regard
him m our present inquiry-the bodily man and the mental
man. We cannot help separating these two existences in
thought, although my own course of study has been directed
o the investigation of the nature of their relation. The
-metaphysician considers man simply in his mental aspect;
ih/^
eltCiallng With the organs of sensation;
d the mode in which man acquires his knowledge of the
external wor d through those organs; nor can°he help
cea mg with the subject of voluntary action, and with the
movements which express mental emotions. The physio
logist, on the other hand, looks simply at the body of man-and yet he cannot help dealing with the physiological con
ditions of mental activity—the way in which we become
conscious of the impressions made upon the organs of sense
appatatim °dVritl111011
Upon the muscu1^
appaiatus. A little consideration will shew that we mav
justly regard the body of man as the instrument by which
ns mind comes into relation with the external world. We
exteraTworld Z m/3a.ns/omething distinct from the
personalitZ
convenieilt to call that
feels think?7?
^tm term Ago. This Ego-which
eels thinks, reasons judges, and determines—receives
all its impressions of the external world through the
Ze ZZ Z °f
Again’ a11
action of
e E^o upon the external world—including in that term
the mmds m other men—is exerted through the instru
mentality of the body. What am I doing "at the ZseZ
time?—endeavouring to excite in your minds certain Ideas
meais ?f paSSmg throufh W own. How do I do so?—by
means of my organs of speech, which are regulated bv
my nervous system; that apparatus being the instrument
' '
�6
through which my mind expresses my ideas in spoken
laimuao'e. The sounds I utter, transmitted to you by
vibrations of the air falling upon your ears, excite m the
nerves with which those organs are supplied certain changes
which are propagated through them to the sensonum, that
wonderful organ through the medium of which a certain
state of consciousness is aroused in your minds; and my aim
is, by the use of appropriate words, to suggest to your minds
the ideas I desire to implant in them.
Such is the aspect under which I would have you con
sider Man’s body this evening. I do not say it is the only
aspect: but it best suits our present discussion to consider
the body as the instrument by which the mind of each
individual is made conscious of what is taking place
around him, and by which he is able to act upon the ex
ternal world; thus becoming the instrument of communi
cation between one mind and another. To illustrate what
I would have you keep before you strongly—that the Mind
is the essential Ego—I will ask your attention to one or
two facts of very familiar experience. It must have hap
pened to most of you to have formed impressions of other
individuals without any knowledge of their bodily appear
ance. We do not know them m the flesh at all, but we
know them intimately, or think we do, in the spirit.. 1
remember, in the year 1851, the year of the first, great
. Exhibition, being told that a number of the Telegraph
establishments in the country having given their clerks a
free ticket to London, to enable them to go up and see
the world’s fair—as it was called—m Hyde Park almost
every clerk on first coming to Town before going; to the
great Exhibition, went down to the telegraph office in
city to fraternise with his chum. You P^^ably know that
telegraph clerks very soon find out who is at the o
end.” Several clerks occasionally work a particulai ^s
ment, and each comes to know in half a dozen
w
has - gone on.” They recognise the style of telegjaphm,,
just as you would recognise the handwilting
+o i;ve
After a'little there is some one whom eachcomess wlike
better than others; A communicates individually with_ ,
and B with A; and beginning with the exchange>of lrttfe
friendly messages at odd times, intimacies, I have been
�7
assured, of the most fraternal kind, frequently spring up
between those who have never seen each other. I daresay,
now that young ladies are employed in telegraphing—and
a most fitting employment it is for them—some more
tender relations may spring up in the same manner.
Take again another illustration—the way in which our
sympathies are aroused with an author, when we come to
. know his mind as presented in his writings. A great many
of you felt when Dickens died, as if you had lost a personal
friend—one with whose mind your own had grown into
dose relation, whose thoughts had exercised a most valu
able influence on yours, and whom you felt to be nearer
to you than many so-called friends.
Let me give you an instance from my own experience.
I have been for some years a great admirer of an American
writer, whose books I have read with the deepest interest,
because I found in these books expressions of some of my
own best thoughts, a great deal better put forth than I
could put them forth myself—the products of a similar
course of scientific inquiry, worked out with the aid of
great poetic insight and a great fund of human sympathy,
—a large human capacity altogether. In his writings I
have felt as if I had one of my nearest and truest friends.
Circumstances lately drew forth a letter from him to myself,
in which he did me the honour to say that I had been his
teacher in science; but I felt he was completely my master
in everything that gives the best expression to scientific
thoughts. Now if I were to go to America, the first man
with whom I should seek to make acquaintance, with the cer
tainty that we should meet as old personal friends, is Oliver
Wendel Holmes.—I do not speak of Ralph Waldo Emer
son, because we have long been personal friends. In the
preface to a book I have lately received from him, he'sums
up all I have been now saying in these pregnant words—
“ Thoughts rule the world.”
Thus it is the mind that reciprocates the mind, much
more than the body reciprocates the body. The body is
the symbol of the mind, just as spoken or written words
are symbols of ideas ; and when we think of a friend whom
we know personally, we combine with the conception of
his personality our whole knowledge and conception of his
�8
character. When yon say, “ I met my friend so and so in
the street,” you do not mean you met simply his body, but
that you met the man—the whole man. But when you
say that you know a man “ by sight” only, you mean that
you know his outside body and nothing more.
In considering the body as the instrument of the mind,
I shall shew you, first, the large amount of automatism in
the human body, as to which I want you to have clear
ideas. I do not wish, for any purpose whatever, to lead
you away from this truth. I wish that you should be in the
position yourselves to appreciate facts, so as not to be led
away by one-sided statements. I desire particularly that
my statements should not be one-sided; and so far as time
will allow, I will place before you the whole of the moat
important considerations relating to this subject.
We must separate our body into two parts; and shall
first consider the part that is most important as the instru
ment of our mind—that which physiologists call the apparratus of animal life. This takes in the nervous system—
the recipient of impressions made by the external world
upon our organs of sense, the instrument through which
these impressions are enabled to affect our conscious minds,
and conversely the medium through which our minds ex
press themselves in action on our bodies. Then, again,
there is the muscular apparatus, which is called into action
through the nervous system, and the framework of bones
and joints by which this muscular apparatus gives move
ment to the several parts of the body.
But this “apparatus of animal life” cannot be maintained
in its integrity, and cannot perform the actions which it is
adapted to execute, without certain conditions. It must be
maintained by nutrition, because it is always wearing and
wasting by its very action, and is. in constant need of
repair; and the material for this repair must be supplied
by the blood-circulation. Again, the power it puts forth is
dependent upon the operation of oxygen on the material of
its tissues or of the blood which circulates through them;
and this is as essential a condition as the pressure of water
is upon the bellows of the organ.
Then the circulation of the blood involves the prepara
tion of the blood from food, and its exposure to the atmo-
�9
■sphere in the lungs, so as to get rid of the carbonic
■acid which is the product of the chemical change that
generates nervo-muscular energy, and may take in a fresh
supply of oxygen ; and hence there is required an apparatus
of organic life. This apparatus consists of all the organs
which take in the food, which digest it, prepare it, and
convert it into blood, those which circulate the blood, and
also those which subject the blood to the influence of the
air. The working of this apparatus in man involves the
action of certain nerves and muscles•, though it is not so with
many of the lower animals, which are provided with a much
simpler mechanism. In the case of man we have the need
of muscles to take in and swallow the food, and of muscles
to move the coats of the stomach in the process of its
digestion; and we require a powerful muscle—the heart
•—to circulate the blood through the body by the alternate
contraction of its several chambers; while powerful muscles
of respiration alternately fill and empty the lungs.
Now, the first point I would lay stress upon is, that
all these actions are essentially and originally automatic.
When I say originally, I mean from the very beginning—
from the moment when the child comes into the world, or
oven before. We know that the first thing the new-born
infant does is to draw a long breath; and from that time
breathing never ceases,—the cessation of breathing being
the cessation of life. The heart’s action has been going
on for months before birth; and its entire suspension for
■& very short time, whether before or after birth, would
bring the whole vital activity of the body to an end.
These motions are executed by the nervo-muscular
apparatus, in a way that does not involve our conscious
ness at all. We do not even know of our heart’s action
unless it be very violent, or we be in such a position that
we feel it knocking against our side. But still it is going
on regularly and tranquilly, though it may not be felt
from one day’s end to another. We cannot stop it, if we
would, by-any effort of the will; but it is affected by our
'©motional states.
So, again, we do not know that we are breathing, unless
we attend to it. The moment that we direct our attention
to it, we become aware of the fact; but if we are studying
a2
�10
closely, or listening to a discourse, or attending to some
piece of music, or, indeed, doing anything that engages our
consciousness, we are no more aware of our breathing than
we are during sleep. This shews you, then, that when
breathing goes on regularly the action is purely automatic.
But we have a very considerable control over our muscles
of respiration. If my respiratory movements were as purely
automatic as those of an insect, I could not be addressing
vou to-night; because the whole act of speech depends upon
the regulation of those movements. We must have such
power over the muscles, as to be able to breathe forth succes
sive jets, as it were, of air, which, by the apparatus of arti
culation, are converted into sounding words. Though we
have power over the respiratory organs to a certain extent,
we cannot “ hold our breath” many seconds. In the West
Indies the overworked negroes used formerly to try to
commit suicide by holding their breath, but could not do
it, except by doubling their tongues back so as to stop the
aperture of the glottis; for the impulse and' necessity forbreathing became so imperative, that they could no longer
resist the tendency to draw in a breath. Thus, whilst, we
have a certain voluntary control over this act of breathing,
so as to be enabled to regulate it to our purposes, we can
not suspend its automatic performance long enough to
interfere seriously with the aeration of the blood.
Let me briefly notice some of our other automatic
actions. In the act of swallowing, which properly begins
at the back of the throat, the “swallow” lays hold of the
food or the drink brought to it by the muscles of the mouth,,
and carries this down into the stomach. We are quit®
unconscious of its passage thither, unless we have taken
a larger morsel or something hotter or colder than ordinary.
This is an instance of purely automatic action. If you
carry a feather, for instance, a little way clown into the
“swallow,” it is laid hold of and carried down involuntarily,
unless drawn back with your fingers.
Take as another instance, the act of coughing. What
does that proceed from ? You may have allowed a drop of
water or a crumb of bread to “go the wrong way,” and get
into the air-passages. It has no business there, and will
excite a cough. This consists, in the first place, in the-
�closure of the glottis—the narrow fissure which gives
passage to the air—and then in a sort of convulsive action
of the expiratory muscles, which sends a blast of air
through the aperture, that serves to carry away the
offending substance. Nothing can be more purpose-like
than that action, yet it is purely automatic. You cannot
help it. You may try to stifle a cough for the sake of the
audience or the lecturer, but the impulse is too strong for
you. You see, then, the purely involuntary nature of this
action. The person who feels inclined to cough may
endeavour to overcome the automatic tendency by an
effort of his will. He may succeed to a certain degree,
but cannot always do so.
Now, although we cannot voluntarily stifle a cough when
it is strongly excited, we can cough voluntarily, with no
excitement at all. You can cough, if you choose, to interrupt
the lecturer, as in the House of Commons coughing is some
times used to put down a troublesome speaker; and little
coughs are sometimes got up to give signals to some friend
privately. Or, again, the lecturer, who may feel his voice
husky in consequence of some little mucus in his throat,
wishes to clear it away; its presence does not excite the
movement, but he coughs intentionally to get rid of it.
Now, I would have you fix your attention on these two
points : in the first place, coughing as an involuntary move
ment excited by a stimulus in the throat; and in the second
place, as a voluntary movement executed by a determinate
effort. This distinction is the key to the whole study of
the nature of the relation between the mind of man and
his muscular apparatus.
The automatic movements of which I have been speaking
depend upon a certain part of the nervous centres, which
does not enter into the structure of the brain properly so
called; namely, the medulla oblongata, or the upward
prolongation of the spinal marrow—the spinal cord, as
physiologists call it—into the skull (a, figs. 1, 2).
The effect of the stimulus or irritation in the windpipe
may not be felt as tickling; for coughing will take place in
a state of profound insensibility. An impression is made
upon the nerves which go to the medulla oblongata, and
in that centre' excites a change. It is the fashion now to call
�12-
this change a “movement of moleculesbut it is nothing ■
more than a name for
the action excited there,
;of the nature of which
we know very little. I
• do not think that this
expression is really very
much better than the old
doctrine of “vibrations”
put forth by Hartley
& more than a century ago.
The change thus excited
produces a converse ac
tion in the mo tor.nerves
which go to the muscles,
and thus calls forth the
combined muscular move
ment of which I have
spoken. This is a typi
Fig. 1.—Under Surface oe Brain.— cal example of what the
a. Medulla oblongata, cut off from physiologist terms
the spinal cord; b, pons varolii; c, “reflex action.”
infundibulum; d, portion of the
The whole Spinal Cord
convoluted surface of the cerebrum;
■ e, portion of the same laid open, is a centre of “ reflex
shewing the difference between the action,” in virtue of the
grey or ganglionic substance of the grey or ganglionic mat
convolutions, and the white or fibrous
substance; /, cerebellum; 1, olfac ter it contains, in addi
tory ganglion; 2, optic nerves; 3-9, tion to the white strands
which form the connec
successive cranial nerves.
tion between the spinal nerves and the brain j and this grey
matter is present in different parts of the cord in different
amounts, in proportion to the size of the nerves connected
with each. Each ordinary spinal nerve contains both
sensory and motor fibres, bound up in the same trunk, blit
these are separate at its roots (fig. 3) ; and a part of each
set of fibres has its centre in the grey matter of the spinal
cord itself, whilst another part is continued into its white
strands. Although, however, we speak of “ sensory
fibres, we do not mean that impressions on them always
call forth sensations. For in the case of many involuntary
acts, ascertain impression is made on the sensory nerve,
�■:I3
.and a reflex influence excited by this. acts through the
corresponding motor nerve without calling forth any sen
sation. Ah impression is conveyed towards the ganglionic
centre, which possesses a
• power of reflexion — not
reflection in the mental
sense, but in the optical
sense of the reflection of fffy'
rays from a mirror. If we
break any part' of this
a nervous circle,” ‘ as Sir
Charles Bell called it, its
action is destroyed.' Cut
the sensory ' nerves, and
no reflex action can be
excited. Cut the motor
nerves? and no muscular
contraction can be called
forth. Destroy the centre, Fig. 2.—Vertical Section of Brain
THROUGH ITS MIDDLE PLANE;
and you will not have the shewing the relation of the Cere
reflexion. The complete brum A and the Cerebellum B, to
nervous circle is necessary the Sensori-motor Tract, which
for the performance of may be considered as the upward
extension of the
every one of these reflex a, and includes medulla oblongata,
the parts lettered
actions. • ■
cl, e,f -, at h is shewn in section the
What I want first to corpus callosum, or great transverse
impress upon you is, that commissure uniting the two cere
the reflex movements im bral hemispheres; and at g the
longitudinal
connect
mediately concerned in the ing the frontcommissure, parts of
and back
maintenance of Organic ’ each; i, optic nerve.
life all take place through
this lower portion of the nervous system, which has no
necessary connection with either sensation or will. That
is to say, that if there were no higher part of the nervous
System than the spinal cord, we should still have reflex
action without the Ego having anything to do with it.
■ -I may illustrate this by the act of sucking, which in
volves a curious combination of respiratory movements with
movements of the lips. This act can be performed without
any brain at all; for infants have come into the world with. out the brain, properly so-called—with nothing higher than.
�14
the prolongation of the spinal cord—and have sacked,
-pibreathed, and even cried
for some hours; and all the
true brain has beenremoved
experimentally from new
born puppies, which still
Fig. 3.—Transvep.se Section of
Spinal Cord ; shewing its grey or sucked at the finger when
ganglionic core, enclosed in its moistened with milk and
white strands; a, r, anterior or put between their lips. This
motor roots;
r, posterior or shews how purely automatic
sensory roots.
these actions are.
But we now come to that other class of movements—
namely, those properly belonging to the apparatus of
Animal life—which are concerned in the obtaining of food and in carrying on ordinary
locomotion. I have to shew you to what a
large extent, among some of the lower ani
mals, these movements are originally auto
matic ; and, on the other hand, to inquire
into their nature in Man.
We will go to the class of Insects and their
allies the Centipedes, as giving the best illus
tration of the primary automatic movements
of animal life. Here (fig. 4) is a diagram of a
Centipede. Every child who has dug in the
ground knows the “ hundred-legs,” and is
pretty sure to have chopped one in two, and.
noticed that each half continues to run. This
is in virtue of the ganglion existing in every
joint of the body, which is the centre of the
reflex action of the legs belonging to it, and
which keeps each joint in motion even after
it is separated from the body. If one of these
creatures is cut into half a dozen pieces, every
one of them will continue to run along. But,
again, if we divide the nervous cord which
connects the ganglia, the sight of an obstacle
Fig. 4.—Gan may cause the animal to stop the movement
gliated Ner of its fore legs, yet the hind legs will continue
vous Cord of to push it on. If you take out the middle por
Centipede.
tion of the chain of ganglia, the legs of that
�15
part will not move J but the legs of the front part will move
or not, according to the direction of the ganglia of the head,
•which seem to control the action of the other ganglia in vir
tue of their connection with the eyes; and the legs of the
hind part will continue to move as before.
When one of these creatures goes out of the way of an
•object before it, we may assume that it sees the object;
for although we have no absolute proof that insects do
see anything, I cannot see that there is any disproof of a
conclusion to which all analogy points. Certainly it seems
to me that if I try to catch a fly, and if it jumps or flies
away, or if I go out and try to catch a butterfly with a
net, and it flies off, it does so because it sees the net.
Those who have watched bees, when a storm is coming on,
flying straight down from many yards’ distance to the en
trance of the hive, can scarcely help concluding that they see
the entrance. At any rate, it is not proved that they do not.
Well, then, the Centipede avoids an obstacle. A visual
impression is made on the eyes, and by their agency is.com
municated to the large ganglia in the head; the reflex
action of which controls that of the other ganglia, and
directs the movement of the body.
We find that the size of these cephalic ganglia in flying
Insects has a very close relation to the development of their
eyes; the eyes being most highly developed in the most
active insects, and the ganglia connected with them the
largest; while the general movements of these insects are
most obviously guided by their sight. Here is a clear case
of Original or primary automatism; because these actions
are all performed by the insect almost immediately that it
comes forth from the chrysalis or pupa state; as soon as
its wings have dried, it begins to fly; and obviously sees
and avoids obstacles just as well as if it had been practising
these movements all its life.
Then, in the case of Insects, we notice that very remark
able uniformity of action, which we characterise as “instinc
tive.” They execute most remarkable constructions after a
Certain plan or pattern, with such extraordinary uniformity
and absence of guidance from experience, that we infer
that they must have inherent in them a tendency to
perform those actions.
�16
We see this in the case of hive bees, which are distin
guished for theii* elaborate architecture, and for their rem arkable domestic economy. I do not say that there is no
rationality in insects, and that there is nothing done with
conception and purpose; because some of their actions seem
to indicate this, especially those which are described in
recent accounts of ants given by Mr. Belt in his “ Naturalist
in Nicaragua.” Sir John Lubbock’s experiments also cer
tainly do seem to indicate a power of adaptation to changes of
circumstances that were not likely to have frequently oc
curred naturally in the history of the race, so as to have
become habitual—changes brought about by human agency,
so foreign to the ordinary habits and instincts of the crea
tures, that we can scarcely attribute their consequent action
to anything but a conscious adaptation to these ends. Bub
this is a matter to be still cleared up—how far experience
modifies the actions of insects. As a general fact, I may say
that they carry Automatism to its very highest extreme. .
To give another illustration—the Mantis religiosa (fig. 5),.
an insect which is allied to the crickets and grasshoppers, but
which does not habitu
ally either jump or fly.
It is a very savage insect,
and lies in wait for its
prey like a tiger. You
can see the curious form
of the long fore-legs,
which act as arms, and
are waved about in the
air; and it rests on the
two hinder pairs of legs.
Now, observe that the
front pair are supported^,
upon a very long first
segment of the thorax;
the two other segments
bearing the wings and
the two other pairs of
legs. Each of these
he centre of the move
ments of the limbs attached to it. The insect is always
�IT
lying in wait; and if any unlucky insect comes sufficiently
near, the arms dose round it and dig-in a pair of hooks,
with which the feet are furnished. By this act the unfor
tunate victim is soon put out of existence. Now if the
head Of this Mantis be cut off, the arms still go on moviim
-the
aild if anything is brought
Wife! their reach, they impress the hooks upon whatever
&SSSP’ Fhe 6FS Simply direct their action>the a^ion
itself being dependent on the ganglion from which the
nerves of these members proceed. Further, if we cut off that
«Vision and separate it from the hind part of the bodyithe
same thing will go on If anything is put within its grasp,
the arms close round it and impress the hooks with just
W game automatic action as we see in the Venus’s fly-trap.
Not only
but if you try to upset the body, it will
balance, and rise again upon the hind kgs.
Ibis shews you how completely automatic the move
ments are. The name of Mantis religiosa is derived from
the curious attitude in which this insect habitually livesT? -tS TT prayer’ We have not this insect
Britain; but the French call it the Prie Dieu
is equivalent to religiosa. •
’
C°nie thS 10A7r Vertebrate animals, of which
We my take the Frog as the best illustration. Its Spinal
’V
�18
Cord may be considered as the representative of the chain
of ganglia in the centipede ; the principal difference being
that its ganglionic matter forms a continuous tract, instead
of being broken up into distinct segments. But we find in the
head, instead of the one pair of ganglia connected with the
eyes, a series of ganglia connected with the several Organs
of sense, together with two masses of which we have no
distinct represent*
It
atives among the
lower animals —
namely, the cere
brum and the cere
bellum. The rela
tion of these to the
other
ganglion»
centres is shewn in
tig. 6, which represents the brain oi
the Turtle; A being
the olfactive lobe,,
or ganglion of smell,
from which proceed
the olfactory nerve»;
B the cerebrum; C
the optic lobe or
ganglion of sight,
from which proceed
the optic nerves;
D, the cerebellum;
and E, the spinal
cord. In mOTi
fishes the cerebrum
is actually smaller
Tig. 7.—Diagram of Brain, shewing the than the optic lobes;
relations of its principal parts: a, spinal but as we ascend in
cord; b, b, cerebellum divided so as to lay the series towards
open the fourth ventricle, 4, which sepa man, we find it borates it from the medulla oblongata ;
c, corpora quadrigemina ; d, optic thalami; coming relatively
f, corpora striata, forming the sensori-motor larger and larger;
tract; g, g, cerebral hemispheres ; h, corpus so that it covers-in
callosum; i, fornix; 1,1, lateral ventricles;
piJes the series
Hr
3, third ventricle; 5, fifth ventricle.
�19
«f ganglionic centres lying along the floor of the skull.
These sensori-motor ganglia, (fig. 7, c, d, f), though com
monly regarded as appendages to the cerebrum, really con
stitute the fundamental portion of the brain; they may be
regarded as an upward continuation of the spinal cord; and
I have been accustomed to designate this whole series of
centres (excluding the cerebrum and cerebellum) as the
axial cord In this all the nerves of sense terminate, and
irom it all the nerves of motion arise, the cerebrum having
only an indirect connection with either.
°
The proportional size of the Cerebrum in different animals
compared with that of their axial cord, corresponds so
closely with the manifestations of intelligence (that is, the
'^itentional adaptation of means to ends, under the Guid
ance o experience) as contrasted with blind unreasoning
instinct, that there can be no doubt of its being the instn”
Xnent of the reasoning faculty. The cerebrum attains its
maximum size and complexity in Man ; on the other hand,
111} froS it is relatively much smaller than in the turtle •
and it would seem that the actions of this animal are pro
wled for almost entirely by the reflex power of its auto
matic apparatus—namely, the spinal cord with the ganglia
Z-ITe’rJ.1Su?P°?e that we divide tlie spinal cord in the
»Welle of the back, between the fore legs and the hind le^s
•what nappens? We find that the animal can no longer move
tte hind legs by any power of its own, but that they can be
made to move by pinching the skin of the foot. If acid
SS put on one leg, the other will try to wipe it off: and a
Wimber of movements of that kind are called forth by
»famuli of various kinds. Yet we feel justified in saying
A® frog does not feel them. We know, as a matter of
penence that if a man receives a severe injury to his
—
Wy Often in
Md also, I
through his^tT5’ am0I1S tlle.slliPPing “ ‘he docks&h his stukmg some projecting object in falling
8o,T oomF,eteIy paralysed. He hal no feeling £
tat shock
power of moving them. But after the
S a„fe?„?fl, hera7dent has passed off- if y°u “»He
the lei »™fnhlS feet’ or aPPly a hot plate to them,
« +u-e£S a^e drawn UP- The man will tell you he feels
othmg whatever, and would not know what had taken
�20
■ place if he did not see the movement. A case of this bir d
occurred to the celebrated surgeon, John Hunter, who asked
a man, 11 Do you feel this in your legs'?”“ No, sir,” he
replied, (e but my legs do.” That was not scientifically
correct, because his legs could not be properly said to feel
that of which the Ego was unconscious ; but it expressed
the fact that the irritation called’forth a respondent motion.
■ • There is only one other mode of explaining this action';
namely, that by dividing the spinal cord.we have made a
second Ego—a new centre of sensation—in the lower part
of the cord. In that case we make as many Egos in the
centipede as we cut the body in pieces; and we might make
three separate Egos in the frog—the head, the upper part of
the trunk with the fore-legs, and the lower part with the
hind legs, each acting independently. This seems, to me
inconceivable; I entirely go with those who maintain that
these actions are provided for by a purely automatic
mechanism.
' .
. - A” still more remarkable fact is, that if we remove
• the higher nervous centres, leaving only the Spinal Cord,
and with it the Cerebellum (which appears to have the
■ power of combining or co-ordinating the movements), we
find that the general actions of locomotion are per
formed as in the uninjured animal. Thus the frog will
continue to sit up in its natural position ; and if we throw
it into the water it will strike out with its limbs and swim,
just as if the whole nervous system.was intact. * This is
■ the case also with the Dytiscus marginalis, a water-beetle,
which, when the ganglia of the head have been removed,
' will remain unon a hard substance without any movement;
' yet, if dropped into water, will begin to strike out, swim
ming in the usual way, but without any. avoidance o±
obstacles. So the frog, if a stimulus is applied, will jump
- just as if the brain had been left. If put on the hand it sits
. there perfectly quiet, and would remain so unless stimulated
to action; but if the hand be inclined very gently and slowly,
so that the frog would naturally slip oil', the creature s *pre"
feet are shifted on to the edge of the hand until he can just
prevent himself from falling. If. the turning of the hand be
■ slowly continued, he mounts up with great care and deli
beration, putting first one leg forward and then the other,
�.21;
nnial he balances himself with perfect precision upon the
edge; ancl if the turning of the hand is continued, over he
goes through the opposite set of operations, until he comes
to be seated in security upon the back of the hand. All
this is done after the brain proper has been removed,
shewing how completely automatic this action is. Another
remarkable fact is, that if you stroke one particular part of
the skin, the frog will croak.
*
.. .
Precisely parallel experiments were made by Flourens.
By removing the brain of a Pigeon he found that the anwal
retained its position, and would fly when thrown into the
air* If the optic ganglia were left, he found evidence that
animal either saw, or that its movements were guided by
impressions received through its eyes. The head of the
pigeon would move round and round if a light was moved
round in front of the eyes. So in the frog it was found that,
if the optic ganglia were left, it would avoid obstacles placed
in front of it, when excited to jump.
Thus we see how completely automatic these movements,
are, and how entirely they are dependent on the reflex
■action of the axial cord, the Cerebrum not being necessary
for their performance. The removal of that organ, how
ever, seems to deprive the animal of all spontaneity; it
remains at rest unless excited to move, and seems to do
nothing with a purpose.
Let us now go to Man, and examine the nature of his
movements. You have all seen a child learning to walk.
You know that it does not get upon its legs to walk all at
©nee, like a newly-dropped lamb ; but that its muscles have
to be trained, and this training is a very long process. The
child learning to walk, as Paley says, is the greatest
posture-master in the world. It requires a long course
■bf experience to acquire the power of moving its limbs in
® proper .manner to execute the successive steps; but far
more training is required in balancing. This balancing
of the body is one of the most curious things in our
mechanism. No automaton has ever been made to walk.
I once saw an automaton that professed to walk; but it had
only a gliding motion; and upon looking at the feet I found
some concealed springs beneath, so that neither foot was
ever really lifted.
�22
The act of walking requires a. continual shifting, of the
centre of gravity from side to side, so as to keep it over
the base during every step; and it is this shifting from side
to side, that constitutes the great difficulty, in. the act of
walking. Almost every muscle in the body is in action in
the maintenance of our balance and in the forward move
ment. The muscles of the eyes, even, are in operation in
keeping our gaze fixed upon what is before us, and thus
guiding our onward movement. But when this movement
has been once acquired, it goes on unconsciously. If you.are
walking with a friend and engaged in earnest conversation,
you may walk a mile and not be the least conscious all the
time of your having been successively advancing one leg
after another; and you do exactly the same thing, while
walking in a state of mental abstraction. So, again, you
are guided by your sight, when you have once set out,
along the line you are accustomed to take. I am in the
habit of walking down the Regent’s Park every lawful, day,
as you call it in Scotland, to my office at the University of
London. I frequently fall into some train of thought—as
latelv about this lecture; and I follow on that train of
thought, not only unconscious of the movements of my legs,
but unaware of the directing action of my vision. Yet I
know that my eyes have been directing me. When I have
come into the crowded streets, I have not. run against my
fellow passengers, or knocked myself against a lamp-post.
My legs have been moving the whole time, and have
brought me to my destination, sometimes to my surprise.
This must have been the experience of all of you who are
accustomed frequently to walk along a certain line. It has
even been the case that when you have set out with the
intention of departing from your accustomed line, for some
little business or other, and have , fallen into a tram ot
thought, through pre-formed association you keep m the
habitual line. After getting half way down a street you
suddenlv find that you have not gone out of your way, as
you intended to do. I regard such habitual action as
purely automatic; not primarily, but secondarily automatic,
the automatism not being original but acquired. . Ihis. is
the most universal of all forms of acquired automatic action
�23
in Man—not only the motion of the limbs, but the direction
of their movements by the sight.
The act of walking may become so automatic as to be
performed during sleep. Soldiers fatigued by a long march
continue to plod onward when sound asleep. If there are
Bo obstacles they go steadily onwards, just like the centi
pede when its head has been cut off. The Indian punkahpullers—men who are engaged the whole day pulling a
string backwards and forwards, to move the great fan
which produces a current of air in every room—often go
on as well when they are asleep as when they are awak®.
These are two instances of acquired automatism; and I
might add a great many more, because everything that
becomes habitual to a man is occasionally performed auto
matically in the state called absence of mind. Thus when
& gentleman goes up to his dressing-room to dress for a
party, the first thing he commonly does is to take out his
Wtch and lay it on the table. The next thing he often
does— I have done it myself—is to wind up his watch,
as if he was retiring for the night. I have known a
case in which the gentleman completed his undressing
and then went to bed-; so that when his wife came in
Search of him, he was comfortably resting from his day’s
Work. That was a case of pure automatism ; and I could
relate many more instances of the same kind, but you
must all have noticed such things in your own experience.
A particular manual operation can be done, if it is one not
requiring the constant direction of the mind, quite autoinatically. A man can plane a board, for instance, or work
his loom, while his mind is entirely occupied in another
direction. A musician will play a piece of music, and yet
maintain a continuous conversation at the same time.
There is a very amusing and suggestive book which I
recommend you to peruse, “ The Autobiography of Robert
Moudin, the Conjurer,” who describes the training by which
he prepared himself for the performance of various of his
feats of dexterity. Amongst other things, he tells us that
he devoted a great deal of time and attention in early life
to the acquirement of the faculty of being able to read a
book continuously, and at the same time to keep up balls
in the air. He brought himself to be able to keep up four
�24'
balls in the air, without detaching his mind from his book
for a moment. He could continue the tram of thought
that the book suggested, without giving his attention at
all to the keeping up of the balls; this action being only
a more elaborate form of the trained automatism that 1
have spoken of. The thought occurred to him, when
writing his autobiography, that he would try whether,
after thirtv years’ cessation from this performance, he
could still execute it. He stops, and then continues his
memoii-: “ I have tried this, and find I can keep up three
balls ” There, I believe, the nervo-muscular combination
that was required, had come by early training to be a part of
his physical constitution, and had been kept up by nutrition.
Whatever, in fact, we learn to do in the period of growth, .
we can continue to do without practice after the growth
has been completed; whilst acquirements that we make
subsequently are more easily lost when we are out o
practice.” I think all experience shews that; and I believe it
is for this physiological reason—that the bodily and mental
constitution'acquired during the period of growth becomes
“a second nature,” and is maintained throughout life,
whilst any modification it may undergo afterwards is some
thing superadded to that basis, and is the first to decline
when the habit of action ceases.
.
We now pass to the other part of our subject—the rela
tion between the higher part of our nature, the Ego, and
these automatic actions. What I shall endeavour to shew
you very briefly is this, that the whole of the neryomuscular apparatus concerned in executing the mandates
of the mind acts as a framed automaton. Anything which
' we mentally determine to do “we will, as we say. In
using the word “will” I do not mean a separate faculty,
I mean the Ego in a state of action. The Ego determines
to do a certain action, and commands the automaton to do it
*The will does not, as physiologists used to believe, thio
itself into a particular set of muscles; but says to the auto
maton, “do this,” and it does it. There are manF
which the Ego desires to do, but which he cannot make the
automaton do for want of training. For instance, manyof
you may strongly desire to be able to play a musical instru
ment. You may be able to read the music, and by watchmo
�25
a performer may see precisely how to do it, but you cannot
do it, simply for want of training. The same is the case with
a great many other actions which we can only acquire by
practice. Again, you may wish to do something physicallv
impossible. The Ego may earnestly desire and intend to
make some great effort—to take a great leap, for instance, to
save his life. He may will to hang on to a cord as long as
xaay be necessary to prevent his falling from a height.
The Ego wills this with all his energy; but his muscles will
not. obey him, because it is not in their nature to maintain
their tension for longer than a certain period.
Let me give you a little experiment that I think every
One will find instruction in performing on himself; it
occurred to me while lecturing on physiology as suited to
conduct my students exactly to the idea I wished to impress
upon them. There happened to be a bust opposite me,
and I said, “ Now, I will to look at that bust, and I will
at the same time to move my head from side to side.” I
told, them to watch my eyes, and they could all see them
rolling from side to side in their sockets,—as you can see
for yourselves by looking at your own eyes in a lookingglasSj and turning your head from side to side. You do not
feel that you are using the slightest exertion, and would not
be aware of the motion of your eyes unless you knew it
as a matter of fact, or some one else told you that you were
<at>ing so. You have said to your automaton, “Look at it”
(whatever it may be), and at the same time “ move your
head round.; ’ and the automaton rolls its eyes in the conteary direction, and thus keeps the image on the same part
•of the retina.
r
That is what I maintain to be the general doctrine of
the automatism of the body, directed and controlled by the
will;—the Ego willing the result, and leaving it to the
automaton to work it out; as when I set my automaton to
walk to a certain place, and direct my thoughts to some
thing altogether different.
kave now, in the last place, to consider how far the
Mind of man acts automatically. This is a subject con
fessedly of very great difficulty. There are those who consider that the mind of man is essentially and entirely
c ependent upon his bodily organisation, although they may
�26
still hold the separate existence of the mind. They find.it,.
indeed, very difficult to conceive that there can be anything
else than automatic action; because they see to what a
very large extent our mental activity is conditioned by the
physical constitution of the body.
The Physiologist can have no more doubt that there is a
mechanism of thought and feeling, of intellect and imagina
tion, of which the Cerebrum is the instrument, than that
there is a mechanism of instinct of which the Axial Cord is
the instrument. "When one idea suggests a second, in accor
dance with a preformed association, the second a third, and
so on, constituting what we call a “train of thought,” without
any order from ourselves, we seem fully justified by a large
body of evidence in affirming that this is the mental ex
pression of a succession of automatic changes, each causing
the next, in the ganglionic matter which forms the con
voluted surface-layer of the Cerebrum. These changes may
or may not result in bodily motion. What we call the
“ movements of expression,” are the involuntary signs of
the state of our feelings ; and so the movements executed
by sleep-walkers are the expressions of the ideas with
which their minds are possessed. So great talkers, like
Coleridge, sometimes run on automatically, when they have
got patient listeners; one subject suggesting another, with
no more exertion or direction of the will than we use in
walking along a course that has become habitual. All this
may be regarded, physiologically, as the “reflex action of
the cerebrum,” the physical mechanism of which is partly
shaped by its inherited constitution, and partly by the
training to which it has been subjected, whether by inten
tional education, or by the education of. circumstances—the
brain “ crowing to” the mode in which it is habiuually
worked, &just a's the mechanism of our bodily movement
shapes itself to the work we habitually call on it to peiform.
We constantly see that mental faculties are inherited, as
well as bodily powers ; that children brought up after the
parents’ death, shew most remarkably the mental tendencies
of one or both of them. They do a number.of things in
exactly the same manner that the parent did, have the
same moral and intellectual tendencies, and present an
extraordinarily striking resemblance in general character.
�27
This principle of the hereditary transmission of facultiesthrough the physical organisation is now generally admitted;,
and what is more, I think it is clear that many of these
Acuities and tendencies have been acquired and superin
duced, as it were, in the constitution of the parent, upon
what it originally possessed. There is one very remarkable
and too common example of this hereditary transmission,
namely, the tendency to alcoholic excess. I remember
a friend telling me he had known a man who for forty years
got up every morning with the strong apprehension of being
unable to resist that craving, which was an essential and
inherent part of his nature, inherited from the unhappy
indulgence of his father. That man fought a most heroic
fight every day of his life. Every now and then he fell,
but recovered himself; and, to my mind, fall as he did, his
recovery shewed him to possess a far higher moral nature
than that of the man who never yieids because he is never
tempted. I cite this merely as one example of acquired
tendency hereditarily transmitted; all of us are familiar
with cases more or less resembling it.
But the question is, whether the Ego is completely
under the necessary domination of his original or inherited
tendencies, modified by subsequent education ; or whether
he possesses within himself any power of directing ancl
controlling these tendencies ? It is urged by some that as
the physical structure of his Cerebrum at any one moment
is the resultant of its whole previous activity, so its reflex
action, determined by that physical structure, must be
really automatic; the only difference between a voluntary
oi’ rational, and an involuntary or instinctive action, lying
in the complexity of the antecedent conditions in the
former case, as distinguished from their simplicity in the
latter. And it is held, in like manner, by many who
look at the question from the mental side, and who do
not trouble themselves at all about the physiological aspect
of it, that a man cannot act in any other way than in
accordance with his character; and that his character at
any one moment is the general resultant of his whole
previous mental life. But even John Stuart Mill, the
most able and conspicuous advocate of this doctrine, felt
that in making every man entirely dependent upon his in
�28
herited constitution, and his subsequent “circumstances,” it
excluded all possibility of real seZ/-direction, all hope of selfimprovement ; and this, he tells us in his autobiography,
■weighed on his existence like an incubus. “ I felt,” he
says, “ as if I was scientifically proved to be the helpless
slave of antecedent circumstances, as if my character and
that of all others had been formed for us by agencies •
beyond our control, and was wholly out of our own power.”
'The way out of this darkness he found in what seems to
have struck him as a new discovery, although it was
fa.mil 13,r enough to many who had previously studied the
action of the mind,—“that we have real power over the
formation of our own character; that our will, by influenc
ing some of our circumstances, can modify our future
"habits or capacities of willing.”
Now, this I hold to be accordant with the experience of
every one who has thought and observed, without troubling
himself with philosophical theories. "VVe all perceive that
in the earlier period of our lives, our characters have been
formed for us, rather than by us. But we also recognise
the fact, that there comes a time when each Ego 'may
take in hand thé formation of his own character ; and that
it thenceforth depends mainly upon himself what course
its development shall take,-—the most valuable result of
early training being that which prepares him to be his
own master, keeping in subjection his lower appetites and
passions, and giving the most favourable direction to the
exercise of his higher faculties. And I shall now explain
to you what seems to me the process by which this is
■ effected.
Every one knows that he can determinately fix h%s
attention upon some one object of sense, to the. more or
less complete exclusion of all others. In looking at a
picture, for instance, he can examine each part of it sepa
rately; or, if he has a “musical ear,” he can single out any
one instrument in an orchestra, and follow it through its
whole performance. Now, just in the same manner we
can fix our attention upon one state of consciousness (a
thought or feeling) to the exclusion of others. Supposing
that you are endeavouring to fix your mind upon a certain
object of study, or are reading a book that requires much
�29
thought to follow it, or are trying to master a mathe
matical problem, or are desiring to work out a certain
question as to the conduct of your own lives, and you are
attracted by the coming-in of a book or a newspaper which
you would like to look at, or are distracted by noises or
the playing of a musical instrument, you feel that it is in
your power to fix and maintain your attention by a suffi
cient effort. That determinate effort is what we call an
act of the will; and I believe that the power of so fixing.
Our attention is the source of all that is highest and best
in our intellectual self-education, as, in another direction, it.
is the source of all our moral self-improvement.
The automatist will say that your doing so is merely
the result of the preponderance of one motive over the
other,—the desire to go on with your study being stronger
than the attractive or distracting influence. But if this
be the whole account of the matter, why should we have
to “ make an effort,”—to struggle against that influence ?We choose, as it seems to me, which is the thing that we
deem preferable; and we then throw the force of the Ego
into the doing of it, just like a man who makes a powerful
muscular exertion to free himself from some restraint.
And I hold that just as the Ego can turn to his own
account the automatic action of his nervo-muscular appa
ratus, regulating and directing his bodily movements, .so
ha can turn to his own account the automatic activity of
his cerebrum, regulating and directing the succession of
his thoughts, the play of his emotions. That succession
is in itself automatic; you cannot produce anything, other
wise than by utilising what may spontaneously present,
itself; and you do so by the selective attention of which I
have spoken, intensifying your mental gaze so as to make ,
the object before you call up some other, until you get
what you are seeking for. This you may readily trace
out for yourselves if you will observe your own mental
experiences, in trying to recollect something. And what
shews the essentially automatic action of the cerebral
mechanism in this familiar operation, is that after you
have been for some time trying in vain to recall some
forgotten name or some recent occurrence which has
“ escaped your memory,” it will often flash into your mind
�30
some little time afterwards, when yon have turned your
attention to something else. In the same manner many
important inventions and discoveries have proceeded from
the automatic working of the Cerebrum, set going in the
first place by the determinate fixation of the attention on
the object to be attained; the success of the result being
due to the whole previous “ training” of the organ.
The act of fixing the attention, in my belief, lies at the
foundation of all education, and is one to be fostered and
encouraged in every child. It is better to begin with only
a few minutes at a time; gradually, by encouragement, the
child comes to feel that it has a power of its own to pro
long its attention; and at last the encouragement is no
longer needed, for the child that has been judiciously
trained will exert all its determination to learn its lesson,
in spite of temptations to go out and play or to amuse itself
in any other mode. But if this determination were simply
the expression of a preponderance of motive, I do not see
why an effort should have to be made. If the motive to fix
the attention be stronger than the attraction of any other
object, or the prospective influence of the good to be
gained be more powerful than the distracting influence, the
mere preponderance of the one over the other would produce
the result. But we know and feel that the making such a
determinate effort, involves more expenditure, “ takes more
out of you,” than the continuous sustained attention when
there is no distracting influence; therefore, I say there
is something here beyond the automatic preponderance of
motive—the mark and measure of the independent exertion
of the will.
Now this power, call it what we may, is capable of being
strengthened by exercise—no power more so; neglected
children being generally most deficient in it, and most
carried away by their own impulses. No doubt a greater
power of concentration is natural to some, and a greater
mobility to others. But still I believe there is no healthy
mind in which this power is not capable of being developed
by training, just like the power of the limbs in walking. Its
possession is the foundation of all intellectual discipline;
without it we can do nothing good in intellectual study.
Look, now, at the moral side, and see how it operates
�there. We begin by saying, “ I ought not” to do so and
SOj*—assuming a moral standard. Take the case, which is
unfortunately so common a one, of a man who has a strong
temptation to alcoholic indulgence. He .knows perfectly
well that an habitual yielding to that temptation will be
his ruin. I have heard of a man who said that if a glass
of spirits was put before him, and he knew that the pit of
hell was yawning between, he must take it. This is an
instance of the overpowering attraction it has for some
individuals ; but this generally results from habit; and it
is over the formation of habits that the will can exert its
greatest power, by fixing the attention on one set of motives
to the exclusion of other motives. I do not say that a man
can bring motives before his mind. He cannot do that—
we can only take what comes into our minds; but he can
direct his thoughts in a certain line, as it were, so as to
find them. He can think of his family or the future, and
80 exclusively fix his attention on the consequences, as to
withdraw it from the immediate attraction. That I take
to be the best mode. A struggle goes on in the mind of
many a man subject to temptation; but if he has strength
of principle enough to resist the immediate tendency to
wrong action, and so gets time to deliberate, he may thus
Herve himself for the conflict. Many good resolutions are
formed—we know what place is said to be paved with them
and we hope to realise them. We determine in ourselves
that we will avoid particular indulgences. We may have
Some strong disposition to apply our powers to ill uses, to
play some mean trick, or something of that kind. Most of
us have temptations of self-interest—not less strong be
cause not pecuniary,-—as to gain credit that does not belong
to us, and so on. We hold back—•“ puli ourselves together ”
is the phrase of the present time—and summon all our
resolution and determination not to yield. There is some
thing more, here, than mere preponderance of motive; for
we determinately direct our attention to the reasons why
we should or should not do the particular act. I believe
that in such cases the mind is best withdrawn from the
temptation, fixing the attention upon something else. That
is the real secret of victory. By fixing our mind upon the
object, and saying “I won’t do it.” the temptation still
�32
keeps haunting us. I have known many a struggle of this
kind relieved by the determination to follow an entirely
different course. We know that in cases of insanity, where
a man is led by, physical disorder to take a miserable view
of everything relating to himself, the medical man sends
him abroad, where he is attracted by a new set of objects
—something which prevents his mind from brooding over
his gloomy thoughts; and in that way, as his physical health
improves, the man comes to feel that he can voluntarily
transfer his attention from them to objects of interest
round him. This, I believe, is the manner in which we
should distract our minds from anything we feel and know
to be unworthy of our attention;—we should find out
something more worthy, and pursue it with determination.
I ask you to take as your guiding star, as it were, in the
conduct of your lives, these four words—“I am,” “ I ought,”
“I can,” “I will.”—“I am” is the expression of reflection
and self-consciousness, the looking-in upon our own trains
of thought. If we do not feel “ I am" we do not think of
ourselves and our own nature—we surrender ourselves. “ I
ought"—expresses the sense of moral obligation. By steadily
fixing our attention on the “I ought,” the course of action
is first directed right, and its continuance m that path
becomes habitual. “ Turn to the right and keep straight
on,” and you will find the doing so easy in proportion.
Every right act, every struggle of the will against wrong, is
the exercise of a power which strengthens with use, and
will make the next act easier to you. On the other hand,
every time you surrender your will to the temptations of
self-interest, or sensual gratification, or anything that turns
you from the straight path, there is a loss of power which
makes the next effort more difficult. Then, “I can"—the
consciousness of power, is the foundation of all effort.
And, lastly, it is not enough to say, “ I ought to do it, and
I can do it,” but we must will to do it. The “ I am,” “ I
ought,” “I can,” “I will,” of the Ego, can train the
mental as well as the bodily Automaton, and make it do
anything it is capable of executing.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The doctrine of human automatism : a lecture (with additions) delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, on Sunday afternoon, 7th March, 1875
Creator
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Carpenter, William Benjamin
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 32 p. : ill. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Sunday Lecture Society
Date
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1875
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N116
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Free will
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The doctrine of human automatism : a lecture (with additions) delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, on Sunday afternoon, 7th March, 1875), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
Language
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English
Automatism
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THE END OE THE EREE-WILL
CONTROVERSY.
BY
HENRY TRAVIS,
M. D.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
1 8 7 5.
Price Ninepence.
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�THE END OE THE EBEE-WILL
CONTROVERSY.
GENERAL REMARKS.
THE difficulty experienced by philosophers in reference to the two opposite ideas which have been
the subjects of the Free-will Controversy, has arisen
from the fact that both are partly true and partly
false, and that the advocates of each idea have imagined
and have endeavoured to prove that their idea is
wholly true, and that the idea which they have
opposed, is wholly false. And this difference of
opinion has arisen from the defective state of mental
science, and from the consequent inability of either
party to trace and explain the mental process, or the
series of mental facts, by which both truths are made
evident—a process inscrutable to those who cannot
trace it, but very obvious to those who are able to do
so. It was by being enabled to trace distinctly the
facts of this mental process, after obtaining correct and
clear ideas respecting them, that the solution of this
great controversy was obtained. While men continued
to think and speak of mental facts in the absurd
manner in which philosophers have hitherto thought
and spoken of them; thinking and speaking of
faculties, and eveD of thoughts and feelings, as entities
and agents; and of mental facts in which there is no
action, as acts, and even, in many cases, as acts of
these imaginary entities, it was utterly impossible that
A
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The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
they should, trace the mental processes which must be
known before the truths involved in the Free-Will
Controversy can be clearly ascertained, or that they
should understand even the most simple mental opera
tions.
THE TWO OPPOSITE IDEAS.
There is a truth of very great importance in the
idea of Free-will. And there is another truth, of very
great importance, in the idea of Philosophical Necessity.
But in each idea there is an error which is extremely
injurious. And the erroneous part of each idea is the
denial of the truth which is asserted in the other.
There is, therefore, in each idea, an affirmative part
which is true, and a negative part which is erroneous ;
and as long as philosophers contended for or against
the truth of either idea, they were, of course, defeated,
for neither idea could be established or refuted without
refuting a truth. To establish the idea of Free-will,
and to refute the idea of Philosophical Necessity, the
truth asserted in the idea of Philosophical Necessity
must be refuted. And to establish the idea of Philo
sophical Necessity, and to refute the idea of Free-will,
the truth asserted in the idea of Free-will must be
refuted. But no truth can be refuted. And therefore
the advocates and the opponents of each opinion have—
“ Found no end in wand’ring mazes lost.”
And many have imagined that there is no end to
be found, or that the solution of the mystery, if there
be any solution of it, is beyond human comprehension.
And it is so while men do not know the facts of the
subject. But when the facts are known it is found to
be extremely simple. It is merely to put together
the two truths, and by doing so, to put away the two
negations. Each idea has been, as it were, an entangle
ment of threads of white and threads of black. But
to each party in the controversy, its own entanglement
�The Two Truths.
3
has seemed to be entirely white, while that of its
opponents has appeared to be entirely black.
Each party could see error, but neither could see
truth in its opponent’s opinion. And most injurious
effects have been produced, and effects which will be
in the highest degree beneficial, and which have been
earnestly desired, have been prevented and made
impossible, in man’s social feelings and conduct, and
in the formation of his character, and through this
in human affairs generally, by these confused and
erroneous ideas in reference to two most important
truths. But the consideration of this part of the
subject must be deferred until the two truths have
been explained.
THE TWO TRUTHS.
The Eree-will party has imagined that man is him
self the primary cause of his determinations. But he
is not. The necessarian, or, to use the more recently
adopted designation, the “ Determinist ” party, has
imagined that man is not a cause at all of his deter
minations, or, in other words, that he is not an agent
in the forming of them. But he is. He is a cause,
he does act mentally, in the forming of his determina
tions. But he is not the primary cause of them; for
his agency in the forming of them is dependent upon
conditions or causation. These, then, are our two
truths— u
First. That man is an agent in the forming of his
determinations, and that he has a power of self-control.
Second. That his agency in the forming of his
determinations, or in the exercise of his power of self
control, is dependent upon conditions or causation.
But as the second truth includes the first, and as
the first is denied by the necessarians, it is not this
truth, it is the general truth, “ that man is in all
respects dependent upon causation,” which the
necessarians have maintained.
�4
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
THE FACTS OF THE SUBJECT.
To ascertain the facts in which the two truths are
immediately manifested it was necessary to trace the
mental operation by which we form determinations.
And to be able to trace this mental operation it was
necessary to have correct and clear ideas of the
mental facts which occur in it. These truths therefore
could not be clearly known while the ideas of men in
reference to these mental facts were confused and
erroneous. If those who believed that man is an
agent in the forming of his determinations could have
pointed out the manner of his agency in forming them
to those who denied that he is so, if, in other words,
they could have pointed out the facts of the mental
process by which he forms them, they would have
established the true part of their idea. And the other
party would then have had no difficulty in pointing
out that man’s agency in the forming of his determina
tions is dependent upon conditions, by tracing cause and
effect through the successive mental facts which occur
in that process. And thus the two truths would have
been made evident. And then it would not have been
difficultto findthatthey are perfectly consistent with each
other. And instead of the want of knowledge and the
confused and erroneous ideas which have existed upon
this subject, and the highly injurious effects which have
been consequent upon them, men would have had en
lightenment and clear and correct ideas in reference to
these highly important truths, and would have obtained
the highly beneficial effects, in the formation of character
and in human affairs generally, which will result from the
application of these ideas in the regulation of their social
feelings and conduct—effects which they can only vaguely
conceive and cannot appreciate while they retain the
erroneous ideas and the ill-regulated social feelings which
they must have while they do not understand this subject.
Perhaps the simplest way to point out the facts by
�Preliminary Statement.
5
which the truth that man is an agent in the forming
of his determinations is demonstrated, will be to
describe the process by which definite and correct
ideas of these facts were obtained.
PRELIMINARY STATEMENT.
I was converted while a young man from the com
mon belief in the idea of free will to belief in the
idea of philosophical necessity—to the belief that man’s
determinations are the effects of causes, and that he is
not an agent in the forming of them, that they are
always produced by the strongest motive, and that our
motives and their relative strength are produced by
internal and external conditions ; by our character (our
ideas and habits of feeling) and our constitutional
state, internal conditions ; and by the persons and
things by whom and by which we are influenced at the
time of their formation, external conditions. I was
enabled to see that the idea that man is the primary
cause of his determinations is opposed to the idea of
the government of all things by Supreme Power and
according to unchanging Laws, or to the fact or truth that
there is always a Cause for whatever occurs. For to
be the cause of our determinations is to be a personal
agent in the forming of them ; and we cannot be agents,
in any way, independently of Causation or Law. But,
having no distinct knowledge of any such agency, I
was led to think that the fact that man’s determinations
are always in agreement with the strongest motive, is
proof that he is not an agent in the forming of them ;
believing, as stated above, that our motives and their
relative strength are dependent upon internal and exter
nal conditions, and not upon any agency of ours in form
ing them. And the denial of man’s agency in the form
ing of his determinations seemed to me to be involved in
the assertion of their dependence upon causes. If the
facts of the subject could then have been pointed out I
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The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
should have seen the error of these ideas, and should not
have remained for more than twenty years in ignorance of
a truth which man must know before he can be
enlightened upon subjects of the highest importance,
and instead of being caused to endeavour to lead others
into the same error, I should have endeavoured to
make known the truth.
And the thought and
perseverance which have been required to arrive at
the knowledge of this subject would have been given
to the advancement of the beneficial results to which
this knowledge will lead. But all has been Cause and
Effect. And a great result has been obtained. And
the good work may now be carried on which could not
advance until this preparation for it had been made.
I held this opinion, as stated, for more than twenty
years, and frequently advocated it in speaking and in
writing. But although I never met with any one who
could disprove it, either in conversation or in print,
I often felt disappointed by finding myself unsuccessful
in my endeavours to convince others of the truth of
it. It was said by believers in the free-will idea, that
they were conscious of a “ nisus,” or effort, that is, of
mental action, or agency, in the forming of their
determinations.
But I could never obtain any
explanation of this mental action. And I could not
convince my opponents that nothing of the kind
occurs. At length I began to examine what it could
be which caused them to have this idea of nisus or
effort in the forming of their determinations.
THE WILL-TO-ACT.
I first asked myself: “ What do we do when we
will ? ”
But I found, by observing what occurs
mentally when we will, that to will is not to do a
mental act, but it is to have a will to do an act. We have
a will to do an act; and what we do is the act which
we have a will to do. The will-to-act is the immediate
�The Will-to-Act.
7
mental antecedent of the act. It is an error, therefore,
to imagine that a determination, or a will-to-act, is a
mental act, or as it is commonly called, an “ Act of
Will.” These are facts, ascertained by observing our
mental experiences.
2. I next asked myself, “ What is this mental fact,
this will-to-act ? ” I found by observing, again, what
occurs within us when we have a will, that to have a
will to do an act we must have an idea of the act.
But I found that an idea of an act is not a will to do it.
We may think of an act without having a will to do
it. Still the thought is there. But in the will-to-act
we must have something more. What is this ? It
must be emotion. As when, for instance, we have a
wish, we must have an idea of that which we
desire combined with the emotion of desire; so when
we have a will to do an act, we have an idea of the act
combined with the emotional part of the will-to-act.
And as a will to do an act is a decisive impulse to do it
— an impulse which is immediately followed by the act—
we may call this emotion “ impulsive/’ A will to do
an act, then, is composed of an idea of the act combined
with impulsive emotion, and with sufficient of this
emotion to be decisive. These, again, are facts. And
they had not previously been pointed out—so far as my
knowledge of writings upon the subject extends. And
they could not be pointed out by any one who
imagined that a will-to-act is a mental act.
I substitute the words to “ determine,” and a “ deter
mination,” for to “ will,” and a “ will-to-act,” because to
“ determine ” is to do a complex mental act, to form a
determination; and to “ will ” is to have a will-to-act
—a complex mental affection; and in order to mark
this distinction, and to avoid the erroneous use of the
verb “ to will ” in the active sense. But a will-to-act
in the strict sense of the term—a decisive impulse to
do an act—is immediately followed by the contemplated
act; and a determination has reference to a con
templated act to be done at a future time—it is a
�8
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
decision or resolution to do an act when the time for
having the decisive impulse arrives. I say, a “ will-toact, ’ instead of a “ will,” to mark the distinction
between the mental fact—a will-to-act—and the
mental faculty, a power of will; that is, a power to
form a will-to-act; an important distinction, which is
frequently overlooked, or not marked, when the same
word is used in both senses.
To understand this
subject, and to convey our ideas correctly to others, it
is necessary (1) to have correct ideas, and (2) to express
them with precision. While the ideas of men in
reference to “ the will,” have been confused and
erroneous, the terms which they have employed to
express them have necessarily been the same.
man’s agency in the forming of his will-to-/ct.
3. So far I had not found any mental action—for we
do not do our thoughts or our emotions. Where, then,
is mental action to be found? Do we act mentally
when we attend, observe, consider, reason, &c. ?
Evidently we do. But how do we act, or what do we
do mentally, when we attend, for instance ? When we
attend to. an idea we must have the idea. And in
attending to it we must do something. What is it that
we do ? We keep up the idea. As to look at an outward
object is to have a perception of sight and to keep it
up, so to attend to an idea is to have this idea and
to keep it up. This is evident when we observe what
occurs within us when we attend to an idea. What
psychologists have called the “ act of attention,” there
fore, is not purely a mental act. It is an active mental
operation, composed of mental affections and mental
acts. This is another fact, not described, so far as my
knowledge extends, by any writer on mental science.
4. But how does this apply to the forming of the
will-to-act ? When we have two opposing motives, say
a motive of inclination and a motive of duty or pru
dence, and when, after some hesitation, the motive of
�Man’s Agency in the Forming of his Will-to-Act. 9
duty prevails, and a will to act in accordance with this
motive is formed, have we been entirely passive during
the period of hesitation—has the predominance of the
good motive heen produced “without any effort of ours,”
or “for us, and not by us”? Or has it been produced
by means of mental action ? And, if it has been pro
duced by means of mental action, how has it been so
produced ? That we may be able to trace the mental
facts which occur in such a case we must substitute for
the indefinite term “ motive ”, and for the vague ideas
which are associated with it, another term, with ideas
which are definite and correct attached to it. When
we are said to have two opposing motives, we have in
fact two opposing indecisive impulses. And each
indecisive impulse is composed of the same elementary
mental facts as those of which a will (a decisive impulse)
to act is composed—of thought and impulsive emotion.
The difference between these impulses and a will-to-act,
is, that they have in them less of the impulsive emotion
than there is in the decisive impulse. An indecisive
impulse is an impulse which is not sufficiently strong
to be the immediate antecedent of the contemplated act.
A decisive impulse is sufficiently strong, and is inevit
ably followed by the act, when the power to do the act
exists, and when the exertion of this power is not
prevented by some external impediment—as when two
wrestlers are struggling with each other.
Now when we have resisted the temptation of an
impulse of inclination, and a decisive impulse in favour
of duty has been produced, what have we done? We
have kept up thoughts. And the effect of keeping up. a
thought is, that as we keep it up it becomes more plain
or clear, and the emotion connected with it is increased
in strength. When, for instance, we keep up a thought
which forms part of the impulse of duty, or which is
favourable to this impulse, we strengthen the emotion
which is connected with it. And while we keep up
this thought, we keep away, more or less, the thoughts
�io
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
which form part of the impulse of inclination. And by
doing so we keep down or keep away, more or less, the
emotion connected with these thoughts. And we thus
weaken the impulse of inclination. It is evident, there
fore, when we observe the mental facts which occur in
us whenwe resist and overcome an impulse of inclination,
that we first have excited in us an indecisive impulse
opposed to it—say, an impulse of duty. That we then
keep up thoughts by which the emotional part of this
impulse is strengthened; and that by doing so we at
the same time weaken the impulse of inclination. And
that by continuing to do so we at last cause the impulse
of duty to become decisive. And it is thus that we
form a determination in favour of the impulse of duty
and resist effectually the impulse of inclination which
was opposed to it. And this is what occurs when we
are said to “ struggle” against a temptation and to over
come it. And it is in the mental action of keeping up
the thoughts by which the emotional part of the good
impulse is strengthened that the “ nisus ” occurs of
which the believer in the common idea of free-will has
been vaguely conscious—not in willing, which is having
a will to do an act, but in forming our will-to-act. The
effort which occurs in the act which we form a will to
do, is another effort. It follows the decisive impulse,
and cannot be that which occurs in the mental process
by which this decisive impulse is formed. It is evident,
therefore, beyond doubt, when we are able to trace the
facts of the subject, that we are agents in the forming
of our determinations, and that necessarians, or determinists, have been in error when they have imagined
that we are not so. And we thus obtain an intelligent
knowledge of this truth, and the ability to explain it to
others, instead of the merely instinctive knowledge of it,
without the ability to explain it, which alone we can
have while we are ignorant of this mental process.
The mental acts which occur in this process are at
first instinctive and involuntary, but they presently
�Man's Agency in the Forming of his Will-to-Act. 11
"become in a manner voluntary, when we “struggle”
intentionally to overcome a temptation. But they
cannot be intelligently voluntary while we do not know
the nature of the mental process. They must be
entirely instinctive while we are ignorant and deny
that we are agents in the forming of our determinations.
But by the knowledge of this mental process our power
of self-control is elevated or advanced from the con
dition of a power which we can only exert with a vague
consciousness, to that of a power which we may exert
with intelligent perception of what we do in exerting
it. And by this knowledge the educator will acquire
a power to promote the development of this extremely
important faculty in the young, which he cannot have
while he is ignorant of the mental process by which we
exercise self-control.
There are three stages of the growth of this power.
In early childhood it does not exist—as the power , to
walk, or to speak, or to reason, &c, does not exist.
As we advance in age it becomes developed, by exercise,
as other powers are developed—“ not for us and not
by us.”
But the exercise of this power, or the
agency upon which its development depends, is very
much dependent upon outward influences, especially
upon the character and conduct of the persons by
whom the young are influenced from their birth. At
length, when good habits, of thought, and feeling, and
action, have been formed, there is little need for the
exercise of this power, but when it is needed its
influence is decisive. The determination in favour of
the good impulse is then produced at once. And finally
the triumph of education will take place when no bad
impulse shall be excited. But to attain this result a
very much better system of education will be required
than any which can exist, or can be imagined, while
men are ignorant of either of the two truths, and while
therefore they must be ignorant of their application in the
regulation of our social feelings and conduct. It is the
�12
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
necessity for the knowledge of the two truths, and of
their , application, as the basis upon which alone an
effective system of the formation of character can be con
structed, which constitutes the very great importance
of the solution of the free-will controversy.
THE CAUSES OF MAN’S AGENCY.
When we know the mental process by which we
form determinations, we may easily trace cause and
effect through every step of this mental operation.
When we resist a temptation and overcome it, we may
trace the cause of the first indecisive impulse, in
character and constitutional state and in outward in
fluences. And in like manner we may trace the cause
of the second indecisive impulse; and of the keeping
up of the thoughts which are kept up; and the
effects of keeping them up; until we arrive at the
final effect, in the forming of the decisive impulse which
we form. But while the nature of this mental operation
was unknown—and while the ideas of men in reference
to mental facts were so confused and erroneous as they
have been it could not be known,—these successions of
cause and effect could not be traced. And as the
believer in the idea of free-will could not point out or
explain the agency or exercise of power which occurs
in the forming of our determination, so the believer in
necessity could not point out the continuance of causa
tion in the mental process.
It has been said that all cannot properly be believed
to be cause and effect, because there must have been a
beginning of causation, and if all were cause and effect
we could not have any cause except as an effect of
antecedent causation, and a beginning of causation
would therefore be impossible. But there is no more
necessity, for our present purpose, to ascertain the
beginning of things, than there is to discover whether the
first hen came from an egg, or the first egg was laid by
�The Cause of Man’s Agency.
13
a hen. As it is enough for us, in reference to this
subject, to know that now we cannot have an egg without
a hen, and we cannot have a hen without an egg; so it is
enough to know that we cannot have any event or
result without a cause, and we cannot have any cause
except as an effect of antecedent causes. It is only
ignorant evasion of the difficulty to suppose that the
man is the primary cause of his agency in the forming
of his determinations, and thus to imagine that a case
of first causation occurs whenever a man forms a
determination, and that there is not one First Cause, but
that there have been, and are, and will be, millions and
millions of First Causes. To say that man is the cause
of his agency is to say that he is an agent in the producing
of it; that is, that his agency is the cause of his agency.
And in fact, his agency in the forming of his determina
tion is in part the cause of his subsequent agency in doing
what he determines to do. And after the commencement
of his agency in the forming of his determination his sub
sequent agency in this mental process is caused in part by
the agency (the mental acts) which preceded it. But for
the beginning of this agency there must be a cause. And
this cause is not his agency. It is in the internal and
external conditions of which the beginning of this
agency is the effect, the internal conditions being in
part the effects of his antecedent agency in the forming
of his character. The first mental act or movement of
his agency in the forming of a determination is the
effect of internal states of excitement which exist
before, or when, this act takes place. And these are
the effects of internal conditions of character and
constitution, and of outward influences. The second act
is the effect of the modified internal excitements which
exist after the first act, and which are, in part, the
effects of the first act. And so on. Aiid the decisive
impulse, and the bodily act which follows it, are the
effects of the internal states of excitement which exist
when it is produced.
�14
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
GENERAL PROOFS OF THE TWO TRUTHS.
Two truths which have been very puzzling to philo
sophers, although they have been known instinctively
by every one, are thus made so plain that they may be
known intelligently by all who are able to trace the
simplest mental facts. And they may be taken by
mankind in general as decisively ascertained.
In
future generations they will be clearly known by every
one.. The instinctive knowledge of both these truths
is indicated by terms which have been adopted
instinctively by mankind in general, and which are in
common use by both parties in the free will contro
versy. Persons who deny that we are agents in the
forming of our determinations speak of “ electing ” to
do so and so; “ determining ” to perform an act;
“ forming.” a wish; “ making ” a choice ; “ resisting ”
a temptation ; &c ; asserting by the use of these terms
that we are agents in the forming of our determinations,
and confounding them with the terms to “ prefer,” to
‘‘ will,” to “desire,” &c., which indicate to have a
preference, a will-to-act, a desire, etc. And persons who
imagine that we are the primary causes of our deter
minations speak of the influences by which we are
caused to determine as we do ; and ask why we have
determined as we have, that is to say, by what internal
or external cause or circumstance we have been
influenced to form the determination which we have
formed. And they employ means to cause others to
determine as they wish. They do so whenever they
request, or advise, or exhort, or in any way endeavour
to persuade others to do or not to do an act of any
kind. For their request or advice, &c., is a cause or
circumstance to influence the individual to determine
to act or to refrain from action as they desire. It has
been remarked that no one can be a consistent fatalist.
And in like manner no one can be a consistent believer
.in the common idea of free-will, or in the idea of
5
�Confused Ideas in Reference to the Two Truths. 15
philosophical necessity. Both parties know instinc
tively and state in words, and apply in practice in
stinctively, in a lame manner, the truth which they deny
in theory. But what has been needed is that both truths
should be known intelligently, and that their appli
cation should be known, and that they should be intelli
gently applied in the regulation of our social feelings and
conduct and in the formation of character. .And this
could not be while men’s knowledge of them was so
imperfect that the two opposite opinions, or either of
them, could be maintained.
CONFUSED IDEAS IN REFERENCE TO THE TWO TRUTHS.
I have met with persons who had assented to the idea
of philosophical necessity, who, when the facts of the
mental process by which we form determinations were
pointed out to them, have said that they never denied
that man is an agent in the forming of his determina
tions, and who have been surprised when passages have
been shown to them in the writings of Hobbes, Edwards,
Priestley, Mill, -Spencer, and others, in which it is
distinctly denied. One of these persons had evidently
forgotten what he thought before; for the denial had
been made and repeated in his own writings as distinctly
and forcibly as it could be made. How far there was
the same forgetfulness or confusion of thought in others,
of whose ideas upon this point there was no written or
printed record, cannot be ascertained. But the fact is
interesting, as indicating the readiness of believers in
the idea of philosophical necessity to accept the true
part of the idea of free-will, when it is plainly pointed
out and is separated from the denial of man’s dependence
upon causation. And I have met with the same readi
ness in believers in the idea of free will, to accept the
true part of the idea of philosophical necessity, when
it is plainly pointed out and is separated from the denial
of man’s agency in the forming of his determinations.
�16
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
Some necessarians have said, when they could no
longer deny man’s agency in the forming of his deter
minations, that this point is unimportant, if the truth
that his agency in forming them is dependent upon
causation is admitted. But it cannot be unimportant,
or of little importance, whether we are right or wrong in
our opinion in reference to a truth of very great importance—whether we believe and understand, or are
ignorant and deny, or only know instinctively, that we
have a power of self-control. And in reference to the
application of the true part of the necessarian idea we
shall see that it is extremely important.
The analysis of the mental process by which we
form determinations is not necessary to convince the
believer in the common idea of free-will that we are
agents in the forming of our determinations. But it
is necessary to refute those who maintain that we are
not agents in the forming of our determinations. And
it is necessary to enable those who believe that we are
so to understand what they believe upon this point, and
to be able to make this truth evident, and to explain
it, to others, who question the correctness of the belief.
We have ample proof in the experience of the past that
those who have believed this truth have not been able
to make it evident to those who have denied it.
It is argued in opposition to the idea that our agency
in the forming of our determinations is dependent upon
causation, that “if we admit that there is always a
cause for our determining as we determine, we must
admit that we can never help determining and acting
as we do, and the admission that we are agents in the
forming of our determinations is therefore unimportant.”
But when we form a good determination, instead of a
bad one which we were tempted to form, we do “ help ”
the forming of the bad determination. And it is this
which we are required to “ help,” and not the forming
of the good one which we form. The person who
excuses his wrong-doing by saying that he “ could not
�Confused Ideas in Reference to the Two Truths. 17
help it,” asserts, in other words, that he has no power
of self-control—a state of mental impotence of which
no one would wish to be accused. And as the develop
ment of this power by education is of very great
importance, the knowledge of the fact that there is such
a power in man to be exercised and developed cannot
be unimportant, or of little importance. The “ determinist ” negation is quite correct when applied to the
miserable man of whom it may be said with truth,
when he does a foolish or an unworthy act, that he
“ cannot help it.” But it is nonsense when applied to
the man who can and does help the doing of such acts.
For to help doing them is to form a determination not
to do them. It is to the credit of a man to say that he
cannot help determining and acting wisely and honour
ably, or that he has no need to exert his power of self
control in the forming of the determination to do so,
and that he could not form a determination to act
foolishly or unworthily. But to say of any one that
he “ cannot help ” determining and acting foolishly or
meanly, and that he cannot even acquire the power to
“ help ” doing so, is to assert that he is morally insane
or imbecile. And who would try, or how could any
one consistently try, to resist a temptation of any kind,
or to correct any bad habit, if he were convinced that he
is not an agent in the forming of his determinations
and therefore he cannot “help” yielding to tempta
tion, and that he cannot acquire the power to help
doing so ? But even those who deny that we are
agents in the forming of our determinations, do try to
resist temptations, and do resist them successfully.
They exert instinctively the power of which in theory
they deny the existence. But they cannot exert it
intelligently while they deny its existence, or while, in
other words, they imagine that man’s determinations
are formed “ for him and not by him.”
But again it is said that “ if the course of events is
determined by a Power which governs man in all that
B
�18
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
he does, or by Causation, it is not man who decides
what shall he done, in any case, but that every event
which occurs, including every determination and act of
every individual, is decided by this power.” But this
is nothing more than saying that there is in the universe
a Supreme Power, and that all things are overruled by
this Power, according to unchanging laws. And man’s
agency_ in the forming of his determinations, and his
possession of a power of self-control, are no more in
consistent with the dependence of this agency upon
Causation, or with the government of all things by
Supreme Power, according to unchanging Laws, than
his agency in the forming of anything else which he
forms, or his power to form or produce any other result,,
is inconsistent with his dependence upon Causation or
Supreme Power. And, in fact, dependence upon
Causation is necessary for self-control. For the power
to determine this way or that independently of Causa
tion, or without a cause or reason for determining as we
do, would not be a power of self-control. It would be
an attribute of insanity, or of an impossible state of
things worse than insanity. For even the movements
of an insane person, though not the results of self-control,
do not occur without a cause. If a man makes a piece
of mechanism, there is a cause for his making it, and
it was to be that he should make it; but nevertheless
he does make it. There is no inconsistency between
the fact that he makes it and the fact that he is caused
to make it, and that it was to be that he should make
it. And, in like manner, when a man forms a deter
mination, there is a cause for his forming it, and it was
to be that he should form it. And it is nonsense to
argue from this that he does not form it, and that he
has no power of self-control. It only follows that he
cannot form a determination, or do anything else, in
dependently of Causation, or of the Power by which all
things are over-ruled.
But again it may be said that if every event which
�Confused Ideas in Reference to the Two Truths. 19
happens was to happen, no event which occurs could
have been prevented, and no event which does not
occur could have been made to occur, and man must be
powerless in reference to the course of events. This is
the fatalist theory. But in the first place we know
that the conclusion, that man is powerless in reference
to the course of events, is not in agreement with
facts. He is continually causing events to happen
which he wishes to occur, and preventing events,
or rather imaginary events, which he wishes not to
happen. And the fact that there is always a Cause for
his doing what he does, and that it was to be that he
should do it, does not alter this, or deprive him of
power to do what he does. And secondly the logic is
defective. It is not the event which happens which
was the object of man’s preventive efforts, when these
efforts have been successful; it is the imaginary event
which does not happen, and which he prevents. And
to argue that he cannot cause an event to occur which
he does not cause to occur, is merely to argue that he
cannot at the same time cause an event to happen and
cause it not to happen, or not cause it to happen; or
that he cannot at the same time do an act and not do it.
Say to a man before he has done some act of no great
importance—“you cannot help doing that act”—and
he may show you by not doing the act that he can help
doing it. But your assertion would be a new element
of causation, added to those which existed before. Say
to him after he has done the act, that he could not help
doing it, because there was a sufficient cause for his
doing it, and it was to be that he should do it; and in
this sense you are right. Because in this you merely
assert his dependence upon Causation. You were wrong
in the first case because you denied his Power to do
what he had power to do. If in the second case you
had told him before he did the act that he could not
help doing it, he might have helped doing it. But
again, your assertion would have been a new element
�20
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
of causation. And other new antecedents would have
been required to produce your assertion, different from
those which existed. And those would have required
new antecedents to produce them. And so on ad infini
tum. To “help” doing an act, or to resist a temptation,
is not to form a determination or to exert our ptower of
self-control without a Cause. It is not to break through
“the everlasting to be”—theologically, the “divine
plan.” But it & to exert our Power of self-controL And
this fact, the exercise of self-control, is not altered by the
other fact that there was a sufficient Cause for it, and
that it “ was to be.” When a man finds that he has
determined and acted unwisely, and asserts that he
would act differently in the same circumstances upon
another occasion, he does not see that the circumstances
never can be the same—that his experience of the effects
of acting as he did would be a new circumstance, a new
element of causation—upon another occasion.
This “ can’t help it,” or fatalist, fallacy arises from
confounding the assertion of man’s dependence upon
Causation with the denial of his Power, and the assertion
of his Power with the denial of his dependence upon
Causation. There are acts which we have power to do,
and events which we have power to prevent, or which
we can “ help,” and there are acts which we have not
power to do, and events which we have not power to
prevent, or which we “ can’t help.” In this statement
we assert or deny our power. But no event can ever
occur, and no act can be done, independently of Causa
tion—our Power being of necessity subordinate to the
Supreme Power of the Universe. But to confound the
assertion of this limitation of our power—inevitable in
the nature of things—with the denial of power which
is made in the assertion that we “ can’t help it,” is to
allow ourselves to be misled by a logical fallacy into a
conclusion which is opposed to most obvious facts. To
say of an event which we have allowed to occur that
we could not help it, is to say that it is one of the class
�Confused Ideas in Reference to the Two Truths. 21
of events over which we have no Power, or to deny our
Power in reference to it. To say of an act which we
have done that there was a Cause for our doing it, and
that it “was to be ” that we should do it, is merely to
assert the truth that we are subject to causation. To
assert that man is the primary cause of his determina
tions, or, in other words, to deny that he is dependent
upon Causation in the forming of them, is to deny the
supremacy, and, in denying that, to deny the existence,
of the Supreme Power of the Universe. Freedom in
the sense of independence of causation, cannot exist, in
the nature of things. Freedom in the sense of having
power to control our wrong impulses—moral freedom—
can exist, and does exist, more or less, in all who are
not insane or imbecile.
There are cases in which it is difficult to trace the
cause of our determining as we do. In fact the believer
in the common idea of free-will, imagining that man is
himself the primary cause of his determinations, cannot
even try intelligently to trace the cause of his determin
ing as he does. But in most cases we may trace the
cause, and may find the reply to the question “ why did
you determine as you did 1 ” And in many cases even
the believer in the idea of free-will is able to trace it,
and does trace it—thus showing his instinctive know
ledge of the truth which in theory he denies. But it
is a mistake to say, as Mr Mill says in his logic, that
our determination “ comes to us from external causes, or
not at all.” And indeed Mr Mill himself speaks of
other causes. (See the chapter on “Liberty and Necessity”
“ in his work on “ Logic.”) Although our determinaation is always in part dependent upon external causes,
it is often much more dependent upon internal causes.
A wise man and a silly man will determine and act
very differently in similar external conditions. And of
course the difference is owing to (internal) differences
of character. And if in any case in which our choice
is unimportant we are unable to trace the cause of our
determining as we have determined, we may safely infer
�22
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
that there was some cause, because we know from ex
perience that in all cases of importance there is a cause.
We have thus seen that the arguments, or the logical
processes, by which men have been led to imagine that
our two truths are inconsistent with each other, are
deceptive ; and that each truth is admitted, and to some
extent applied, instinctively, even by those who deny
it. But to know a truth distinctly or intelligently, and
to be able to explain it, is very different from merely
knowing it instinctively and being unable to explain
it—the only knowledge of either truth which the
parties who believe it can have while they are unable
to point out the facts by which it is made evident.
And the intelligent application of the two truths is very
different, as we shall see, from the vague instinctive
application of them which alone can be made while the
truths are not distinctly known, and from the imperfect
and distorted application which alone can be made
when the assertion of one of them is combined with the
denial of the other.
IMPORTANCE OF THIS ANALYSIS.
The discovery of the analysis of the mental process
by which we form determinations is therefore of the
highest importance. For by ascertaining this analysis
we acquire the distinct knowledge of the two truths,
which must be known distinctly, and must be combined
with each other, in order that the foundation may be
laid of the only system of education by which the
character of man can be well-formed. And it is only
by means of this system of education, and by the
intelligent application of both these truths in the
regulation of our social feelings and conduct, or by the
character (or the ideas and habits of feeling) which this
education and application will enable man to acquire,
that a well ordered and happy state of society can be
realised. All systems of educational or social reform,
�The Application of the Two Truths.
23
therefore, which are not based upon the distinct know
ledge and the practical application of our two truths,
must fail to produce satisfactory results.
THE APPLICATION OF THE TWO TRUTHS.
It has already been stated that effects which are ex
tremely injurious in the formation of character, and
through this in human affairs generally, are produced
by the denial of man’s dependence upon Causation, in
the common idea of free-will, and by the want of
knowledge which is the cause of this denial; and that
effects which will be in the highest degree beneficial
will be produced by the distinct knowledge of this
truth, and of its application, and by the application of
it. But the beneficial effects can only be very im
perfectly obtained while the assertion of this truth is
combined with the denial of man’s agency in the
forming of his determinations, and while therefore the
injurious effects of this denial must be experienced.
A very injurious exaggeration of the inferences which
follow from each truth is produced when the denial
of either of them is combined with the assertion of the
other, or when the assertion of either truth is not
combined with the assertion of the other. From the
truth that man is an agent in the forming of his
determinations, and that he has a power of self-control,
it follows that he is a morally responsible being. But
when this truth is combined with the denial of the
truth that man’s agency in the exercise of his power is
dependent upon Causation, or is not combined with
the distinct knowledge of this truth, the idea of man’s
moral responsibility is very injuriously exaggerated;
and anger, unkindness, and vindictiveness, are excited
and justified. But when the truth that man is an
agent in the forming of his determinations is combined
with the truth that his agency in the forming of
them is dependent upon conditions or causes, our idea
�24
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
of his moral responsibility is very beneficially qualified.
And instead of the excitement and justification of
anger, unkindness, and vindictiveness, consequent
upon the exaggerated idea of man’s moral responsi
bility, we are caused, by the thought of the circum
stances by which what is displeasing to us in others
has been produced, when we keep up this thought, and
apply it in the regulation of our social feelings and
conduct, to be considerate and kind, and our ideas of
what is just to them are very beneficially modified. In
the former case we are led to imagine that it is right
that we should be unkind, and, in many cases, that we
should act with great unkindness, to those who dis
please us ; or to think it kind to be unkind. In the
latter case we know that, however we may with justice
blame and attribute demerit, and however, in the
present state of society, we may find it necessary to
punish, it is not just to be unkind ; because the object
of our displeasure must have been very injuriously
influenced in his education and by present circumstances.
And we shall discover that when society shall be
sufficiently enlightened, by the knowledge of this
subject, and shall be guided in its proceedings by
enlightened benevolence, the causes will be removed
by which what is injurious in man is produced, and
the effects will of course be prevented, and the
necessity for punishments will then be removed. And
we shall discover that punishments, although they are
indispensable in the present state of society, and are
therefore permissible, are not just, and are in many re
spects very injurious in their effects upon the character of
those who punish and of those who are punished. They
violate justice and kindness for the sake of expediency
or utility, or from necessity, created by the present
unwisely constituted state of society. But the be
ginning of the evil is in the want of knowledge and
the erroneous ideas by which the necessity for
punishments, and the spirit of unkindness, are pro
duced.
�Confused Ideas in Reference to Responsibility. 25
If with the idea that man is in all respects dependent
upon causation we combine the denial of his agency in
the forming of his determinations, we take away the basis
of the idea of his moral responsibility. And although
in the truth which we assert we have the justification
of considerate and kind feelings for all, it is the
consideration and kindness which are due to the insane
which are justified, it is not the considerate and kind
feelings due to a rational being, whose character has
been injuriously formed by means of injurious influences,
and who may still be enabled to acquire an effective
power of self-control if beneficially influenced to a
sufficient extent.
CONFUSED IDEAS IN REFERENCE TO REPONSIBILITY.
Some necessarians, or determinists, have endeavoured
to reconcile the idea of man’s moral responsibility with
their denial of his agency in the forming of his deter
minations. But to do so they have confounded the
responsibility which consists in being liable to exper
ience the consequences of our acts, which is legal or
practical responsibility, with that which is consequent
upon our ability to exercise self-control, which is moral,
responsibility.
It must be evident upon a little
consideration that the responsibility which depends
upon the possession of the power of self-control
cannot be supposed to exist when the existence of the
power upon which it depends is denied. In this
endeavour they confound the fact that punishment is
often indispensable, in the present state of things, and is
legal, and is “justified ” in this sense, and that we must
experience the consequences of our acts, that we are
practically and legally responsible; which is dependent
upon the truth that man is dependent upon causation ;
with the fact that we may be blamed, or are culpable,
when we omit to exercise our power of self-control
according to the dictates of duty, when no insuperable
obstacle prevents our doing so; which is moral
�26
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
responsibility, and is dependent upon the truth that
we have a Power of self-control, and which could not
exist if we had no such power ; but which must be
qualified, as stated, by the knowledge that our agency
in the exercise of our power of self-control is dependent
upon Causation. We have a remarkable example of this
endeavour to substitute man’s practical for his moral
responsibility, and of the confusion of ideas upon this
subject which is produced by the denial of man’s agency
in the forming of his determinations, in the chapter of
Mr Mill’s “Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy ” in which responsibility is considered.
“ Reponsibility means punishment,” Mr Mill says.
But it“ means punishment ” in two senses. It “ means
punishment” as deserved; which it could not be, as
we have seen, if Mr Mill were right in his denial of
man’s agency in the forming of his determinations—
moral responsibility. And it “ means punishment ”
as expedient or useful, in harmony with man’s de
pendence upon causation, a kind of responsibility which
could not exist if the negative part of the idea of
free-will were correct—practical responsibility. And
Mr Mill confounds the second kind of responsibility
with the first. In the chapter referred to, and in the
chapter on “Liberty and Necessity” in Mr Mill’s
work on “ Logic,” there are many examples of the use
of terms which are not admissible on the supposition
that man is not an agent in the forming of his
determinations, or which involve the admission, and
indicate the instinctive knowledge, of the truth which
Mr Mill denies. And those chapters are extremely
interesting studies for those to whom both our truths
are known. But they are very unsatisfactory and very
misleading to those who are in search of the truth
upon these points, and the more so on account of the
influence of the writer with many thoughtful persons.
But this influence, so far as it is injurious, will pass
away, with the progress of knowledge, leaving only
�Importance of the Application.
27
that which is beneficial—which is of great value. And
when both our truths are known men will no longer
think or write inconsistently or injuriously upon this
great subject.
IMPORTANCE OF THE KNOWLEDGE AND THE APPLICATION
OF THE TWO TRUTHS.
The influence of the intelligent application of the
two truths, as described above, in the regulation of
man’s social feelings and conduct, and in the formation
of his character, will be of the highest importance—
of importance which, to many, will be incredible and
inconceivable until the results can be seen in practical
realisation. By this application man’s benevolent feel
ings will be enlightened and developed, instead of being
to a great extent stultified and repressed, as they have
been, by the idea in which man’s dependence upon
Causation is denied, or while men, although they have
known man’s dependence upon Causation, have not
understood the application of this truth, or have not
applied it. And the ignorant feelings of unkindness
which have been excited and developed in men by the
exaggerated idea of man’s moral responsibility, and by
the erroneous ideas and the want of knowledge from
which this exaggerated idea has proceeded, will be
repressed, or will not be produced, instead of being
continually excited, as they have hitherto been. Man
will, thus, become intelligently benevolent, or kindly
disposed towards his fellow-men, instead of being
caused, as hitherto, to become ignorantly unkind, to a
great extent—a most important moral effect. And,
knowing and distinctly perceiving man’s dependence
upon Causation, he will be enabled to trace intelligently
the causes by which evil effects in man’s feelings and
conduct and in the formation of his character have
been produced, and those from which good effects in
these respects will proceed, and thus to realise a most
�28
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
important intellectual result. He will thus be enabled
to ascertain the causes and the processes of Causation by
which selfishness, untruthfulness, injustice, unkindness
in every form (including religious intolerance and per
secution), vice and crime of every description, poverty
and the fear of poverty, murders, wars (or wholesale
murders), injurious surroundings of every kind, and all
the miseries which have resulted from this combination
of satanic influences have been produced. And he
will find that they have all followed, as naturally
caused effects, from the want of distinct knowledge of the
two truths, and of their application, and from the
erroneous ideas which have been consequent upon this
want of knowledge, and from the unintelligent or
instinctive application of these erroneous ideas, in the
mis-regulation of man’s social feelings and conduct.
And, on the other hand, he will find that a series of
causes and effects the reverse of this will follow from
the distinct knowledge and the intelligent application
of our two truths. Benevolence will take the place of
selfishness, and men will become disposed to be truth
ful and just. And they will learn what will be just,
and will become disposed to fulfil the requirements
of justice, to the utmost, in the spirit of enlightened
good-will to all, or with the earnest and intelligent
desire that the happiness of every individual should
be promoted to the utmost possible extent, by the right
formation of character and by favourable outward influ
ences. And they will find that in adopting the practical
measures which are necessary to promote the highest
happiness of all, men will promote their own highest
interests or happiness in the most effectual manner,
while they fulfil their most sacred social duties, which
have hitherto been so wofully disregarded and violated
and to a great extent misunderstood. And they will form
new social arrangements, in harmony with this new
character, which will be most beneficial for all; instead
of the old social arrangements, in harmony with the
defectively formed character hitherto universal, which
�Effects of the Application.
29
are extremely injurious to all—not only to those who
are the most injured by them in their character and
surroundings, but also to those whose selfish interests
and tastes they are intended to promote and gratify.
For all are deeply injured in character and in surround
ings by the present system. It is a deep injury to be
surrounded by such characters as are formed in con
sequence of the ideas and the system which now exists,
instead of being surrounded by the characters of true
enlightenment and enlightened goodness which men
will be caused and enabled to acquire in a well-ordered
state of society. And it is a deep injury to be caused to
acquire some variety of the general character of the
present system, instead of being caused and enabled to
acquire the character of the system of true enlighten
ment and enlightened goodness. And the material
surroundings of even the highest classes—their mansions, and palaces, and the pleasure-grounds and parks
attached to them, are in many respects very inferior
combinations of circumstances, when compared with
the domestic and social arrangements, and their sur
roundings, which will he formed when the scientific
knowledge and the manual and mechanical powers of
society shall be applied under the guidance of
enlightened benevolence.
And the employments
and amusements of the wealthy are inevitably, in the
present state of things, to a great extent useless and
unsatisfactory.
The tree of evil will thus be caused to die away, from
its roots, and will disappear entirely, in due time ; and
the tree of good will be planted in the place of it. And
men will live in the midst of scenery beautified by its
presence, in an atmosphere of goodness, in the light of
intelligence, and in the midst of abundance of all
things necessary for their rational happiness. And
poverty will be known no more. For it is only as the
effect of selfishness, and unkindness, and disunion, and
gross injustice between man and man, and of the want
�30
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
of knowledge and the erroneous ideas by which this
irrational state of things is produced, that poverty and
the fear of it can exist, in a world overflowing as this is
with the material means for the production of every
kind of wealth which man can reasonably desire. And
when the various employments which are necessary for
the satisfaction of man’s wants, and of his reasonable
desires, shall be regulated by enlightened benevolence,
they will all be made attractive, as well as highly
effective; and the duties of life will be fulfilled with
willingness and pleasure. For the object of them all
will be to promote human happiness; not the selfish
mercenary object of gaining a wage, or a fee, by doing
something which we would not do if we were not paid
for doing it. It is thus, and only thus, that men will
learn how to fulfil, and will be enabled and caused to
fulfil, their social duties, according to the great rule
that we should “ do to others in all things, as we would
have others do to us,” and that they can realise the
happiness which is only to be realised by doing so.
And, before they could enter upon this course, it was
necessary, as we have seen, that the two truths which
have been the subjects of the free-will controversy, and
their application, should be distinctly known.
THE
CAUSES
OF
EVIL
AND
OF
GOOD
TO
MAN.
The discovery of the process of Causation by which
our social evils have been produced, and of that by
which they will be remedied, was opened to the world
by a necessarian. It could never have been ascertained
by a believer in the idea in which man’s dependence
upon Causation in the forming of his determinations
is denied. But when first made it was too incomplete
for general practical application, and too incomplete
to be explained, and to be received as real by the
public in general. And it was caused to be so by the
negation which in the necessarian idea is combined
�The Causes of Evil and of Good to Man. 31
with the truth upon which depends the knowledge of
the causes by which man is influenced in his determina
tions and conduct, and therefore in his agency in
producing evil or good results in his social affairs.
If man were himself the primary or independent cause
of his determinations, then, as our social evils depend
upon his conduct, and his conduct upon his deter
minations, he would be the primary or independent
cause of our social evils, and it would be useless to
look in any other direction for the cause of them.
And it would be folly to expect that he could be
influenced for good or evil by causes of any kind.
But as his agency in the forming of his determinations
is dependent upon Causation, it might be hoped that
the causes of evil and of good, in his feelings and
conduct, and in the formation of his character, and
through these in his social affairs generally, may be
ascertained, and that the causes of good may be sub
stituted for the causes of evil. It is quite certain that
until now these causes have not been1 known, even to
the believers in the truth upon which the knowledge
of them depends.
But while in ascertaining the
application of the truth upon which the knowledge
of these causes depends, the truth which should be
combined with it, and applied with it, remained
unknown, and was denied, and the denial of this
truth was combined with the assertion of the other,
the new knowledge was vitiated at its source. The
belief of the truth which was denied, which is highly
important as a cause of good, was supposed to be a
cause of evil; and the denial of this truth, which is
a powerful cause of evil, was supposed to be a power
ful cause of good. The discoverer, to a great extent,
of the causes of evil and of good to man, the late MrOwen of New Lanark, maintained that man’s character,
and his opinions, and his determinations, are formed
“for him, and not by him.” And he, therefore,
logically, and with characteristic moral courage, and
�32
The End of the Free-Will Controversy.
with the best intentions, but with intellectual blind
ness and want of judgment, upon this point, con
sequent upon this erroneous idea, or rather upon the
want of knowledge by which alone this idea is
permitted to exist, maintained that man is not a
morally responsible being, that he cannot have merit
or demerit, or deserve praise or blame, in the true
sense of those terms.
Punishments and rewards he
ascertained to be extremely injurious, or powerful
causes of evil, in many respects, although indjspensable while men are so unwisely educated and placed
as they have hitherto been. It was by the application
of the truth that man is dependent upon Causation
that he was enabled to make this invaluable discovery,
so far as he made it. It was, as stated, by the denial
of the truth that man is an agent in the forming of
his determinations, &c., and by the false inferences
which follow from this denial, that the discovery was
made so incomplete, and was so far falsified, that he
could not explain it, and it could not be practically
applied on an extended scale. It was by the applica
tion of the truth that man is dependent upon
Causation—by applying it in the regulation of his
social feelings and conduct, while he was yet a boy,
that he was enabled to acquire the character of
enlightened benevolence, so far as, with his partially
erroneous ideas, he could acquire it. And, havingdone so, it was by the application of this truth, to
some extent, under the guidance of his enlightened
benevolence, in a great educational experiment, during
the first quarter of the present centruy, that results
were obtained in an adult population of from two to
three thousand of the working classes, and in many
hundreds of children, which excited the admiration
and astonishment of thousands of visitors, of all classes,
from the highest to the lowest. And he thus verified
practically his great discovery, so far as his views were
correct. But owing to the erroneous part of his
�The Causes of Evil and of Good to Man. 33
fundamental idea, all his endeavours to explain his
discovery were in vain. He did not even succeed in
enabling his disciples to understand the change of
character which he contemplated, and the means to
effect it, and the importance of it, so far as to know
that it is only by the character which will result from
the application of the truth that man is dependent
upon Causation—it is only from the intelligent applica
tion of this truth in the regulation of their social
feelings and conduct, and in the formation of their
character, and in human affairs generally—that men
can be enabled to realise a well-ordered and happy
state of society. But of course he could not know that
his own views were so far erroneous, in consequence
of a fundamental mistake, that no one could obtain
correct ideas from any explanations which he could
give. But all other systems of social reform-—all the
ideas and plans to which the name Communism or
Socialism are given, and all other schemes of reform—
are still more defective fundamentally. They are
altogether defective fundamentally. They do not
contain any indications of the knowledge by means
of which alone the character can be formed which
is indispensable for the construction of a well-ordered
and happy state of society. On the contrary they
all exhibit the want of this knowledge, and contain
conspicuous evidence, to those who understand the
subject, of having emanated from characters in which
the knowledge and the enlightened benevolence did
not exist by which alone men can be enabled to devise
and construct a well-ordered state of society, and can
be enabled to co-operate intelligently for the most
effectual promotion of the happiness of all. And
although in Mr Owen’s ideas there is much to be
corrected, which follows from the denial of man’s
agency in the forming of his determinations, and
which is very injuriously misleading, and which must
be corrected before the true parts of his ideas can be
�34
'Fhe End of the Free-Will Controversy.
understood, and accepted, and practically applied by
society, we have in the true parts of them the inspirations of the spirit of enlightened benevolence, so far
as this spirit could be obtained by the application of
the truth that man is dependent upon Causation,
while this truth was combined with the denial of man’s
agency in the forming of his determinations, and with
the consequent denial of his power of self-control and
of his moral responsibility. But neither the man nor
the system has been understood. And he did not
understand either himself or his system. Neither of
them could be understood while the two truths which
have been the subjects of the Free-will Controversy
were supposed to be inconsistent with each other, and
while, therefore, they could not be applied together
in the regulation of man’s social feelings, &c. I will
endeavour to explain this subject in another pamphlet.
But it will be well to observe in concluding, that the
statements which have been made in reference to the
effect of the application of the two truths, in the
reformation of the adult character, in those who are
sufficiently pre-disposed to acquire the new character,
and in reference to the education of the young which
will result from this application, are not speculative.
They have been practically verified so far that they
cannot be disbelieved by any one who is acquainted
with the facts of the subject.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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The end of the free-will controversy
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Travis, Henry
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 34 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
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Thomas Scott
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1875
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Free Will
Determinism
Conway Tracts
Free Will and Determinism
-
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rJtÎs
national sectile society
THE
|
INFLUENCE OF HEREDITY
i ,*■
ON FREE WILL.
»■
BY
PROFESSOR LUDWIG BUCHNER,
Author
of
“ Force and Matter,” “ Man : his Past, Present,
and Future,” etc., etc.
. [Translated, Inj permission, l>y Annie Besantd\
LONDON:
FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28, STONEGUTTER STREET, E.C.
1 880.
PRICE
TWOPENCE,
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLES BRADLAUGH,
28, STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
�THE
INFLUENCE OF HEREDITY ON
FREE WILL.
“ How naive is the empty conceit of the freedom of the
human will when Nature completely rules it by those instincts
of self-preservation which she has implanted in man!”—G. H.
Schneider.
Two diametrically opposed views, or philosophical opinions,
have always been maintained on the important and much
•debated question of the freedom of the human will. The one
•declares that its absolute freedom, the freedom of the Ego,
is proved by the facts of consciousness, or by the knowledge
that in a given case we can do one thing as well as another,
and that it is therefore raised above all doubt and above all
•discussion. The other maintains the exact contrary, and
says that the human will is absolutely determined, and
since it is dependent upon influences from without and from
within it is in reality unreasonable to speak of a free choic^
•or decision between two possible courses. The notion that
a man can of his own free choice do this or that, arises, say
the upholders of this view, from a delusive appearance
or from self-deception. The will follows the relatively
strongest motive or the relatively pleasantest idea, since it
is impossible that the contrary should prevail. Also the
interdependence of phenomena, the so-called laws of
causality—urge the defenders of this opinion—prove the
�4
The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
impossibility of free will, for each action, according to theselaws, is necessary and is unavoidable by the actor.
It is not, indeed, a satisfactory proof of the depth or
the certainty of human knowledge that in a question so
theoretically and practically important, opinions so es
sentially different and opposed, so mutually exclusive,,
should have faced each other unreconciled during long
centuries, and should remain in like fashion facing each
other to-day. There is, however, one circumstance to be
taken into account as a partial explanation of this long
controversy, which is a fault of man’s heart rather than his
head; so-called ethical motives have been mixed up with
the handling of this question, and the freedom of the will
has been defended as a postulate of morality without 'which
the groundwork of our whole moral system would be in the
gravest peril. In a scientific consideration of the matter
such a side question is manifestly irrelevant, and if science
were able to demonstrate the absolute determination of the
human will, then must its determination be admitted, even
though the whole of human society were thereupon to fall
to pieces. Fortunately, this danger is purely imaginary.
It is, on the contrary, to be hoped that morality itself will
rise in the same measure as we learn the inner and outer
influences which determine the actions of men, and thereby
become able to work definitely upon these influences.
Further, this proof of the absolute determination of the
will is hardly to be made, without logical artifices or unfaii
arguments. The statistical facts which are often brought
forward to support that determination, prove nothing as to
the individual will, but only show that the actions of men,
or their volitions, are determined on a large scale, and on
the whole, by certain influences, which under otherwise
�The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
5
■similar circumstances cannot fail to show, or at least permit
to be seen, a certain regularity. For instance, the condition
■of a nation has the greatest influence over the actions of an
individual, and these actions change when the condition
■changes. Thus, according to experience, famine, want of
work, commercial crises, wars, etc., raise to the highest
point the number of crimes against life and property or the
number of suicides, while, on the other hand, they lessen the
¡number of marriages. It is also proved that the number of
the last, for example, rises and falls with the relative price
of corn. But although all these and many similar influences
are among the causes which help to determine the will of
■the individual, they are yet not the only ones. A far more
.powerful and more important factor in this determination is
the personality of the actor himself; statistics can only
■disclose to us the outer, and not the inner, motives of
■a single action, while this personal factor naturally with
draws itself from all statistical calculations. Yet this will
•of the individual decides whether or not he will yield to those
influences of the environment which can be reached by
■observation.
Further, motives from without and from within are to be
■distinguished also in the individual will itself ; among the
¡first the special and personal conditions amid which an action
takes place must be understood, while the inner motives
■arise from the inner nature, or disposition of the individual
person, from his personality itself, his character. The
■character must be regarded as the real immediate cause of
all voluntary actions, while the determining outside motives
appear more as indirect causes. The worth of a man is al
ways to be measured as greater or less accordingly as his
•character is proved or maintained amid the influences
�6
The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
brought to bear upon it by circumstances. Here then is the.
important point upon which modern investigation of nature
brings to bear its mighty lever, so as to let in a hitherto
unknown light on the freedom of the human will, and to
conclude by actual proofs the hitherto unfruitful speculations
of theoretical philosophy. No one should now be ignorant
of the dazzling light thrown by the great natural investi
gator, Darwin, on the evolution of the individual characters
of men and beasts, of his enthralling researches on the in
fluence of physical and psychical inheritance, and on thegradual evolution of the whole organism. So long as people
did homage to the now fortunately exploded theory of
separate creative acts, and regarded each species of animalsas the special production of a creative will they naturally
had no need to examine into the evolution of the individual
character; it was plainly, just like the bodily organism, the
production of the creative will, and no further explanation’
was needful. But when the unscientific nature of such a
doctrine was recognised people began to understand that
each individual was or might be the last product orevolution of a long series of preceding species and of past
centuries ; then they demanded also some further explanation
of the individual character, the mental personality, and this
naturally was only to be had where the physical evolution
had been found, that is to say in the incidents of descent
and development. In fact, there cannot now-a-days be thesmallest doubt, scientifically, that the individual character,
the whole mental personality of an individual, must beregarded as the last result or production of an interwoven
series of developments, a long succession of earlier species, and
as moulded also by the conditions environing the act of gene
ration. In other words : character, or that which determines-
�The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
7
by preference the actions of men (and of beasts) is, as to by far
its greatest part, inherited from parents and ancestors, and
arises by natural necessity out of the constitution of the
procreator and his partly inherited, partly acquired cha
racteristics, as well as out of the conditions of the pro
creation itself. “ Man,” says Vibot, in his excellent book
on inheritance (p. 374, etc.), “who has inherited the thought
tendencies of his ancestors, is driven to will, and therefore
to act, like them. This heritage of impulses and propen
sities forms a circle of inner influences in the midst of
which he lives, and the power to judge these and, if need
be, to overcome resides ever in himself. . . . But in
this unceasing conflict between individual and generic
qualities between the person and his inheritance, or
speaking generally, between freedom and destiny, freedom is
conquered more often than is thought.” Or, as the famous
physiologist, Burdach, put it j more than fifty years ago:
“ Descent has more influence on our physical and psychical
character than all outward material and spiritual cir
cumstances.” (Physiology as an Experimental Science,
vol. i., p. 571.) We must not, indeed, omit to say that the
truth here enunciated is a very old one, and that unpre
judiced philosophers and practical physiologists well knew
the powerful influence exercised over human will and action
by inherited character; perhaps no one knew this better
than the great dramatist Shakspere, whose dramatic characters
are all men of flesh and blood, and not the poor puppets
which other dramatists dance between heaven and earth,
marionette-fashion, on their self-constructed psychological
wires. Those who have read my “ Force and Matter” will
know that in the chapter on freewill, I myself, five years
before Darwin, laid great stress on this fact, and brought into
�8
The, Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
prominence the vast influence of the inherited propensities
of character on human will and action, prompting to this or
that course. But the great rôle played by the origin of the
individual character, the physical inheritance going hand in
hand with the mental or spiritual inheritance, could not then
be so emphasised as it deserved to be, and as is now possible,
thanks to Darwin and the light thrown upon it by his
famous theory.
It must not, however, be forgotten that the individual
character is not formed only and exclusively by hereditary
transmission, but that the environment, experience, train
ing, education, example, etc., also powerfully co-operate in
moulding and changing it. But I think I shall not be
wrong in maintaining that the inborn and inherited ten
dencies of the character, or the inherited propensities, in
stincts, and appetites, are so strong both in men and beasts
that, in comparison with them, all other influences and
motives fall more or less into the background, and that it
is consequently only possible for an individual man to
struggle against this perpetual compulsion under very ex
ceptional circumstances. He who brings into the world with
him an innate tendency to goodwill, sympathy, conscientious
ness, love of right-doing, etc., will, with few exceptions, and
under all circumstances, be a genuine moralist, even though
he have learned few moral laws ; while, on the contrary, an
innate propensity to melancholy, or to deceit, or to frivolity,
or to folly, or to pride, or to avarice, or to sensuality, or to
drunkennesss, or to gambling, or to violence, and so on, is,
as a rule, not to be controlled or held back by any kind of
will or argument. Daily experience most plainly teaches
that each person, as a rule, acts in the manner most in ac- ,
cordance with his nature and inner propensities, and that
�The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
9
these innate tendencies and inclinations of our nature
generally exercise an influence on our decisions and on
our actions, in comparison with which other motives, es
pecially those due to reflection, fall more or less into the
background. The youth or the sensualist sacrifices every
thing to his bodily desires; the old man or the miser and the
covetous man sacrifices everything to the desire of gain, to
the struggle for possessions ; the lazy to the longing for rest
or the shunning of work ; the ambitious to the striving for
honor and distinction; the mother to the love of her children,
and so on. The miser, who already has heaped up millions,
and who, perhaps, has no children to whom he can bequeath
his treasures, aye, and who perhaps has reached the evening
of life and knows that he must soon divide his goods among
strangers, yet does not cease to gather together wealth.
The voluptuous King Henry VIII. of England broke
through every bond of decency and morality, and separated
himself and his country from the then all-powerful Papacy,
simply that he might satisfy his longing for sexual pleasure.
The tendency to shame or modesty, which amongst civilised
nations has been gradually developed and has been more
-and more strengthened by inheritance, can transform
our maidens and women into veritable heroines in de
fence of their purity, while among many savage tribes
who go perfectly naked, no trace of shame nor of sexual
modesty is to be found. Or again, even the civilised
nations of antiquity thought and felt quite differently
from ourselves on this matter. Innate passion con
quers all representations, listens to no reason, and forgets
all prudence and all danger. No man can by his simple
' will thoroughly master innate timidity, and he who has once
.given way to the demon of drunkenness or gambling, will in
�10
The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
very few cases be able to set himself free again by his owns
determination. The passionate man perpetrates in anger deeds
of which in more quiet moods he would think himself quite'
incapable ; the compassionate or the generous sacrifices him
self for others, while the hardhearted does not permit such,
feelings to have the smallest influence over his conduct..
Beasts, when they are under the control of certain propen
sities, such as sexual desire, hunger, maternal love, etc., arewont to forget utterly all danger and all prudence, and
blindly to sacrifice themselves, even although of the most
shy or the most timid species. Notwithstanding, we seethat also among beasts prudence and consideration may oc
casionally overcome a propensity or a desire. For example,,
if young animals have been attracted by a bait and have
fallen a sacrifice, the older ones, wise by experience, know
how to resist the temptation, and either leave the bait un
touched or manage to snatch it in some cunning fashion,
without being caught at the same time. Among men,,
whose reasoning and reflective powers are so far raised above
those of beasts, this is naturally the case to a far greater
extent, so that man is able to speak of a choice or the
expression of a free will, in which reason and thought win
the victory over desires aroused by sensation or perception
this is a temporary victory of a more rational idea over a
less rational. But, as a rule, the individual upon every
occasion follows that idea which is the pleasantest to himEven suicides or religious martyrs are determined on their
course by the idea that the condition which awaits them isa more agreeable one than the present.
So, as Gr. H. Schneider (“ On the Animal Will,” p. 145,.
etc.) very well says, all voluntary decisions, both of men
and of beasts, are determined partly by objective conscious-
�The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
11
Hess, and partly without it; that is, they depend partly
on inherited organisation and partly on an act of the under
standing. In each single circumstance both factors are
concerned. The will, as such, depends, according to'
him, on the so-called intellectual tendencies, which have
been gradually developed from sensations and perceptions.
The further we descend in the animal kingdom—according toSchneider—the more weight have these tendencies of feeling
and thought, that is the innate and inherited instincts or
natural propensities ; while, on the contrary, imagination,
and reason, or acts of the will arising from conscious
ness, increase in the same measure as the animal gradationsapproach their highest point, or man. Therefore also, no
decided line can be drawn between instinct and will, and the
old theological doctrine that animals only act from instinct,
from an implanted impulse to purposeful action, without
consciousness of the purpose, but man, on the contrary, only
from free will, has quite faded. Man is led both by will
and by instinct, but there is in him more will and less
instinct than in beasts. From this point of view the
childish, the childlike, or thoughtless human being, in whom
sensational and perceptive impulses more easily master
prudence and reason, comes nearer to the animals than the
older man, grown wise by experience and by the cultivation
of his mental powers. The will is, therefore, never abso
lutely free, since the inherited organisation traces for it
very decided limits, and since outside this organisation a
great number of other circumstances—the full investigation
of which does not come within the scope of this paper—in
fluence it, narrowing and hemming it in. But in each case
the chief limits set to free will appear to lie in the laws of
inheritance, and an accurate knowledge of these is therefore
�12
The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
imperative in order to judge riglitly in this weighty matter.
Unfortunately our knowledge of these laws is still very im
perfect ; yet we at least know this much with certainty,
that psychical heredity displays the same—if not a greater—
power and influence, as does physical, and that the abilities
■acquired during life possess the same transmissibility as those
inherited. Hence follows this result—immeasurably im
portant for progress and for the future of the human
race—that this transmission, although made without in
tention and unconsciously, tends towards a continual
improvement of the human race, and—result even yet more
solemn—that we ourselves have a share in making this
improvement. Then in the same measure as each single gene
ration works for its own training, moulding and improve
ment, inner and outer, in that same measure also it works
for the good and for the improvement of all following
generations ; so that each thus improved race hands on to the
following race not only the mental and material treasures
which it has gained and heaped together, but also a higher
and increased ability for improvement and further progress.
Heredity—however slowly and with often great breaks
due to popular commotions—raises us step by step to an
ever higher grade of moral, mental, and material develop
ment, and we shall make the attainment of this object the
easier just in so far as we work for our own moral, intel
lectual, and material perfection, and as in this fashion we
enrich the heritage which we bequeath to the next genera
tion. In any case such a prospect and such a call to labor
for our further improvement is worth more than all the
quackery and nonsense of antiquated dogmas and supersti
tious fancies, with which the ruling religious systems have
sought and still seek to satisfy the mental and emotional
�The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
13
needs of man. For of what use can be all those imagina
tions of man as to eternity if they miss scientific truth, and
if they hinder instead of furthering the progress of know
ledge, or lead it into false paths? I consider it wholly im
possible that man, already so far advanced, can allow
himself to be guided any longer by these leading strings,
and the time cannot be very far off when he shall tread the
paths of reason and science instead of those of lies and
hypocrisy!
Ere I conclude, I would ask you not to regard this paper
as one which even half solves the important and scarcely
wholly soluble problem of the freedom of the human will. For
that task there is not now the necessary time, nor are my
weak powers sufficient. I have only aimed to show you—
or rather to call to your attention—how great an influence
the inherited mental organisation or character exercises over
our decisions, and therefore over our actions, over our will
—over' that will which appears to be bound in so many other
ways as well as in the most essential. But since this
organisation is not rigid, unchangeable, fixed for all time,
but can be changed and improved partly by our own exer
tions, I have ventured to impress on you the important
duty which is binding upon us of striving after that perfec
tion in which all good men agree.
Lastly, for the sake of greater clearness both for myself
and for my hearers, I will endeavor to define the results of
my enquiry and my opinions in a few brief sentences of
summary and review.
1. The will is neither absolutely free nor absolutely
determined.
2. It is determined or bound by a large number of inner
and outer influences, among which the inherited organisa-
�14
The Influence of Heredity on Free Will.
lion, the inborn nature of the mind and character, plays
■the chief part.
3. It is relatively free in so far as purposeful reason or
»reflection masters in any particular case thoughtless or in
nate or instinctive propensities and desires.
4. Innate propensities or instincts yield gradually more
.and more to reason and thought as we rise in the animal
kingdom, as well as in the development of the individual
man ; whence the will becomes freer step by step, and
(becomes more defined by the subordination of the former.
5. That since the will is not rigid nor unchangeable, it is
-therefore in the power of man himself by progressive traindno-, moulding, and improvement to free himself from these
.animal instincts more and more, and thereby to make him
self better, happier, and more contented than he has hitherto
been.
6. Freethouglit is above all called to work for the accom
plishment of this great end.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
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The influence of heredity on free will
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Buchner, Ludwig [1824-1899]
Besant, Annie Wood [1847-1933] (tr)
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 14 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Freethought Publishing Company
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1880
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N113
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Free will
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English
Annie Besant
Free Thought
Free Will and Determinism
Heredity
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l-ITS
C(
THE
PHYSICAL BASIS OF WILL.
jKite
DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
ON
EUNBAY AFTERNOON, FEBRUARY 15th, 1880,
BY
HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D.
Honban:
PUBLISHED BY THE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY.
1880.
PRICE THREEPENCE.
�The Society’s Lectures by the same Author,
now printed, are—
“ Lessons of Materialism.” (Price 3d., or 3jd. by Post.)
“The Physical Basis
of
Will.” (Same Price.)
Can be obtained (on remittance by letter of postage stamps or
order) of the Hon. Treasurer, Wm. Henry Domville, Esq,., 15,
Gloucester Crescent, Hyde Park, W., or at the Hall on the days
of Lecture; or of Mr. John Bumpus, 158, Oxford Street, W.
Works by the same Author:
“ The Pathology of Minh.” Being the Third Edition of the
Second Part of the “ Physiology and Pathology of Mind,” re
cast, much enlarged and re-written. In 8vo, price 18s.
“ The Physiology of Mind.” Being the First Part of a
Third Edition, revised, enlarged, and re-written, of “The
Physiology and Pathology of Mind.” Crown 8vo, 10s. 6d.
“ Body and Mind
An Inquiry into their Connection and
Mutual Influence, specially with reference to Mental Dis
orders. Second Edition, enlarged and revised, with Psycho
logical Essays added. Crown 8vo, 6s. 6d.
Macmillan & Co., London.
�SYLLABUS.
Is there a physical basis of will ?
Statement of the doctrine of free will.
The difficulties of the doctrine—(1) In its relation to universal
causation; (2) In its relation to supernatural workings on the
mind.
The practical life of mankind always in conformity with the
theory that the will is not outside causation, but is determined
by motives.
What are the grounds of the conviction of a free will ?
The value of the testimony of consciousness as a witness;
what it does say, and does not say.
The physiological basis of will: nervous functions which go
along with its functions and may be its material equivalents.
Observed dependence of will upon organization; impairment
of will accompanying the beginnings of physical derangement.
The formation of will is the formation of character by means
of good training on a sound physical basis.
The apprehension of the reign of law in mind as in matter not
inconsistent with moral feeling and responsibility, but necessary
in order to infix and develop a rational sense of responsibility.
The limited range of all human knowledge.
��THE
PHYSICAL BASIS OF WILL.
N a lecture which I gave here last year, and published
afterwards in the Fortnightly Review * I pointed out
that moral feeling is just as closely dependent upon
organization as is the meanest function of mind, and
asserted broadly “that there was not an argument to
prove the so-called materialism of one part of mind which
did not apply with equal force to the whole mind.” For
this statement I was taken to task in an article in the
Spectator, the critic in that journal summoning up to
confront and confound me the alleged self-determining
power of human will—the freedom of the will. I pro
pose, then, to make this lecture supplementary to the
former one in some respects, by considering now whether
we are entitled to assume, as I hold, a Physical Basis of
Will, or whether, as my critic thinks, we have in the Will
a self-sustained spiritual entity, which owns no cause,
obeys not law, and has no sort of affinity with matter.
’Tis not a discussion of much lively or fruitful promise,
but inasmuch as those who engage in the Freewill con
troversy, ■while repeating the old and trite arguments, for
the most part leave out of sight the physical aspect of the
subject, it may be instructive to bring that more into
notice, and to show that those who uphold a material
basis of will have some plain facts to go upon.
They who maintain that the will is not determined
I
* “ Materialism and its Lessons.”
�6
The Physical Basis of Will.
by motives, but is self-determined, free, do not for the
most part go so far as to imply that motives are not at
work in the mind, and that the will takes no account of
them; they affirm that there is not the uniform, in
separable connection between motive and will which
there is between cause and effect in physical nature. The
will is not the unconditionally necessary consequent of
its antecedent motives. It, or some other mysterious
entity in the individual which, having virtually abstracted
from the actual individual, they call his non-bodily self, has,
they allege, an independent, perfectly spontaneous, arbi
trary power to make this or that motive predominate as
it pleases ; to chose this or that one among motives and
make it the motive; in doing which this self-determining
principle is presumed by some, I believe, to act without
motive, of its own pure motion, without cause or reason;
by others to act from motives so high and fine, that they
constrain it instantly, without weighing at all upon its
*
freedom.
Clearly then we have here a very singular
power in nature, which we might call supernatural were
* “The noumenon, ding-an-sich, real self,” “is unknowable,
inscrutable,” “ exists outside Time, Space, and Causality, is ab
solutely free,” “ in itself, per se, is unchangeable; ” “ and, as it is
my only real being, my primitive and inborn self, it must be
present as a factor in every change and every action of which
my phenomenal Self, my empirical character, is capable.” That
is to say, itself outside Time, Space, and Causality, it is the
moving principle of every change in Time, Space, and Causality
which takes place through me. Of a truth a wonderful power
which can thus be actually and not be theoretically at the same
time in and outside Time, Space, and Causality! But more.
Why does a truthful man who has told a falsehood feel a remorse ?
Because “his conscience tells him that he is responsible,not indeed
for this particular act— since this he could not help—but for not
being a better man.” “ Blame not the action, then, but the man
for being capable of such an action. Whip him, not for telling
this particular lie, but for being a liar at heart, in his inmost
nature. For this inmost nature, his real Self, his ding-an-sich,
which, as a noumenon, is in some inscrutable manner emanci
pated from the laws of Time and Causality, from the operation
of motives, is absolutely free.” But surely it will be, on the
one hand, a singularly hard matter to lay hold of and whip the
inmost nature, the real self, the noumenon, when “ it exists out-
�The Physical Basis of Will.
7
it not that it is allowed to be a part of nature acting in
and upon it, although coming from a mysterious source
outside it; but being thus an important agent in nature,
without being of the same kind or having anything in
common with anything else there—any sympathy, affinity,
or relationship whatever with the things which it works
in and upon—-we may fairly call it unnatural.
If there be a power of this kind in the Universe, the
reflection which occurs instantly is that causation is not
universal, as people are in the habit of assuming, but that
there is a large region of human events which is exempt
from the otherwise uniform law of cause and effect, the
region, that is to say, of man’s highei’ mental operations.
A great deal of the force which works in them and by
which they work on the external world obeys not the
law of conservation of energy. Now this is a rather
startling reflection, seeing that the great natural argu
ment for the existence of God is that everything must
have a cause, and that for cause of all things, therefore,
there must be a cause of causes, a great First Cause. At
the outset, then, we come to a perplexing dilemma—to
the obligation of concluding either that the will, like
other things, must have a cause, or that a great first cause
is not a necessity of human thought.
side of Time, Space, and Causality,” and, on the other hand,
rather unfair to whip vicariously the empirical character which
cannot help itself, when the real culprit escapes. How whip it,
too, in any case, seeing that it is a thing-in-itself, incorporeal,
spiritual, “as the air invulnerable”? The foregoing extracts are
taken from, an account of Kant’s Philosophy, by Professor Bowen,
of Harvard College, U.S., in his work on Modern Philosophy.
At the end of his exposition and comments, he says: “ And thus
the deep and dark problem of fixed fate and freewill is solved,
the two contradictories being reconciled with each other.” No
doubt they are reconciled in the minds of those who, like Pro
fessor Bowen, can believe at the same instant two contradictories.
Sir W. Hamilton laid it down that one of two inconceivable con
tradictories must be true, and it passed for a long time for high
philosophy that a man should be able so to conceive inconceivables as to know them to be contradictory. Here we have
a step farther in philosophy, since we have two conceivable con
tradictories which are both true.
�8
The Physical Basis of Will.
But this is only a first difficulty. We are taught by
those who uphold the freedom of the will that although it
is not governed by motives, but is a self-determining
principle in us, it is wrought upon continually and most
powerfully by supernatural agency. A Divine grace is
ever near to help it in time of need, strengthening it to
do well, weakening it to do ill. It is God’s good purpose
to “master our will,” and to make us “surrender and
resign it to his just, wise, and gracious will; ” and to
make good his right, says that eloquent divine, Dr. I.
Barrow, “ God bendeth all his forces and applieth all his
means both of sweetness and severity, persuading us by
arguments, soliciting us by entreaties, alluring us by fair
promises, scaring us by fierce menaces, indulging ample
benefits to us, inflicting sore corrections on us, working
in and upon us by secret influences of grace, by visible
dispensations of providence.” A stupendous array of
motives this, which it is a wonder any one ever withstands,
especially when it is borne in mind that they are worked
by the unlimited power of Omnipotence, which has fore
known and fore-ordained the result from all eternity I
However, we are not to suppose that these mighty agencies
are anywise incompatible with the freedom of will; indeed,
when it has surrendered itself to entire obedience it is
enjoying the most perfect freedom'; when it is in the
grasp of Omnipotence it is most free. Hard sayings no
doubt for reason, but not at all hard to faith seemingly,
since many persons persuade themselves that they have
intelligent apprehension of them.
The will is assailed very powerfully in a second super
natural way—namely, by the Devil, if the Devil, that is
to say, be not defunct. Bor it seems to be an open
question now whether he has not undergone by evolution
such a transformation of kind as to have lost all his per
sonality and much of his power. At the time when he
paid Luther a memorable visit he was a distinct being
enough, with great horns and a tail and cloven hoofs;
later on, when Milton described him, he had lost these
appendages, and become the great Archfiend, above his
fellows “ in shape and gesture proudly eminent,” who
�The Physical Basis of Will.
9
amid the torments of a new-found Hell still flung defiance
at the Omnipotent, with unconquered will declaring it
better to “reign in Hell than serve in Heaven;” still
later he underwent philosophic transformation into the
polished, cultivated, intellectually subtile, but mocking,
doubting, cynical, Mephistopheles of Faust. What form
and substance has he now, if form and substance he has
any ? Those whose professional work it is to do battle
with him, and to frustrate his ever active wiles and malice,
and who ought therefore to know him best, do not tell us
clearly what their exact ideas on the subject are, if they
have clear and exact ideas ; they apparently like to believe
in him as much in a vague and cloudy way as they dislike
to believe in him in any precise and definite way, or at
any rate dislike to be asked to define precisely their belief;
but although they may not be very sure of his present
form and dwelling-place, they have no doubt in a general
way of the evil desires and passions with which he inspires
poor human hearts, and of his open and insidious assaults
on the higher aspirations of human will, which he, un
tiring enemy, besets, besieges, beleaguers, bombards con
tinually. Again then we have a large region of human
events—a region the limits of which it is impossible to
define or to get defined—which is outside the natural
law of causation, and cannot ever be made matter of
scientific study. For as it is plain that we have no means
by which we can measure and register the quantity and
kind of energy which the Devil thus exerts continually
upon the will—no Satanometer or Diabolometer so to
speak—human events, so far as they are effects of his
counsels and instigations, must lie outside the range of
positive knowledge. But once more we are not to suppose
that these supernatural workings upon the will abridge in
the least degree its perfect freedom.
These are difficulties one might suppose great enough
to make even the theologico-metaphysical theorist pause,
but they have no effect to shake his faith in his dogma,
or to lessen his scorn of the profane persons who
doubt and dispute the freedom of the will. He is bold
enough in the last resort to affirm that man’s thoughts,
B
�10
The Physical Basis of Will.
feelings, and doings on earth are not proper subjects of
enquiry by a scientific method, and to avow that true
knowledge of them must come either by an extraordinary
metaphysical intuition or by revelation and faith. The
last key to the problem for him is indeed not “Search and
know,” but “God spake these words and said;” not know
ledge by the well-tried paths of observation and reason,
but “ He that believeth not shall be damned.” Of which
text 1 hope it is not irreverent to sav here that whosoever
believeth, whether it be on the authority of Holy Church
or of Holy Scripture, that which contradicts reason abso
lutely needs no further damnation; he has done himself
damage enough already as a rational being.
Meanwhile mankind has lived always and still lives in
conformity with quite an opposite theory of human will—
namely, that it is governed by natural motives. The
problem of freewill is a problem of the study, it never
has been a problem of practical life; a theoretical dogma
of faith, not a working belief, the doctrine has flourished
in an atmosphere of vague and cloudy phrases, and all
discussions about it have been in the air; it has shifted
its ground too and changed its form so often that it is
not possible to know where and how to seize and hold it.
Laws have been systematically made and punishments
inflicted upon those who broke them under a very deflnite
conviction that the will is not an uncaused power, but
does move in obedience to motive, and may be fashioned
to act in this way or that. The execution of a murderer
does not fail to influence his likeminded fellow, who cer
tainly has not the freedom of will to be unaffected thereby;
the aim and use of the punishment are to determine his
will, and it could not be of the least use if the will were
self-determined. We observe historically the past actions
of men in different situations and circumstances in order
to gain a knowledge of the springs of human action which
shall be of use to us in our present and future dealings.
The person who has had much experience, whether in
politics, business, or any other special department of
human labour, is esteemed a wiser guide than a new
comer, because of the certainty that the thoughts and
�The Physical Basis of Will.
11
acts of men are not in any respect chance-events, but
that what they have done before, that they will do again
when actuated by similar motives.
Prudence and forethought in the conduct of affairs, the
provisions made for education, social institutions and
usages, all the operations of daily life in the intercourse
of sane men are based upon the tacit implication that acts
of will are never motiveless, but conform to law and may
be counted upon. There is not a single department of
practical life which is not an implicit denial of a free self
determining power in each individual, and an implicit
recognition of a common nature in men affected by common
influences, and taking a common development in conse
quence. The only person who answers at all to the
metaphysical definition of a self-determining will is the
madman, since he exults in the most vivid consciousness
of freedom and power, sets reason at naught, and often
does things which no one can predict, because he acts
without motives, or at any rate from motives which no
one can penetrate. Did sane men possess freewill they,
like the madman, would be free from responsibility, since
their wills would act independently of their characters,
just as they listed, not otherwise than as men used to
declare, before they knew better, that “• the wind bloweth
where it listeth,” and no one would have much, if any,
motive left to try to improve his character.
We may take it then to be true that the explicit setting
forth, in formal knowledge, of what is implicit in the
course of human life would be a system of philosophy in
which a self-determining principle had no part nor place,
in which freewill would be a wrnrd void of meaning—
nonsense. But true knowledge has its foundation in
experience, and is really the conscious exposition of what
is implicit in human progress ; it is implicit in action
before it is explicit in thought. Men do not divine
truth and then work to it consciously; it is instinct in
them before it is understanding; and when in mature
time the unconscious breaks forth into consciousness, it
is the man of genius who is the organ through which the
expansion takes place; he is the interpreter of its blind
�12
The Physical Basis of Will.
impulses to the age, and gives them thenceforth clear
utterance and definite aim. The truth then, as testified
practically by the experience of the whole world from the
beginning until now, is that will is a power which does
not stand outside the range of natural causation, but one
which is moved habitually by motive in every man from
his cradle to his grave. The freewill problem might be
compared well to that great logical puzzle which so long
and so much perplexed the philosophers : I mean the
race between Achilles and the tortoise, where the tortoise
being allowed a certain start, and Achilles supposed to
run ten times as fast, it was proved that he never could
logically overtake it. For if we suppose the tortoise to
have a thousand yards’ start, it would have run a hundred
yards when Achilles had run the thousand yards; when
Achilles again had run the hundred yards, the tortoise
would be ten yards ahead; when Achilles had run the
ten yards, the tortoise would have gone one yard; when
Achilles had done the one yard, the tortoise would lead it
by the tenth of a yard; when Achilles had got over the
tenth of a yard, he would still be the hundredth of a yard
behind; and so on by successive subdivisions of the
diminishing space for ever. Clearly then Achilles never
could logically overtake the tortoise, whatever he might
do actually. So it has been with the freewill puzzle : the
philosophers, confusing themselves and others with a
juggling statement of the problem, have applied the word
free to the will instead of to the man, who has always
known himself to be free, not to will, but to do what he
willed when not hindered from doing it by internal or
external causes, just as they proved that Achilles would
not overtake the tortoise, by treating a finite space which
was infinitely divisible as if it were infinite.
*
Put the
race problem in a plain way, without ambiguous use of
words, and the result is plain enough : when Achilles had
run one thousand yards, the tortoise would have run one
* One is required to go on subdividing a unit indefinitely, and
to be surprised that the sum of the diminishing fractions never
can reach 1.
�The Physical Basis of Will.
13
hundred, but when Achilles had run two thousand yards,
where would the tortoise be ? Why, it would have run
two hundred yards altogether, and would of course be
eight hundred yards behind.
So much then for the facts in their relation to freewill.
Now what are the grounds of the metaphysician’s clear
conviction that he has a will and that it is free ? His
consciousness tells him so, he says, and all the arguments
in the world will not invalidate its direct and positive
testimony. But does it really tell him so ? One may
meet that statement truly by affirming that his conscious
ness does not tell him anything like that which he is in
the easy habit of supposing and declaring it to do.
Certainly it is not true that we know immediately by
consciousness that we have such a power as the meta
physician means by will. One-tenth only of that con
fident dogma is the direct deliverance of consciousness,
the other nine-tenths are pure and gratuitous hypothesis.
Consciousness tells us nothing whatever of an abstract
will-entity; it makes known a particular volition when
we have it and no more; the creation of an abstract will
which is supposed to execute the particular volition on
each occasion, and its further fashioning into a spiritual
entity, is an assumption as unwarranted as any that has
ever been made by the crudest materialism. It would be
no whit more absurd to make a spiritual entity of sensa
tion and to maintain that this abstract entity was
necessary to produce each sensation; or to postulate a
special emotional entity which operates in each emotion;
or to create a spirit of greenness and to detect it at work
in each green thing; or to discover the spirit of stoneness
in every stone by the roadside. What the metaphysician
has done has been to convert into an entity the abstract
word which embraces the multitude of particular volitions,
varying infinitely in degree and quality, just as at an
earlier period of thought, when the metaphysical spirit
had more life and sway than it has now, he explained the
sleep-producing properties of opium by a soporific essence
in it, and the difficulty of getting a vacuum by Nature’s
abhorrence of a vacuum; or as at a still earlier period of
�14
The Physical Basis of Will.
thought he put a Naiad in the fountain, a Dryad in the
tree, a Sun-god in the sun.
But, in the second place, while consciousness does not
tell him that he has a will such as he supposes, no more
has it the authority to tell him that his will is free.
Consciousness only illumines directly the mental state of
the moment; it reveals nothing of the long train of
antecedent states of which that state is the outcome—all
is dark beyond where its light directly falls; and it
cannot testify anything as an eyewitness concerning what
is happening there, any more than a person in the light
can testify of what is taking place in the dark. Let
there be a solitary gas-lamp lit in a large square on a
pitchdark night, it enables you to see immediately around
it, but it does not show what is going on in any other
part of the square; and if any one standing near it
chanced to get a severe blow on the head from a stone
coming out of the darkness, he would think it small
satisfaction to be told that the blow was by a selfdetermined stone. So it is with consciousness ; it makes
known the present volition, it does not make known its
causes; and that, as Spinoza pointed out long ago, is the
origin of the illusion of Freewill. How, indeed, could a
present state of consciousness reveal immediately another
state of consciousness; in other words, how could it be
itself and a formei' state of consciousness at the same
time ? But whosoever will be at the pains to carry his
self-inspection patiently back from the present state of
consciousness to that state which went before it, and
from that again to its antecedent state, and so backwards
along the train of activity which has issued in the latest
mental outcome, lighting up in succession as well as he
can each link in an intricate chain of many-junctioned
associations, may easily assure himself that he would never
have present states of feeling were it not for past states of
feeling. Let the will be as free as any one chooses to sup
pose, it is certainly as impotent to will without previous
acts of will, as a child is to walk before it has learned to
step: the present volition contains the abstracts, so to
speak, of a multitude of former volitions: by them it is in
�The Physical Basis of Will.
15
formed. The most eager metaphysician, when he is not
thinking of his abstract dogma of freewill, or of an equally
abstract reason whose supreme dominion over will is sup
posed to constitute its singular freedom, will not deny
*
that an individual’s thinking, feeling, or acting as he does at
any moment of his life is the outcome of his nature and
training, the expression of his character; that his present
being is the organic development of his past being ; that
he is fast linked in a chain of causation which does not
suffer him ever to get out of himself. It is a chain, too,
which, if he reflects, he must perceive to reach a long
way farther back in an ancestral past than he can
estimate. We see plainly how a person inherits a father’s,
grandfather’s, or more remote ancestor’s tricks of speech,
of walk, of handwriting, and the like, without imitation
on his part, since the father or grandfather may have
died before he was born; and in the same way he inherits
moods of feeling, modes of thought, impulses of will, and
exhibits them in thoughts, feelings and acts which seem
essentially spontaneous, most his own. Has he done
well in some great and urgent emergency of life in which
he knew not what he did at the instant, he may justly
give thanks to the dead father or grandfather who en
dowed him with the actuating impulse or the happy
aptitude which served him so well on the critical occasion.
We little think, for the most part, how much we owe
to those who have gone before us. There is not a word
which I have used, or shall use, in this lecture which does
not attest by its origin and growth countless generations
of human culture extending from our far distant Aryan
forefathers of the Indian plains down to us ; in like
manner there is not a thought or feeling or volition
which any one in this room can have which he could have,
had not countless generations of human beings thought
and felt and willed before him, and had not he himself
been thinking, feeling, and willing ever since he left his
cradle. It is in vain we attempt by self-inspection to
make plain all the links of causation of any feeling or
* See note at the end of the lecture.
�16
The Physical Basis of Will.
volition; the impossibility is to seize and weigh each
minute and remote operative element—to bring all the
contributory factors into the light of consciousness. So
much is unconscious agency—temperament, character,
instinct, habit, potential thought and feeling, what you
will—something which lies deeper than direct self-obser
vation or even the utmost labours of self-analysis can
reach. Hence spring the illusions into which men often
times fall with regard to their motives on particular
occasions, the remarkable self-deceptions of which they
are capable. They think, perhaps, that they have acted
in their freedom from certain high motives of which
they were conscious when these were not the real
motives which actuated them.
*
From the unlit depths
of his being, the deep and silent stream of the indi
vidual’s nature, rise the forces which break on the sur
face in the currents and eddies of consciousness. One
may get a truer explanation • sometimes of a person’s
conduct on a particular occasion by a knowledge of the
characters of his near relations than by his own expla
nation of his motives or one’s own speculations about
them ; for in their traits we may see displayed in full
detail what is potential mainly and of occasional out
comein him. When acts appear to be quite incommen
surate with motives, or when the same motive appears to
produce different acts, the just conclusion is not that an
arbitrary freewill has capriciously meddled and upset
calculation, but that the motives which we discover are
only a part of the complex causation, and that the most
important part thereof lies in the dark. Self-conscious
ness is a very incompetent witness in that matter: you
might as well try to illuminate the interior of St. Paul’s
with a rushlight. A motiveless will may be compared,
* A desire or motive does not generally go the direct way to
its issue in action any more than a person necessarily goes the
direct way from London to Edinburgh. He may go two or three
ways, or he might go all round by Exeter, and still get there.
So with desire, which goes a roundabout and very intricate way
sometimes, carrying with it, so to speak, something from each
place at which it has stopped on its journey.
�The Physical Basis of Will.
17
perhaps, to a foundling baby; respecting which wise men
conclude, not that it had no parents and came by chance,
but that they do not know who its parents are.
The metaphysicians have yet another argument of
which they make much. They lay great stress upon
their assertion that there is nothing in the operations of
the body which is in the least like the energy we are
conscious of as will, and that we cannot put a finger on
anything in all the functions of the nervous system which
can conceivably serve as a physical basis of will. Let us
enquire then if that be so. The simplest nervous opera
tion, that which is the elemental type of which the more
complex functions are built up, as a great house is built
up of simple bricks, is what we call a reflex act: an
impression is made upon some part of the body, the
molecular change produced thereby is conducted along a
sensory nerve to a nerve-centre and arouses the energy
thereof, and that energy is thereupon transmitted or
reflected along a connected motor nerve and accomplishes
a particular movement, which may be purposive or not.
Tor example, a strong light falls upon the retina and the
pupil instantly contracts in order to exclude the excess of
light; a blow is threatened to the eye and the eyelids
wink involuntary to protect it : a lump of food gets to
the back of the throat and as soon as it is felt there the
muscles contract and push it on. These are operations
of the body in which, although they accomplish a purpose,
the will has no part whatever; they take place in spile of
the will, as everybody knows, and one of them even
when a person is completely unconscious.
A more
striking instance of an instructive reflex act is afforded
by a well-known experiment on the frog : if its right
thigh is irritated by a drop of acid it rubs it off with the
foot of that side, but if it is prevented from using that
foot for the purpose it makes use of the opposite leg.
Intelligent purpose and deliberate will, one would natur
ally say; but when the frog’s head is cut off and the
experiment made then the result is the same; it tries
first to use its right foot, and that being impossible bends
the other leg across and wipes off the acid with it. As
�18
The Physical Basis of Will.
its head has been cut off it is certain that it has not
conscious intelligence and will in any definite and proper
signification of those terms ; it does not know what it is
doing although it acts with admirable purpose, any more
than the pupil does when it contracts in a strong light or
than the steam engine does when it performs its useful
*
work.
The concluson which we must come to and
emphasize is that the nervous system has the power,
instinct in its constitution or acquired by training, to
execute mechanically acts which have the semblance
of being designed and voluntary, without there being
the least consciousness or will in them. Have we not
here then a pretty fair physical foundation of a rudi
mentary will ?
Let us now go a step further. The will, as we know,
has not the power to execute only, but it has the power
to prevent execution, to hold impulses in check; indeed,
its higher energies are most tasked, and its highest
qualities shown, in the exercise of this controlling function.
Our appetites and passions urge us to immediate gratifica
tions ; it is the noble function of will to curb these lowei
*
* A critic of my book on the “ Physiology of Mind,” in the
“Journal of Mental Science.” of January last, defines the theory
of. freewill thus: “ that in every determination to act which con
stitutes a volition the determinant is not a mere datum of nerves,
or seuse, or passion, but?s an idea actively taken up, formulated
as an adecpiate end, and stamped as an element of happiness by
that noubodily entity which we call self. . . . This is the
simple key to the whole problem of Responsibility.” The italics
are his. We may take notice here how admirably the acts of
the. decapitated frog fit this definiton. It evidently takes up
actively the idea of getting rid of the pain, formulates it as an
adequate end, and stamps it as an element of happiness by that
nonbodily entity (clearly very much, if not entirely, non-bodily
seeing that it is headless) which we call self! Thus it gives
us the key to the whole problem of Responsibility. It were
well, perhaps, if all those who write about mind would follow
Spinoza’s advice—first study sufficiently the functions of the
body, so as to “ learn by experience what the body can do and
what it cannot do by the simple laws of its corporeal nature and
without receiving any determination from the mind.” They
might then, perhaps, as Schopenhauer thought, “ leave many
German scribblers unread.”
�The Physical Basis of Will.
19.
impulses of our nature. Is there anything, then, in the
operations of the nervous system which can possibly be
the basis of this exalted governing function? Let us
take preliminary note here that there are reflex actions
going on in the body which are essential to life, but over
which this mighty despot of the mind, the will, has no
authority whatever—the movements of the heart and of
the intestines, for example; they go on regularly night
and day; if they did not we should die; bat we cannot
slacken or quicken or stop them by any exertion of will
which we can make. The movements of breathing, which
are also reflex, we can control partially; we can breathe
quickly or slowly as we please, or even stop breathing for
a time, but not for long, since no one can kill himself
by simply holding his breath. The physiologist, however,
can easily quicken or retard the beatings of an animal’s
heart at will, by stimulating directly the proper nerves.
By irritating a nerve which goes to it—the so-called vagus
nerve—he can retard them, and by irritating another
nerve connected with it—the so-called sympathetic—he
can quicken them. He can do with its pulsations as the
coachman can with his horses, pull them in to go slowly
or send them on quickly. But more—and this is the
point I wish to come to—he can affect them not only in
the direct way which I have mentioned, but also indirectly
by a sharp impression on some part of the body. Bor
example, if he suspends a frog by its legs and then taps
sharply on its belly, he instantly stops its heart for a
time. What happens is that the stimulus of the tap is
carried by a nerve to a nerve-centre in the brain near
that centre from which a controlling nerve of the heart
proceeds, and so acts upon it as in the result to prevent
or inhibit the action of the heart; in other words, what
we have to apprehend and perpend in the experiment is
that the physiological sympathy of nerve-centres in the
organization of the nervous system is such that one
centre, when stimulated to function, has the power to
inhibit physically the function of another centre, just as
the will inhibits the movements of breathing.
This
temporary arrest of the heart’s beats by an intercurrent
�20
The Physical Basis of Will.
stimulus somewhere into its reflex arc is after all not
very unlike to temporary arrest of respiration by an in
tercurrent volition into its reflex arc.
Did time permit, I might bring forward many more,
and more striking, instances of this kind of inhibitory
action, selecting them from the operations of the human
body both in health and in disease; but it must suffice
for the present to set down and emphasize the broad con
clusion which they warrant, namely, that one nervous
centre, when stimulated into activity, may so act upon
another centre as either to help, or to hinder, or to suspend
its function by pure physiological mechanism. Have we
not here, then, a physical basis of the inhibitory power of
will ? Place the fact by the side of the fact on which I
laid emphatic stress just now—namely, that the nervous
system has the power of executing purposive acts without
any intervention of consciousness or will; and it is plain
we have in the two physical functions something which
runs closely parallel with the rudiments of volition and
may well be their material equivalents—that is to say,
power to command execution of a purpose and power to
stop execution.
Metaphysicians * get their theories of will by considering
its highest displays in a much cultivated self-conscious
ness, where the difficulties of satisfactory analysis are
insuperable; but a complete and sincere study of it must
deal with its small beginnings as well as with its finest
displays—ought, in fact, to commence with them; for to
ignore the facts of its genesis and development is to make
an artificial philosophy which may serve well for intel
lectual gymnastics in scholastic exercises, but has no
practical bearing on the concerns of real life. Let us
then examine the simplest instances of primitive volition
in the animal and in the infant. When a dog, in obedi
ence to its natural instinct, seizes a piece of meat which
* They appear to be desirous of abandoning their old name of
metaphysicians in favour of the new name of idealists. But they
have no right to that term, which is properly applicable only to
one who upholds the Berkleian theory.
�The Physical Basis of Will.
21
lies near it and is punished for the theft, the memory of
what it was made to suffer intervenes on another occasion
between the impression on sight and the ensuing impulse,
and checks or inhibits it; in like manner when an infant
grasps something bright which attracts its gaze and is
burnt, its memory of the pain which it suffered checks
or inhibits a similar hasty movement on another occasion.
Here then we have the simplest instance of will; the
animal or infant voluntarily refrains from doing what its
first impulse is to do—of two courses chooses the best.
But what is the probable physical side of the process ?
In the first case, where the dog seized the meat, an im
pression upon the sense of sight, the conduction of the
molecular change to the nerve-centre, and the production
of a special sensation, as the ingoing process; after which,
as the outgoing process, the transmission of the energy
along a motor nerve to muscle and a consequent adaptive
movement—a sensorimotor process; in the second event,
when a punishment was inflicted, the association of this
sensorimotor process with the painful stimulation of
another nerve-centre : and in the third case, when the
dog seeing the meat refrained from touching it, instead
of the instant reflexion of the sensation into movement,
there was the stimulation by it of the associated centre in
which the memory of the pain was registered, the conse
quence of which was the inhibition of the movement.
One of two catenated physiological centres was in fact
excited to inhibit the other. If we multiply in an endless
complexity this simple scheme of nerves and nerve-centres
we get the constitution of the brain, indeed of the whole
nervous system, which contains an innumerable multitude
of interconnected nerve-centres ready to be awakened into
action by suitable stimulation to increase, to combine, to
modify, to restrain one another’s functions. As counter
part on the mental side to this exceeding complexity of
physical structure, we have very complex deliberation
going before the formation of will, which comes out at
last from the intricate interactions of so many hopes,
fears, inclinations, promptings, desires, reflections, and
the like, of so many constituent elements of character,
�22
The Physical Basis of Will.
that we are unable to analyze them and so to specify the
exact factors in its complex causation : it is the resultant
of a very intricate composition of forces. To me it seems
then a fair conclusion that in the inhibitory action of one
nerve-centre upon another, as disclosed by physiological
observation, and in the simplest instance of volition, as
known by consciousness, we have two processes which go
along together parallel, and not unfair therefore to main
tain that we have as good authority to believe in a physical
basis of will as in a physical basis of any mental state
whatever.
The plain truth is, when we look the facts fairly in the
face, that we never meet with will except in connection
with a certain organization of matter, varying with its
variations, and exhibiting every proof of being dependent
upon it. It is notably infantile in the child, imbecile in
the idiot, grows in power, range, and quality as the
mental powers grow by education, is mature in the adult,
falls sick with the body’s sicknesses, and becomes decrepit
in the decrepitude of age. However free and independent
in theory, it never shows its power in fact except from a
good physical basis. The aim, the use, and the result of
a sound moral training are to fashion a strong will; and
assuredly all training acts through the intimate develop
ment of the nervous system which it produces. Good
moral habits, like other habits, are formed by the structure
growing to the modes of its exercise. When the physical
basis is congenitally defective, as in the idiot, no excellence
of training will succeed in developing a normal will, any
more than much thought will add one cubit to the stature
of a dwarf. And when we make a survey of the various
forms of mental derangement, which we know to be the
deranged functions of disordered brain, we observe that
a first symptom of mischief is always a loss of power of
will over the thoughts and feelings : that is the sad sign
which portends the coming calamity. The person who is
about to fall into acute mania has ideas and feelings surge
up in his mind in the most irregular and tumultuous
fashion, and is impelled by them to strange and disorderly
acts. It is painfully interesting to watch the .struggle
�The Physical Basis of Will.
23
which goes on sometimes at the beginning of the attack
before the failing will undergoes complete dissolution :
the patient will succeed by a strong effort in controlling
himself for a few moments when he knows that some one
is looking at him, or when he is spoken to, and in acting
and answering calmly and coherently, but the enfeebled
will cannot hold on to the reins, and he relapses soon into
incoherent thought, speech and conduct, becoming, as the
disease makes progress, incapable of even an instant’s
real self-control. The person who is falling melancholic
is tormented with painful thoughts and feelings, blasphe
mous or otherwise afflicting, which come into his mind
against his most earnest wish, cause him unspeakable
distress, and cannot be repressed or expelled by all the
efforts of his agitated will; so hateful are they to him, so
independent do they seem of his true self, that he ends
perhaps by thinking them the direct inspiration of Satan
and himself given over to eternal damnation. The mono
maniac broods upon some idea of greatness or of suspicion,
rooted in its congenial feeling of exaltation or of distrust,
until the weakened will looses all hold of it and it grows
to the height of an insane delusion; then he imagines
himself to be emperor, prophet, or some other great per
sonage, or believes all the world to be in a conspiracy
against him. The sufferer who is afflicted with a frequently
upstarting impulse to do harm to himself or to others,
conscious all the while of the horrible nature of the im
pulse, which he fights against with frenzied energy, goes
through agonies of distress in the struggles to prevent his
true will being mastered by it. Everywhere we observe
impaired will to go along with the beginnings of physical
derangement. And if we look to the last term of the
mental degeneration, as we have it in the demented
person in whom all traces of mind are well-nigh extin
guished, who must be fed, clothed, cared for in every way,
whose existence is little more than vegetative, we find an
almost complete abolition of rational will accompanying
extreme disorganization of special structure.
The lessons of mental pathology admit of no misread
ing ; they make known everywhere an entire dependence
�24
The Physical Basis of Will.
of will on physical organization. Bnt there is an im
portant aspect of the matter which I ought not to pass
by altogether, although my allusion to it now must
necessarily be the briefest.
It is this converse and
weighty truth—that actual derangement of the structure
of an organ can be brought about by the continuance of
excessive or disordered function ; that the habitual indul
gence of evil passions, ill-regulated thoughts, and de
praved will does lead to corresponding physical changes
in the brain ; and that every person has thus in the patient
fashioning and timely exercise of will no mean power
over himself to prevent insanity. For the praises of such
a well-fashioned will, I cannot do better than borrow the
lines of Tennyson :—
Oh ! well for him whose will is strong !
He suffers, but he will not suffer long;
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong:
For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock,
Nor all calamities hugest waves confound,
Who seems a promontory of rock
That, compassed round with turbulent sound,
In middle ocean meets the surging shock,
Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.
But assuredly we shall not have a will of that kind
formed by treating it as a free, independent, arbitrary entity
which has no affinities, is not moved by motive, and owns no
law but self-caprice; it can be formed only by painful
degrees, in conformity with stern laws of moral develop
ment, by one who is solicitous uniformly to use motives
and make good use of them, patiently watchful to with
stand and check the earliest invasion of his mind by low
motives, earnest to cultivate good feelings and noble aspi
rations, steadfast always to strengthen the will by habitual
practice in right doing—who aims, indeed, to make it, as
it should be, the highest and fullest expression of a wellformed character.
The acknowledgment that human
will is included within the law of causation—the appre
hension of the universal reign of law in mind and in
matter—so far from tending to dishearten men and to
�The Physical Basis of Will,
25
paralyze their highest efforts by driving them into a dreary
fatalism, seems to me to be essential in ordei’ to infix and
develop in their minds a vital sense of responsibility to
search out intelligently and to pursue deliberately the right
path of human progress; a responsibility, be it said, which
the metaphysical dogma of free-will not merely weakens
but logically destroys. Men have not been paralyzed in
intelligence or effort, but have gained in both immeasur
ably, by perceiving and comprehending the law of gravita
tion ; and in like manner by apprehending the reign of law
in mind they will lose only the freedom to make ignorant
blunders and to waste their forces unintelligently : they
will obey the law whose service is their best freedom.
Knowing that their efforts rest securely upon eternal law,
they will know that their labours cannot be in vain: that
they have the power of the universe at their backs, “ the
everlasting arms ” beneath them.
It is unfortunate that people, scared by a horror of
materialism, the “uncreating word” before which freedom
of will and responsibility die, as a writer has described
it lately, cannot see that the application of a scientific
method of enquiry to human thoughts, feelings, and
doings in no way touches injuriously the supreme autho
rity of moral law and the power and wish to obey it.
Neither moral feeling nor responsibility would be taken
out of life were a purely materialistic evolution proved
doctrine ; on the contrary, the course of that evolution in
the past would remain the best guarantee and yield the
strongest assurance of a further moral and intellectual
progress in the future. If it be true that men have risen
by a gradual evolution from a pre-moral state of barbarism
to their present height of intelligence and moral feeling,
and if it be, as it certainly is, the essential principle of
evolution to pass upwards from more simple and general
to more complex and special organisation, it is surely a
rational inference and a sound expectation that intelli
gence and moral feeling will reach a still higher develop
ment in the future. Science is only organised knowledge
and does not pretend to do more than find out and set
forth how things are as they are, and by help of what it
�26
The Physical Basis of Will.
thus learns to forecast what they will be in the future; it
perceives clearly how inexorably its range is limited by
the limitations of our few and feeble senses, and how
impossible it is that it should ever discover anything about
the primal origin of things—about the why and whence, of
the mysterious universe of its observations. Evolution,
the modern name of that conception which the old Greek
philosophers, when they first formed it, called nature or
the becoming of things (</>v<ns), is only a more exact and
true exposition of how things have become, not in the
least an explanation of the mystery of their why. By
the help of knowledge slowly widening we can look back
in retrospective imagination to the time and manner in
which our planet and the other planets of our solar
system took form by nebular condensation and started
on their several orbits; we can trace with patient
thought the successive changes which have taken place on
the surface of the earth and have culminated in man and
his achievements ; we may foresee, perhaps, a time when
a few miserable human beings, living degraded lives in
snow huts near the equator, shall represent all that is
left of the vanished myriads of the human race, or a still
later period when the earth, fallen to the condition in
which the moon now is, rolls on its solitary way through
space, a frozen and barren globe, the tomb of a Dead
Humanity ;—we may, if we look far enough before and
after, do all that, but we can never tell what minute frac
tion our solar system may be—what a vortex-molecule,
so to speak—of countless other systems in the inconceiv
able immensities of space which lie beyond our utmost
ken, and what essential relations it may have to them;
we cannot tell why matter on earth has formed an ascend
ing series of more and more complex compounds, why
having reached a certain complexity of composition it
became living, why organic evolution have gone on to
higher and ever higher achievements until it reached the
complexity of human organization and gave birth to con
sciousness ; and we cannot tell in the least what will
happen in the long long time to come, when all the
operations of our solar system are ended, past as com
�The Physical Basis of Will.
27
pletely as the light of the first human eyes that gazed on
them in wonder. Science is confined to a finite space
between two infinities—the eternal past and eternity to
come; it measures only a single pulsation, so to speak,
in the working of a power whose source and end are
past finding out, which was and is, and is to come, from
everlasting to everlasting; beyond that range, narrow it
is true, but more than wide enough to give full scope to
all human affections and to occupy usefully all human
energies, there is absolute nescience—agnosticism if you
will. Organised as we are we can no more know about
it than the oyster in its narrow home and with its very
limited sentiency can know of the events of the human
world—of the noise and turmoil, say, of an English electior,
or of the interesting chronicles of the “ Court Circular.”
What science repudiates and condemns, I believe, is the
presumptuous pretence on the part of theology to know
and tell all about the inscrutable, to put forward as
truths, not ever to be questioned, childish explanations
which are an insult to the understanding and would be
its suicide if really accepted, to demand reverent assent
to doctrines which sometimes outrage moral feeling, and
to declare solemnly that whosoever believeth not the
fables which it proclaims “ shall without doubt perish
everlastingly.”
What it may furthermore well repudiate and condemn
is the evident want of sincerity of heart and veracity of
thought shown by those who proffer and accept these
explanations, by reason of which they do not honestly
sound their beliefs and pursue them rigidly to their
logical issues, but suffer themselves to use words habitu
ally in a non-natural sense, and to hold side by side
inconsistent and even directly contradictory doctrines,
without being troubled by their manifest inconsistencies.
The scientific spirit claims entire veracity of thought,
whatever the result, knows that truth does not depend
upon our sympathies and antipathies, is resolute to follow
it to the end even at the sacrifice of the most cherished
beliefs. It cannot but think it to be as demoralizing in
tendency as it is insincere in fact, to profess to hold a
�•28
The Physical Basis of Will.
faith in entire reverence after having given up most of
what is characteristic of it, and as certain in the end to lead
to grossly inconsistent conduct. Such disingenuous deal
ing with momentous matters marks indeed an unveracity
of thought which would be lamentable hypocrisy were it
not more often intellectual timidity and unconscious
self-deception. But whether the insincerity be conscious
or unconscious, it is incompatible with that rigid, hearty,
and entire devotion to truth in thought, feeling, and ex
pression which is the aim and at the same time the
strength of a good understanding.
Note to Page 15.—Kant's doctrine is that there is a determi
nation of the will by pure reason, that so reason gets practical
reality, and that in this absolute obedience the will has absolute
assurance of its freedom. The moral law is a law spontaneously
imposed on the will by pure reason: it stands high above all the
motives, sensuous and their like, which determine the empirical
will; it pays no respect to them, but with an inward, irresistible
necessity, orders us, in independence of them, to follow it abso
lutely and unconditionally—’tis a categorical imperative, universal,
and binding on every rational will. A happy thing, certainly, that
a will determined to unconditional obedience by so absolute an
authority retains nevertheless the absolute assurance of its free
dom. But then comes the not unimportant question—What is
it that practical reason categorically commands ? How are we
to know what the moral law dictates and forbids ? The easiest
thing in the world, thinks Kant: let only those maxims of con
duct derived from experience be adopted as motives which are
susceptible of being made of universal validity—which are fit to
be regarded as universal laws of reason to govern the actions of
all mankind. I do right when I do what all persons would
think right in similar circumstances. Very good, without doubt,
although very like the common-place maxim of every ethical
system ; but my difficulty has been to know in a particular case
what all intelligent beings would think right. How am I to get
at the universal standard or precept and apply it to my particu
lar occasion, so as to know absolutely what I ought then to do?
Kant helps me by means of two remarkable illustrations. Suicide
is one. Is suicide, under the strongest temptation conceivable,
ever right ? I must ask myself then, “ Is the principle of the
admission that suicide is ever right fit to become a universal
law ?” No, says Kant, it is not fit, since the universal practice
�fhe Physical Basis of Will.
29
of suicide would reduce the world to chaos. Very true, but it is
sadly disappointing to perceive that the sublime and supreme
reason has, in order to become practical reality, found it neces
sary to come down from its supersensuous heights and to be no
better than gross Utilitarianism. All that it can tell me, panting
for its supreme utterance, is that suicide is inexpedient as a
universal principle of conduct—in fact, it makes use of the
common motives of an experience which is nowise supersen
suous, and instead of helping me to an absolute precept or
standard to measure them by, actually comes to them for its
authority. Kant’s philosophy, of which the metaphysical mind
is getting re-enamoured in some quarters at the present day, has
its head high in the clouds and dreams there sublimely; but
it finds it necessary to have its feet on the ground when the time
comes for it to march.
The second instance is no more helpful. May a person in the
greatest need of a loan, which he knows he will not get unless
he makes a solemn promise to repay what he is perfectly certain
he never will be able to repay, make the promise? No, says
Kant, for if it were a universal law, all faith in promises would
be destroyed, and nobody would lend money. In other words,
in the long run it would be very bad for society that faith in
promises should be destroyed. An excellent truth, which no
body can deny, but it evidently smacks much of the earth
earthy; indeed, it would seem that those who discover the
basis of morality in the social sanction may claim Kant, when
he is not in the clouds, as an out-and-out supporter. It is dif
ferent when he is busy spinning empty supersensuous theories
which have no relation to actual life, and amusing his disciples
with the magnificent dissolving views of his metaphysical magic
lantern. First he presents a splendid view of supreme reason
to the spectator who, as he admires it, sees the picture dissolve
gradually and in its place appear the grand features of Moral
Law, which shared with the Starry Heaven Kant’s ever new
and rising admiration and reverence; as the gaze is fixed in ad
miration upon this view it melts into indistinctness, and. as it
does so, there comes by degrees into clear definition the mighty
figure of freewill. Thereupon, informing his enthusiastic audience
that there are not really three pictures, as they might suppose,
but one picture, the three being one and the one being three,
Reason being Will and Will Reason, and that they cannot fail
to perceive, when they reflect properly upon what they have
seen, that the belief in God and immortality have now been
made safe for ever, he retires amidst unbounded applause.
Meanwhile, the critic who has not been blinded by the magnificent
metaphysical display, and who feels that he does not live, move,
and have his being in an abstract land beyond physics, asks him
self with regard to the philosophy—Will it march ?—and is not
�30
The Physical Basis of Will.
much surprised to find that when it begins to march it can only
do so on well-worn Utilitarian tracks.
All theories of freewill seem to come to this—that the will
which is swayed by low motives is not free, that the will which
is swayed by the higher motives is more free, and that the will
which is swayed by the highest motives is most free; conse
quently, when a person is blamed for having done ill, he is not
blamed for not having acted without motives, but for not having
been actuated by the highest motives. Create an artificial world
of names apart from the real world of facts—a world which shall
simply be made up of negations of all qualities of which we have
actual experience—and let the highest motives be known in it
as the Will of God or abstract Supreme Reason, you will get
your service which you may please yourself to call perfect
freedom. And there does not appear to be any reason why you
may not create and take refuge in another still more ideal world
beyond that, if persons of a positive spirit should show any dis
position to invade ideal word No. 1 with inconvenient enquiries.
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The physical basis of will : a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society on Sunday afternoon, February 15th, 1880
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Collation: 30, [2] p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Presented in Memory of Dr. Moncure D. Conway by his children, July Nineteen hundred & eight. Includes bibliographical references. List of the Society's Sunday Lectures on unnumbered pages at the end.
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Free Will
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Conway Tracts
Free Will and Determinism
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THE
PHYSICAL BASIS OF W
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DELIVERED BEFORE THE
SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY,
ON
SUNDAY AFTERNOON, FEBRUARY 15th, 1880,
BY
HENRY MAUDSLEY, M.D.
HontJan:
PUBLISHED BY THE SUNDAY LECTURE SOCIETY.
1880.
PRICE THREEPENCE.
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�THE
PHYSICAL BASIS OF WILL.
N a lecture which I gave here last year, and published
afterwards in the Fortnightly Review, I pointed out
*
that moral feeling is just as closely dependent upon
organization as is the meanest function of mind, and
asserted broadly “ that there was not an argument to
prove the so-called materialism of one part of mind which
did not apply with equal force to the whole mind.” For
this statement I was taken to task in an article in the
Spectator, the critic in that journal summoning up to
confront and confound me the alleged self-determining
power of human will—the freedom of the wiH. I pro
pose, then, to make this lecture supplementary to the
former one in some respects, by considering now whether
we are entitled to assume, as I hold, a Physical Basis of
WiH, or whether, as my critic thinks, we have in the Will
a self-sustained spiritual entity, which owns no cause,
obeys not law, and has no sort of affinity with matter.
’Tis not a discussion of much lively or fruitful promise,
but inasmuch as those who engage in the Freewill con
troversy, while repeating the old and trite arguments, for
the most part leave out of sight the physical aspect of the
subject, it may be instructive to bring that more into
notice, and to show that those who uphold a material
basis of will have some plain facts to go upon.
They who maintain that the wiH is not determined
I
* “ Materialism and its Lessons,’
�6
The Physical Basis of Will.
by motives, but is self-determined, free, do not for the
most part go so far as to imply that motives are not at
work in the mind, and that the will takes no account of
them; they affirm that there is not the uniform, in
separable connection between motive and will which
there is between cause and effect in physical nature. The
will is not the unconditionally necessary consequent of
its antecedent motives. It, or some other mysterious
entity in the individual which, having virtually abstracted
from the actual individual, they call his non-bodily self, has,
they allege, an independent, perfectly spontaneous, arbi
trary power to make this or that motive predominate as
it pleases ; to chose this or that one among motives and
make it the motive; in doing which this self-determining
principle is presumed by some, I believe, to act without
motive, of its own pure motion, without cause or reason;
by others to act from motives so high and fine, that they
constrain it instantly, without weighing at all upon its
*
freedom.
Clearly then we have here a very singular
power in nature, which we might call supernatural were
* “The noumenon, ding-an-sich, real self,” “is unknowable,
inscrutable,” “ exists outside Time, Space, and Causality, is ab
solutely free,” “ in itself, per se, is unchangeable; ” “ and, as it is
my only real being, my primitive and inborn self, it must be
present as a factor in every change and every action of which
my phenomenal Self, my empirical character, is capable.” That
is to say, itself outside Time, Space, and Causality, it is the
moving principle of every change in Time, Space, and Causality
which takes place through me. Of a truth a wonderful power
which can thus be actually and not be theoretically at the same
time in and outside Time, Space, and Causality! But more.
Why does a truthful man who has told a falsehood feel a remorse ?
Because “his conscience tells him that he is responsible, not indeed
for this particular act- since this he could not help—but for not
being a better man.” “ Blame not the action, then, but the man
for being capable of such an action. Whip him, not for telling
this particular lie, but for being a liar at heart, in his inmost
nature. For this inmost nature, his real Self, his ding-an-sich,
which, as a noumenon, is in some inscrutable manner emanci
pated from the laws of Time and Causality, from the operation
of motives, is absolutely free.” But surely it will be, on the
one hand, a singularly hard matter to lay hold of and whip the
inmost nature, the real self, the noumenon, when “ it exists out-
�, 'The Physical Basis of Will.
'.7
it not that it is allowed to be a part of nature acting in
and upon it, although coming from a mysterious source
outside it; but being thus an important agent in nature,
without being of the same kind or having anything in
common with anything else there—any sympathy, affinity,
or relationship whatever with the things which it works
in and upon—-we may fairly call it unnatural.
If there be a power of this kind in the Universe, the
reflection which occurs instantly is that causation is not
universal, as people are in the habit of assuming, but that
there is a large region of human events which is exempt
from the otherwise uniform law of cause and effect, the
region, that is to say, of man’s higher mental operations.
A great deal of the force which works in them and by
which they work on the external world obeys not the
law of conservation of energy. Now this is a rather
startling reflection, seeing that the great natural argu
ment for the existence of God is that everything must
have a cause, and that for cause of all things, therefore,
there must be a cause of causes, a great First Cause. At
the outset, then, we come to a perplexing dilemma—to
the obligation of concluding either that the will, like
other things, must have a cause, or that a great- first cause
is not a necessity of human thought.
side of Time, Space, and Causality,” and, on the other hand,
rather unfair to whip vicariously the empirical character which
cannot help itself, when the real culprit escapes. How whip it,
too, in any case, seeing that it is a thing-in-itself, incorporeal,
spiritual, “as the air invulnerable”? The foregoing extracts are
taken from an account of Kant’s Philosophy, by Professor Bowen,
of Harvard College, U.S., in his work on Modern Philosophy.
At the end of his exposition and comments, he says: “And thus
the deep and dark problem of fixed fate and freewill is solved,
the two contradictories being reconciled with each other.” No
doubt they are reconciled in the minds of those who, like Pro
*
fessor Bowen, can believe at the same instant two contradictories.
Sir W. Hamilton laid it down that one of two inconceivable con
tradictories must be true, and it passed for a long time for high
philosophy that a man should be able so to conceive inconceivables as to know them to be contradictory. Here we have
a step farther in philosophy, since we have two conceivable con.tradictories which are both true.
�8
The Physical Basis of Will.
But this is only a first difficulty. We are taught by
those who uphold the freedom of the will that although it
is not governed by motives, but is a self-determining
principle in us, it is wrought upon continually and most
powerfully by supernatural agency. A Divine grace is
ever near to help it in time of need, strengthening it to
do well, weakening it to do ill. It is God’s good purpose
to “ master our will,” and to make us “ surrender and
resign it to his just, wise, and gracious will; ” and to
make good his right, says that eloquent divine, Dr. I.
Barrow, “ God bendeth all his forces and applieth all his
means both of sweetness and severity, persuading us by
arguments, soliciting us by entreaties, alluring us by fair
promises, scaring us by fierce menaces, indulging ample
benefits to us, inflicting sore corrections on us, working
in and upon us by secret influences of grace, by visible
dispensations of providence.” A stupendous array of
motives this, which it is a wonder any one ever withstands,
especially when it is borne in mind that they are worked
by the unlimited power of Omnipotence, which has fore
known and fore-ordained the result from all eternity I
However, we are not to suppose that these mighty agencies
are anywise incompatible with the freedom of will; indeed,
when it has surrendered itself to entire obedience it is
enjoying the most perfect freedom; when it is in the
grasp of Omnipotence it is most free. Hard sayings no
doubt for reason, but not at all hard to faith seemingly,
since many persons persuade themselves that they have
intelligent apprehension of them.
The will is assailed very powerfully in a second super
natural way—namely, by the Devil, if the Devil, that is
to say, be not defunct. For it seems to be an open
question now whether he has not undergone by evolution
such a transformation of kind as to have lost all his per
sonality and much of his power. At the time when he
paid Luther a memorable visit he was a distinct being
enough, with great horns and a tail and cloven hoofs;
later on, when Milton described him, he had lost these
appendages, and become the great Archfiend, above his
fellows “ in shape and gesture proudly eminent,” who
�9
The Physical Basis of Will.
amid the torments of a new-found Hell still flung defiance
at the Omnipotent, with unconquered will declaring it
better to “ reign in Hell than serve in Heaven; ” still
later he underwent philosophic transformation into the
polished, cultivated, intellectually subtile, but mocking,
doubting, cynical, Mephistopheles of Faust. What form
and substance has he now, if form and substance he has
any ? Those whose professional work it is to do battle
with him, and to frustrate his ever active wiles and malice,
and who ought therefore to know him best, do not tell us
clearly what their exact ideas on the subject are, if they
have clear and exact ideas; they apparently like to believe
in him as much in a vague and cloudy way as they dislike
to believe in him in any precise and definite way, or at
any rate dislike to be asked to define precisely their belief;
but although they may not be very sure of his present
form and dwelling-place, they have no doubt in a general
way of the evil desires and passions with which he inspires
poor human hearts, and of his open and insidious assaults
on the higher aspirations of human will, which he, un
tiring enemy, besets, besieges, beleaguers, bombards con
tinually. Again then we have a large region of human
events—a region the limits of which it is impossible to
define or to get defined—which is outside the natural
law of causation, and cannot ever be made matter of
scientific study. For as it is plain that we have no means
by which we can measure and register the quantity and
kind of energy which the Devil thus exerts continually
upon the will—no Satanometer or Diabolometer so to
speak—human events, so far as they are effects of his
counsels and instigations, must lie outside the range of
positive knowledge. But once more we are not to suppose
that these supernatural workings upon the will abridge in
the least degree its perfect freedom.
These are difficulties one might suppose great enough
to make even the theologico-metaphysical theorist pause,
but they have no effect to shake his faith in his dogma,
or to lessen his scorn of the profane persons who
doubt and dispute the freedom of the will. He is bold
enough in the last resort to affirm that man’s thoughts,
B
�10
The Physical Basis of Will.
feelings, and doings on earth are not proper subjects of
enquiry by a scientific method, and to avow that true
knowledge of them must come either by an extraordinary
metaphysical intuition or by revelation and faith. The
last key to the problem for him is indeed not “ Search and
know,” but “God spake these words and said:” not know
ledge by the well-tried paths of observation and reason,
but “ He that believeth not shall be damned.” Of which
text I hope it is not irreverent to say here that whosoever
believeth, whether it be on the authority of Holy Church
or of Holy Scripture, that which contradicts reason abso
lutely needs no further damnation: he has done himself
damage enough already as a rational being.
Meanwhile mankind has lived always and still lives in
conformity with quite an opposite theory of human will—
namely, that it is governed by natural motives. The
problem of freewill is a problem of the study, it never
has been a problem of practical life; a theoretical dogma
of faith, not a working belief, the doctrine has flourished
in an atmosphere of vague and cloudy phrases, and all
discussions about it have been in the air; it has shifted
its ground too and changed its form so often that it is
not possible to know where and how to seize and hold it.
Laws have been systematically made and punishments
inflicted upon those who broke them under a very definite
conviction that the will is not an uncaused power, but
does move in obedience to motive, and may be fashioned
to act in this way or that. The execution of a murderer
does not fail to influence his likeminded fellow, who cer
tainly has not the freedom of will to be unaffected thereby;
the aim and use of the punishment are to determine his
will, and it could not be of the least use if the will were
self-determined. We observe historically the past actions
of men in different situations and circumstances in order
to gain a knowledge of the springs of human action which
shall be of use to us in our present and future dealings.
The person who has had much experience, whether in
politics, business, or any other special department of
human labour, is esteemed a wiser guide than a new
comer, because of the certainty that the thoughts and
�The Physical Basis of Will.
11
acts of men are not in any respect chance-events, but
that what they have done before, that they will do again
when actuated by similar motives.
Prudence and forethought in the conduct of affairs, the
provisions made for education, social institutions and
usages, all the operations of daily life in the intercourse
of sane men are based upon the tacit implication that acts
of will are never motiveless, but conform to law and may
be counted upon. There is not a single department of
practical life which is not an implicit denial of a free self
determining power in each individual, and an implicit
recognition of a common nature in men affected by common
influences, and taking a common development in conse
quence. The only person who answers at all to the
metaphysical definition of a self-determining will is the
madman, since he exults in the most vivid consciousness
of freedom and power, sets reason at naught, and often
does things which no one can predict, because he acts
without motives, or at any rate from motives which no
one can penetrate. Did sane men possess freewill they,
like the madman, would be free from responsibility, since
their wills would act independently of their characters,
just as they listed, not otherwise than as men used to
declare, before they knew better, that “ the wind bloweth
where it listeth,” and no one would have much, if any,
motive left to try to improve his character.
We may take it then to be true that the expEcit setting
forth, in formal knowledge, of what is implicit in the
course of human life would be a system of philosophy in
which a self-determining principle had no part nor place,
in which freewill would be a word void of meaning—
nonsense. But true knowledge has its foundation in
experience, and is really the conscious exposition of what
is implicit in human progress; it is implicit in action
before it is explicit in thought. Men do not divine
truth and then work to it consciously; it is instinct in
them before it is understanding; and when in mature
time the unconscious breaks forth into consciousness, it
is the man of genius who is the organ through which the
expansion takes place; he is the interpreter of its blind
�12
The Physical Basis of Will.
impulses to the age, and gives them thenceforth clear
utterance and definite aim. The truth then, as testified
practically by the experience of the whole world from the
beginning until now, is that will is a power which does
not stand outside the range of natural causation, but one
which is moved habitually by motive in every man from
his cradle to his grave. The freewill problem might be
compared well to that great logical puzzle which so long
and so much perplexed the philosophers: I mean the
race between Achilles and the tortoise, where the tortoise
being allowed a certain start, and Achilles supposed to
run ten times as fast, it was proved that he never could
logically overtake it. For if we suppose the tortoise to
have a thousand yards’ start, it would have run a hundred
yards when Achilles had run the thousand yards; when
Achilles again had run the hundred yards, the tortoise
would be ten yards ahead; when Achilles had run the
ten yards, the tortoise would have gone one yard ; when
Achilles had done the one yard, the tortoise would lead it
by the tenth of a yard; when Achilles had got over the
tenth of a yard, he would still be the hundredth of a yard
behind; and so on by successive subdivisions of the
diminishing space for ever. Clearly then Achilles never
could logically overtake the tortoise, whatever he might
do actually. So it has been with the freewill puzzle: the
philosophers, confusing themselves and others with a
juggling statement of the problem, have applied the word
free to the will instead of to the man, who has always
known himself to be free, not to will, but to do what he
willed when not hindered from doing it by internal or
external causes, just as they proved that Achilles would
not overtake the tortoise, by treating a finite space which
was infinitely divisible as if it were infinite.
*
Put the
race problem in a plain way, without ambiguous use of
words, and the result is plain enough: when Achilles had
run one thousand yards, the tortoise would have run one
* One is required to go on subdividing a unit indefinitely, and
to be surprised that the sum of the diminishing fractions never
can reach 1.
�The Physical Basis of Will.
13
hundred, but when Achilles had run two thousand yards,
where would the tortoise be ? Why, it would have run
two hundred yards altogether, and would of course be
eight hundred yards behind.
So much then for the facts in their relation to freewill.
Now what are the grounds of the metaphysician’s clear
conviction that he has a will and that it is free ? His
consciousness tells him so, he says, and all the arguments
in the world will not invalidate its direct and positive
testimony. But does it really tell him so ? One may
meet that statement truly by affirming that his conscious
ness does not tell him anything like that which he is in
the easy habit of supposing and declaring it to do.
Certainly it is not true that we know immediately by
consciousness that we have such a power as the metarphysician means by will. One-tenth only of that con
fident dogma is the direct deliverance of consciousness,
the other nine-tenths are pure and gratuitous hypothesis.
Consciousness tells us nothing whatever of an abstract
will-entity; it makes known a particular volition when
we have it and no more; the creation of an abstract will
which is supposed to execute the particular volition on
each occasion, and its further fashioning into a spiritual
entity, is an assumption as unwarranted as any that has
ever been made by the crudest materialism. It would be
no whit more absurd to make a spiritual entity of sensa
tion and to maintain that this abstract entity was
necessary to produce each sensation; or to postulate a
special emotional entity which operates in each emotion;
or to create a spirit of greenness and to detect it at work
in each green thing; or to discover the spirit of stoneness
in every stone by the roadside. What the metaphysician
has done has been to convert into an entity the abstract
word which embraces the multitude of particular volitions,
varying infinitely in degree and quality, just as at an
earlier period of thought, when the metaphysical spirit
had more life and sway than it has now, he explained the
sleep-producing properties of opium by a soporific essence
in it, and the difficulty of getting a vacuum by Nature’s
abhorrence of a vacuum; or as at a still earlier period of
�14
The Physical Basis of Will.
thought he put a Naiad in the fountain, a Dryad in the
tree, a Sun-god in the sun.
But, in the second place, while consciousness does not
tell him that he has a will such as he supposes, no more
has it the authority to tell him that his will is free.
Consciousness only illumines directly the mental state of
the moment; it reveals nothing of the long train of
antecedent states of which that state is the outcome—all
is dark beyond where its light directly falls; and it
cannot testify anything as an eyewitness concerning what
is happening there, any more than a person in the light
can testify of what is taking place in the dark. Let
there be a solitary gas-lamp lit in a large square on a
pitchdark night, it enables you to see immediately around
it, but it does not show what is going on in any other
part of the square; and if any one standing near it
chanced to get a severe blow on the head from a stone
coming out of the darkness, he would think it small
satisfaction to be told that the blow was by a selfdetermined stone. So it is with consciousness; it makes
known the present volition, it does not make known its
causes; and that, as Spinoza pointed out long ago, is the
origin of the illusion of Freewill. How, indeed, could a
present state of consciousness reveal immediately another
state of consciousness; in other words, how could it be
itself and a former state of consciousness at the same
time ? But whosoever will be at the pains to carry his
self-inspection patiently back from the present state of
consciousness to that state which went before it, and
from that again to its antecedent state, and so backwards
along the train of activity which has issued in the latest
mental outcome, lighting up in succession as well as he
can each link in an intricate chain of many-junctioned
associations, may easily assure himself that he would never
have present states of feeling were it not for past states of
feeling. Let the will be as free as any one chooses to sup
pose, it is certainly as impotent to will without previous
acts of will, as a child is to walk before it has learned to
step: the present volition contains the abstracts,, so to
speak, of a multitude of former volitions t by them it is in
�The Physical Basis of Will.
15
formed. The most eager metaphysician, when he is not
thinking of his abstract dogma of freewill, or of an equally
abstract reason whose supreme dominion over will is sup
posed to constitute its singular freedom, will not deny
*
that an individual’s thinking, feeling,or acting as he does at
any moment of his life is the outcome of his nature and
training, the expression of his character; that his present
being is the organic development of his past being ; that
he is fast linked in a chain of causation which does not
suffer him ever to get out of himself. It is a chain, too,
which, if he reflects, he must perceive to reach a long
way farther back in an ancestral past than he can
estimate. We see plainly how a person inherits a father’s,
grandfather’s, or more remote ancestor’s tricks of speech,
of walk, of handwriting, and the like, without imitation
on his part, since the father or grandfather may have
died before he was born; and in the same way he inherits
moods of feeling, modes of thought, impulses of will, and
exhibits them in thoughts, feelings and acts which seem
essentially spontaneous, most his own. Has he done
well in some great and urgent emergency of life in which
he knew not what he did at the instant, he may justly
give thanks to the dead father or grandfather who en
dowed him with the actuating impulse or the happy
aptitude which served him so well on the critical occasion.
We little think, for the most part, how much we owe
to those who have gone before us. There is not a word
which I have used, or shall use, in this lecture which does
not attest by its origin and growth countless generations
of human culture extending from our far distant Aryan
forefathers of the Indian plains down to us ; in like
manner there is not a thought or feeling or volition
which any one in this room can have which he could have,
had not countless generations of human beings thought
and felt and willed before him, and had not he himself
been thinking, feeling, and willing ever since he left his
cradle. It is in vain we attempt by self-inspection to
make plain all the links of causation of any feeling or
* See note at the end of the lecture.
�16
The Physical Basis of Will.
volition; the impossibility is to seize and weigh each
minute and remote operative element—to bring all the
contributory factors into the light of consciousness. So
much is unconscious agency—temperament, character,
instinct, habit, potential thought and feeling, what you
will—something which lies deeper than direct self-obser
vation or even the utmost labours of self-analysis can
reach. Hence spring the illusions into which men often
times fall with regard to their motives on particular
occasions, the remarkable self-deceptions of which they
are capable. They think, perhaps, that they have acted
in their freedom from certain high motives of which
they were conscious when these were not the real
motives which actuated them.
*
From the unlit depths
of his being, the deep and silent stream of the indi
vidual’s nature, rise the forces which break on the sur
face in the currents and eddies of consciousness. One
may get a truer explanation sometimes of a person’s
conduct on a particular occasion by a knowledge of the
characters of his near relations than by his own expla
nation of his motives or one’s own speculations about
them ; for in their traits we may see displayed in full
detail what is potential mainly and of occasional out
come in him. When acts appear to be quite incommen
surate with motives, or when the same motive appears to
produce different acts, the just conclusion is not that an
arbitrary freewill has capriciously meddled and upset
calculation, but that the motives which we discover are
only a part of the complex causation, and that the most
important part thereof lies in the dark. Self-conscious
ness is a very incompetent witness in that matter : you
might as well try to illuminate the interior of St. Paul’s
with a rushlight. A motiveless will may be compared,
* A desire or motive does not generally go the direct way to
its issue in action any more than a person necessarily goes the
direct way from London to Edinburgh. He may go two or three
ways, or he might go all round by Exeter, and still get there.
So with desire, which goes a roundabout and very intricate way
sometimes, carrying with it, so to speak, something from each
place at which it has stopped on its journey.
�The Physical Basis of Will.
17
•perhaps, to a foundling baby; respecting which wise men
conclude, not that it had no parents and came by chance,
but that they do not know who its parents are.
The metaphysicians have yet another argument of
which they make much. They lay great stress upon
their assertion that there is nothing in the operations of
the body which is in the least like the energy we are
conscious of as will, and that we cannot put a finger on
anything in all the functions of the nervous system which
can conceivably serve as a physical basis of will. Let us
enquire then if that be so. The simplest nervous opera
tion, that which is the elemental type of which the more
complex functions are built up, as a great house is built
up of simple bricks, is what we call a reflex act: an
impression is made upon some part of the body, the
molecular change produced thereby is conducted along a
sensory nerve to a nerve-centre and arouses the energy
thereof, and that energy is thereupon transmitted or
reflected along a connected motor nerve and accomplishes
a particular movement, which may be purposive or not.
For example, a strong light falls upon the retina and the
pupil instantly contracts in order to exclude the excess of
light; a blow is threatened to the eye and the eyelids
wink involuntary to protect it; a lump of food gets to
the back of the throat and as soon as it is felt there the
muscles contract and push it on. These are operations
of the body in which, although they accomplish a purpose,
the will has no part whatever; they take place in spite of
the will, as everybody knows, and one of them even
when a person is completely unconscious.
A more
striking instance of an instructive reflex act is afforded
by a well-known experiment on the frog: if its right
thigh is irritated by a drop of acid it rubs it off with the
foot of that side, but if it is prevented from using that
foot for the purpose it makes use of the opposite leg.
Intelligent purpose and deliberate will, one would natur
ally say; but when the frog’s head is cut off and the
experiment made then the result is the same; it tries
first to use its right foot, and that being impossible bends
the other leg across and wipes off the acid with it. As
�18
The Physical Basis of Will.
its head has been, cut off it is certain that it has not
conscious intelligence and will in any definite and proper
signification of those terms ; it does not know what it is
doing although it acts with admirable purpose, any more
than the pupil does when it contracts in a strong light or
than the steam engine does when it performs its useful
*
work.
The concluson which we must come to and
emphasize is that the nervous system has the power,
instinct in its constitution or acquired by training, to
execute mechanically acts which have the semblance
of being designed and voluntary, without there being
the least consciousness or will in them. Have we not
here then a pretty fair physical foundation of a rudi
mentary will ?
Let us now go a step further. The will, as we know,
has not the power to execute only, but it has the power
to prevent execution, to hold impulses in check; indeed,
its higher energies are most tasked, and its highest
qualities shown, in the exercise of this controlling function.
Our appetites and passions urge us to immediate gratifica
tions ; it is the noble function of will to curb these lower
* A critic of my book, on the “ Physiology of Mind,” in the
“ Journal of Mental Science,” of January last, defines the theory
of freewill thus: “ that in every determination to act which con
stitutes a volition the determinant is not a mere datum of nerves,
or sense, or passion, but is an idea actively taken up, formulated
as an adequate end, and stamped as an element of happiness by
that nonbodily entity which we call self. . . . This is the
simple key to the whole problem of Responsibility.” The italics
are his. We may take notice here how admirably the acts of
the decapitated frog fit this definiton. It evidently takes up
actively the idea of getting rid of the pain, formulates it as an
adequate end, and stamps it as an element of happiness by that
nonbodily entity (clearly very much, if not entirely, non-bodily
seeing that it is headless) which we call self! Thus it gives
us the key to the whole problem of Responsibility. It were
well, perhaps, if all those who write about mind would follow
Spinoza’s advice—first study sufficiently the functions of the
body, so as to “ learn by experience what the body can do and
what it cannot do by the simple laws of its corporeal nature and
without receiving any determination from the mind.” They
might then, perhaps, as Schopenhauer thought, “ leave many
German scribblers unread.”
�The Physical Basis of Will.
19
impulses of our nature. Is there anything, then, in the
operations of the nervous system which can possibly be
the basis of this exalted governing function? Let us
take preliminary note here that there are reflex actions
going on in the body which are essential to life, but over
which this mighty despot of the mind, the will, has no
authority whatever—the movements of the heart and of
the intestines, for example; they go on regularly night
and day; if they did not we should die; but we cannot
slacken or quicken or stop them by any exertion of will
which we can make. The movements of breathing, which
are also reflex, we can control partially; we can breathe
quickly or slowly as we please, or even stop breathing for
a time, but not for long, since no one can kill himself
by simply holding his breath. The physiologist, however,
can easily quicken or retard the beatings of an animal’s
heart at will, by stimulating directly the proper nerves.
By irritating a nerve which goes to it—the so-called vagus
nerve—he can retard them, and by irritating another
nerve connected with it—the so-called sympathetic—he
can quicken them. He can do with its pulsations as the
coachman can with his horses, pull them in to go slowly
or send them on quickly. But more—and this is the
point I wish to come to—he can affect them not only in
the direct way which I have mentioned, but also indirectly
by a sharp impression on some part of the body. For
example, if he suspends a frog by its legs and then taps
sharply on its belly, he instantly stops its heart for a
time. What happens is that the stimulus of the tap is
carried by a nerve to a nerve-centre in the brain near
that centre from which a controlling nerve of the heart
proceeds, and so acts upon it as in the result to prevent
or inhibit the action of the heart; in other words, what
we have to apprehend and perpend in the experiment is
that the physiological sympathy of nerve-centres in the
organization of the nervous system is such that one
centre, when stimulated to function, has the power to
inhibit physically the function of another centre, just as
the will inhibits the movements of breathing.
This
temporary arrest of the heart’s beats by an intercurrent
�20
The Physical Basis of TFi'ZZ.
stimulus somewhere into its reflex arc is after all not
very unlike to temporary arrest of respiration by an in
tercurrent volition into its reflex arc.
Did time permit, I might bring forward many more,
and more striking, instances of this kind of inhibitory
action, selecting them from the operations of the human
body both in health and in disease; but it must suffice
for the present to set down and emphasize the broad con
clusion which they warrant, namely, that one nervous
centre, when stimulated into activity, may so act upon
another centre as either to help, or to hinder, or to suspend
its function by pure physiological mechanism. Have we
not here, then, a physical basis of the inhibitory power of
will ? Place the fact by the side of the fact on which I
laid emphatic stress just now—namely, that the nervous
system has the power of executing purposive acts without
any intervention of consciousness or will; and it is plain
we have in the two physical functions something which
runs closely parallel with the rudiments of volition and
may well be their material equivalents—that is to say,
power to command execution of a purpose and power to
stop execution.
Metaphysicians * get their theories of will by considering
its highest displays in a much cultivated self-conscious
ness, where the difficulties of satisfactory analysis are
insuperable; but a complete and sincere study of it must
deal with its small beginnings as well as with its finest
displays—ought, in fact, to commence with them; for to
ignore the facts of its genesis and development is to make
an artificial philosophy which may serve well for intel
lectual gymnastics in scholastic exercises, but has no
practical bearing on the concerns of real life. Let us
then examine the simplest instances of primitive volition
in the animal and in the infant. When a dog, in obedi
ence to its natural instinct, seizes a piece of meat which
* They appear to be desirous of abandoning their old name of
metaphysicians in favour of the new name of idealists. But they
have no right to that term, which is properly applicable only to
one who upholds the Berkleian theory.
�The Physical Basis of Will.
21
lies near it and is punished for the theft, the memory of
what it was made to suffer intervenes on another occasion
between the impression on sight and the ensuing impulse,
and checks or inhibits it; in like manner when an infant
grasps something bright which attracts its gaze and is
burnt, its memory of the pain which it suffered checks
or inhibits a similar hasty movement on another occasion.
Here then we have the simplest instance of will; the
animal or infant voluntarily refrains from doing what its
first impulse is to do—of two courses chooses the best.
But what is the probable physical side of the process ?
In the first case, where the dog seized the meat, an im
pression upon the sense of sight, the conduction of the
molecular change to the nerve-centre, and the production
of a special sensation, as the ingoing process; after which,
as the outgoing process, the transmission of the energy
along a motor nerve to muscle and a consequent adaptive
movement—a sensorimotor process; in the second event,
when a punishment was inflicted, the association of this
sensorimotor process with the painful stimulation of
another nerve-centre; and in the third case, when the
dog seeing the meat refrained from touching it, instead
of the instant reflexion of the sensation into movement,
there was the stimulation by it of the associated centre in
which the memory of the pain was registered, the conse
quence of which was the inhibition of the movement.
One of two catenated physiological centres was in fact
excited to inhibit the other. If we multiply in an endless
complexity this simple scheme of nerves and nerve-centres
we get the constitution of the brain, indeed of the whole
nervous system, which contains an innumerable multitude
of interconnected nerve-centres ready to be awakened into
action by suitable stimulation to increase, to combine, to
modify, to restrain one another’s functions. As counter
part on the mental side to this exceeding complexity of
physical structure, we have very complex deliberation
going before the formation of will, which comes out at
last from the intricate interactions of so many hopes,
fears, inclinations, promptings, desires, reflections, and
the like, of so many constituent elements of character,.
�22
The Physical Basis of Will.
that we are unable to analyze them and so to specify the
exact factors in its complex causation: it is the resultant
of a very intricate composition of forces. To me it seems
then a fair conclusion that in the inhibitory action of one
nerve-centre upon another, as disclosed by physiological
observation, and in the simplest instance of volition, as
known by consciousness, we have two processes which go
along together parallel, and not unfair therefore to main
tain that we have as good authority to believe in a physical
basis of will as in a physical basis of any mental state
whatever.
The plain truth is, when we look the facts fairly in the
face, that we never meet with will except in connection
with a certain organization of matter, varying with its
variations, and exhibiting every proof of being dependent
upon it. It is notably infantile in the child, imbecile in
the idiot, grows in power, range, and quality as the
mental powers grow by education, is mature in the adult,
falls sick with the body’s sicknesses, and becomes decrepit
in the decrepitude of age. However free and independent
in theory, it never shows its power in fact except from a
good physical basis. The aim, the use, and the result of
a sound moral training are to fashion a strong will; and
assuredly all training acts through the intimate develop
ment of the nervous system which it produces. Good
moral habits, like other habits, are formed by the structure
growing to the modes of its exercise. When the physical
basis is congenitally defective, as in the idiot, no excellence
of training will succeed in developing a normal will, any
more than much thought will add one cubit to the stature
of a dwarf. And when we make a survey of the various
forms of mental derangement, which we know to be the
deranged functions of disordered brain, we observe that
a first symptom of mischief is always a loss of power of
will over the thoughts and feelings : that is the sad sign
which portends the coming calamity. The person who is
about to fall into acute mania has ideas and feelings surge
up in his mind in the most irregular and tumultuous
fashion, and is impelled by them to strange and disorderly
acts. It is painfully interesting to watch the struggle
�The Physical Basis of Will.
23
which goes on sometimes at the beginning of the attack
before the failing will undergoes complete dissolution:
the patient will succeed by a strong effort in controlling
himself for a few moments when he knows that some one
is looking at him, or when he is spoken to, and in acting
and answering calmly and coherently, but the enfeebled
will cannot hold on to the reins, and he relapses soon into
incoherent thought, speech and conduct, becoming, as the
disease makes progress, incapable of even an instant’s
real self-control. The person who is falling melancholic
is tormented with painful thoughts and feelings, blasphe
mous or otherwise afflicting, which come into his mind
against his most earnest wish, cause him unspeakable
distress, and cannot be repressed or expelled by all the
efforts of his agitated will; so hateful are they to him, so
independent do they seem of his true self, that he ends
perhaps by thinking them the direct inspiration of Satan
and himself given over to eternal damnation. The mono
maniac broods upon some idea of greatness or of suspicion,
rooted in its congenial feeling of exaltation or of distrust,
until the weakened will looses all hold of it and it grows
to the height of an insane delusion; then he imagines
himself to be emperor, prophet, or some other great per
sonage, or believes all the world to be in a conspiracy
against him. The sufferer who is afflicted with a frequently
upstarting impulse to do harm to himself or to others,
conscious all the while of the horrible nature of the im
pulse, which he fights against with frenzied energy, goes
through agonies of distress in the struggles to prevent his
true will being mastered by it. Everywhere we observe
impaired will to go along with the beginnings of physical
derangement. And if we look to the last term of the
mental degeneration, as we have it in the demented
person in whom all traces of mind are well-nigh extin
guished, who must be fed, clothed, cared for in every way,
whose existence is little more than vegetative, we find an
almost complete abolition of rational will accompanying
extreme disorganization of special structure.
The lessons of mental pathology admit of no misread
ing ; they make known everywhere an entire dependence
�24
The Physical Basis of Will.
of will on physical organization. But there is an im
portant aspect of the matter which I ought not to pass
by altogether, although my allusion to it now must
necessarily be the briefest. It is this converse and
weighty truth—that actual derangement of the structure
of an organ can be brought about by the continuance of
excessive or disordered function ; that the habitual indul
gence of evil passions, ill-regulated thoughts, and de
praved will does lead to corresponding physical changes
in the brain; and that every person has thus in the patient
fashioning and timely exercise of will no mean power
over himself to prevent insanity. For the praises of such
a well-fashioned will, I cannot do better than borrow the
lines of Tennyson :—
Oh! well for him whose will is strong!
He suffers, but he will not suffer long;
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong:
For him nor moves the loud world’s random mock,
Nor all calamities hugest waves confound,
Who seems a promontory of rock
That, compassed round with turbulent sound,
In middle ocean meets the surging shock,
Tempest-buffeted, citadel-crowned.
But assuredly we shall not have a will of that kind
formed by treating it as a free, independent, arbitrary entity
which has no affinities, is not moved by motive, and owns no
law but self-caprice; it can be formed only by painful
degrees, in conformity with stern laws of moral develop
ment, by one who is solicitous uniformly to use motives
and make good use of them, patiently watchful to with
stand and check the earliest invasion of his mind by low
motives, earnest to cultivate good feelings and noble aspi
rations, steadfast always to strengthen the will by habitual
practice in right doing—who aims, indeed, to make it, as
it should be, the highest and fullest expression of a wellformed character.
The acknowledgment that human
will is included within the law of causation—the appre
hension of the universal reign of law in mind and in
matter—so far from tending to dishearten men and to
�The Physical Basis of Will.
25
paralyze their highest efforts by driving them into a dreary
fatalism, seems to me to be essential in order to infix and
develop in their minds a vital sense of responsibility to
search out intelligently and to pursue deliberately the right
path of human progress; a responsibility, be it said, which
the metaphysical dogma of free-will not merely weakens
but logically destroys. Men have not been paralyzed in
intelligence or effort, but have gained in both immeasur
ably, by perceiving and comprehending the law of gravita
tion; and in like manner by apprehending the reign of law
in mind they will lose only the freedom to make ignorant
blunders and to waste their forces unintelligently : they
will obey the law whose service is their best freedom.
Knowing that their efforts rest securely upon eternal law,
they will know that their labours cannot be in vain: that
they have the power of the universe at their backs, “ the
everlasting arms ” beneath them.
It is unfortunate that people, scared by a horror of
materialism, the “uncreating word” before which freedom
of will and responsibility die, as a writer has described
it lately, cannot see that the application of a scientific
method of enquiry to human thoughts, feelings, and
doings in no way touches injuriously the supreme autho
rity of moral law and the power and wish to. obey it.
Neither moral feeling nor responsibility would be taken
out of life were a purely materialistic evolution proved
doctrine ; on the contrary, the course of that evolution in
the past would remain the best guarantee and yield the
strongest assurance of a further moral and intellectual
progress in the future. If it be true that men have risen
by a gradual evolution from a pre-moral state of barbarism
to their present height of intelligence and moral feeling,
and if it be, as it certainly is, the essential principle of
evolution to pass upwards from more simple and general
to more complex and special organisation, it is surely a
rational inference and a sound expectation that intelli
gence and moral feeling will reach a still higher develop
ment in the future. Science is only organised knowledge
and does not pretend to do more than find out and set
forth how things are as they are, and by help of what it
�26
The Physical Basis of Will.
thus learns to forecast what they will be in the future; it
perceives clearly how inexorably its range is limited by
the limitations of our few and feeble senses, and how
impossible it is that it should ever discover anything about
the primal origin of things—about the why and whence of
the mysterious universe of its observations. Evolution,
the modern name of that conception which the old Greek
philosophers, when they first formed it, called nature or
the becoming of things
is only a more exact and
true exposition of how things have become, not in the
least an explanation of the mystery of their why. By
the help of knowledge slowly widening we can look back
in retrospective imagination to the time and manner in
which our planet and the other planets of our solar
system took form by nebular condensation and started
on their several orbits; we can trace with patient
thought the successive changes which have taken place on
the surface of the earth and have culminated in man and
his achievements ; we may foresee, perhaps, a time when
a few miserable human beings, living degraded lives in
snow huts near the equator, shall represent all that is
left of the vanished myriads of the human race, or a still
later period when the earth, fallen to the condition in
which the moon now is, rolls on its solitary way through
space, a frozen and barren globe, the tomb of a Dead
Humanity;—we may, if we look far enough before and
after, do all that, but we can never tell what minute frac
tion our solar system may be—what a vortex-molecule,
so to speak—of countless other systems in the inconceiv
able immensities of space which lie beyond our utmost
ken, and what essential relations it may have to them;
we cannot tell why matter on earth has formed an ascend
ing series of more and more complex compounds, why
having reached a certain complexity of composition it
became living, why organic evolution have gone on to
higher and ever higher achievements until it reached the
complexity of human organization and gave birth to con
sciousness ; and we cannot tell in the least what will
happen in the long long time to come, when all the
operations of our solar system are ended, past as com-
�.The Physical Basis of Will.
27
" pletely as the light of the first human eyes that gazed on
them in wonder. Science is confined to a finite space
• between two infinities—the eternal past and eternity to
come; it measures only a single pulsation, so to speak,
in the working of a power whose source and end are
past finding out, which was and is, and is to come, from
everlasting to everlasting ; beyond that range, narrow it
is true, but more than wide enough to give full scope to
all human affections and to occupy usefully all human
energies, there is absolute nescience—agnosticism if you
will. Organised as we are we can no more know about
it than the oyster in its narrow home and with its very
limited sentiency can know of the events of the human
world—of the noise and turmoil, say, of an English electior,
or of the interesting chronicles of the “ Court Circular.”
-What science repudiates and condemns, I believe, is the
presumptuous pretence on the part of theology to know
and tell all about the inscrutable, to put forward as
truths, not ever to be questioned, childish explanations
which are an insult to the understanding and would be
its suicide if really accepted, to demand reverent assent
to doctrines which sometimes outrage moral feeling, and
to declare solemnly that whosoever believeth not the
fables which it proclaims “ shall without doubt perish
everlastingly.”
What it may furthermore well repudiate and condemn
is the evident want of sincerity of heart and veracity of
thought shown by those who proffer and accept these
explanations, by reason of which they do not honestly
sound their beliefs and pursue them rigidly to their
logical issues, but suffer themselves to use words habitu
ally in a non-natural sense, and to hold side by side
inconsistent and even directly contradictory doctrines,
without being troubled by their manifest inconsistencies.
The scientific spirit claims entire veracity of thought,
whatever the result, knows that truth does not depend
upon our sympathies and antipathies, is resolute to follow
it to the end even at the sacrifice of the most cherished
beliefs. It cannot but think it to be as demoralizing in
tendency as it is insincere in fact, to profess to hold a
�28
The Physical Basis of Will.
faith in entire reverence after having given up most of
what is characteristic of it, and as certain in the end to lead
to grossly inconsistent conduct. Such disingenuous deal
ing with momentous matters marks indeed an unveracity
of thought which would be lamentable hypocrisy were it
not more often intellectual timidity and unconscious
self-deception. But whether the insincerity be conscious
or unconscious, it is incompatible with that rigid, hearty,
and entire devotion to truth in thought, feeling, and ex
pression which is the aim and at the same time the
strength of a good understanding.
Note to Page 15.—Kant’s doctrine is that there is a determi
nation of the will by pure reason, that so reason gets practical
reality, and that in this absolute obedience the will has absolute
assurance of its freedom. The moral law is a law spontaneously
imposed on the will by pure reason: it stands high above all the
motives, sensuous and their like, which determine the empirical
will; it pays no respect to them, but with an inward, irresistible
necessity, orders us, in independence of them, to follow it abso
lutely and unconditionally—'tis a categorical imperative, universal,
and binding on every rational will. A happy thing, certainly, that
a will determined to unconditional obedience by so absolute an
authority retains nevertheless the absolute assurance of its free
dom. But then comes the not unimportant question—What is
it that practical reason categorically commands ? How are we
to know what the moral law dictates and forbids ? The easiest
thing in the world, thinks Kant: let only those maxims of con
duct derived from experience be adopted as motives which are
susceptible of being made of universal validity—which are fit to
be regarded as universal laws of reason to govern the actions of
all mankind. I do right when I do what all persons would
think right in similar circumstances. Very good, without doubt,
although very like the common-place maxim of every ethical
system; but my difficulty has been to know in a particular case
what all intelligent beings would think right. How am I to get
at the universal standard or precept and apply it to my particu
lar occasion, so as to know absolutely what I ought then to do ?
Kant helps me by means of two remarkable illustrations. Suicide
is one. Is suicide, under the strongest temptation conceivable,
ever right ? I must ask myself then, “ Is the principle of the
admission that suicide is ever right fit to become a universal
law ?” No, says Kant, it is not fit, since the universal practice
�The Physical Basis of Will.
29
sary to come down from its supersensuous heights and to be no
better than gross Utilitarianism. All that it can tell me, panting
for its supreme utterance, is that suicide is inexpedient as a
universal principle of conduct—in fact, it makes use of the
common motives of an experience which is nowise supersen
suous, and instead of helping me to an absolute precept or
standard to measure them by, actually comes to them for its
authority. Kant’s philosophy, of which the metaphysical mind
is getting re-enamoured in some quarters at the present day, has
its head high in the clouds and dreams there sublimely; but
it finds it necessary to have its feet on the ground when the time
comes for it to march.
The second instance is no more helpful. May a person in the
greatest need of a loan, which he knows he will not get unless
he makes a solemn promise to repay what he is perfectly certain
he never will be able to repay, make the promise ? No, says
Kant, for if it were a universal law, all faith in promises would
be destroyed, and nobody would lend money. In other words,
in the long run it would be very bad for society that faith in
promises should be destroyed. An excellent truth, which no
body can deny, but it evidently smacks much of the earth
earthy; indeed, it would seem that those who discover the
basis of morality in the social sanction may claim Kant, when
he is not in the clouds, as an out-and-out supporter. It is dif
ferent when he is busy spinning empty supersensuous theories
which have no relation to actual life, and amusing his disciples
with the magnificent dissolving views of his metaphysical magic
lantern. First he presents a splendid view of supreme reason
to the spectator who, as he admires it, sees the picture dissolve
gradually and in its place appear the grand features of Moral
Law, which shared with the Starry Heaven Kant’s ever new
and rising admiration and reverence; as the gaze is fixed in ad
miration upon this view it melts into indistinctness, and, as it
does so, there comes by degrees into clear definition the mighty
figure of freewill. Thereupon, informing his enthusiastic audience
that there are not really three pictures, as they might suppose,
but one picture, the three being one and the one being three,
Reason being Will and Will Reason, and that they cannot fail
to perceive, when they reflect properly upon what they have
seen, that the belief in God and immortality have now been
made safe for ever, he retires amidst unbounded applause.
Meanwhile, the critic who has not been blinded by the magnificent
metaphysical display, and who feels that he does not live, move,
and have his being in an abstract land beyond physics, asks him
self with regard to the philosophy—Will it march ?—and is not
much surprised to find that when it begins to march it can only
do so on well-worn Utilitarian tracks.
All theories of freewill seem to come to this—that the will
which is swayed by low motives is not free, that the will which
�30
The Physical Basis of Will.
of suicide would reduce the world to chaos. Very true, but it is
sadly disappointing to perceive that the sublime and supreme
reason has, in order to become practical reality, found it necesis swayed by the higher motives is more free, and that the will
which is swayed by the highest motives is most free; conse
quently, when a person is blamed for having done ill, he is not
blamed for not having acted without motives, but for not having
been actuated by the highest motives. Create an artificial world
of names apart from the real world of facts—a world which shall
simply be made up of negations of all qualities of which we have
actual experience—and let the highest motives be known in it
as the Will of God or abstract Supreme Reason, you will get
your service which you may please yourself to call perfect
freedom. And there does not appear to be any reason why you
may not create and take refuge in another still more ideal world
beyond that, if persons of a positive spirit should show any dis
position to invade ideal word No. 1 with inconvenient enquiries.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The physical basis of will: a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, on Sunday afternoon, February 15th, 1890
Creator
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Maudsley, Henry
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 30, [2] p. ; 18 cm
Notes: Series list on preliminary pages unnumbered pages at the end.
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The Sunday Lecture Society
Date
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1890
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G4844
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (The physical basis of will: a lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, on Sunday afternoon, February 15th, 1890), identified by Humanist Library and Archives, is free of known copyright restrictions.
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application/pdf
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Text
Language
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English
Subject
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Free will
Determinism
Free Will and Determinism