Part 3

So also Wundt: "Freedom and constraint are reciprocal concepts; they are both necessarily connected with consciousness; outside of consciousness they are both imaginary concepts, which only a mythologising imagination could relate to things." (Human and Animal Psychology, p. 426.)

Now let us take that equally confusing word "will." Unfortunately, few of those who champion the freedom of the will think it worth while to trouble their readers with a clear definition of what they mean by it. The orthodox definition of the will as "a faculty of the soul" tells us nothing. It is explaining something the existence of which is questioned by reference to something else the existence of which is unknown. Or the definition is volunteered, "Will is the power to decide," a description which only tells us that to will is to will. Professor James tells us that "Desire, wish, will, are states of mind which every one knows, and which no definition can make plainer." This may be true of desire and wish; it certainly is not true of "will." There is no question as to "will" being a state of mind, but as to every one knowing its character, and above all possessing the knowledge enabling him to discriminate between "will" and "desire" and "wish," this is highly questionable. One may also be permitted the opinion that if advocates of "free-will" were to seriously set themselves the task of discovering what they do mean by "will," and also in what way it may be differentiated from other mental states, the number of the champions of that curious doctrine would rapidly diminish.

What is it that constitutes an act of volition, or supplies us with the fact of will? The larger part of our bodily movements do not come under the heading of volition at all. The primary bodily movements are reflex, instinctive, emotional, the action following without any interposition of consciousness. Of course, an action that is performed quite automatically at one time may be voluntarily performed at another time. I may close my eyelid deliberately, or it may be because of the approach of some foreign object. Or an action, if it be performed frequently, tends to become automatic. To come within the category of a voluntary action, it must be performed consciously, and there is also present some consciousness of an end to be realized. Every voluntary action is thus really dependent upon memory. A newly-born child has no volitions, only reflexes. It is only when experience has supplied us with an idea of what may be done that we will it shall be done. This consideration alone is enough to shatter the case for the supposed freedom of the will.

The essential issue is again confused by the language employed. If all volitional action is action performed with the view to an end, a quite correct and completely adequate word would be "intentional"! If we were to speak of an "intentional" action instead of a voluntary one, the nature of the act would be clear, the factors of experience, memory, consciousness of an end, would be indicated, and the misleading associations of "willing" avoided. It is difficult, however, to introduce a new terminology, and so I must beg the reader, in the interests of clarity, to bear in mind that whenever "voluntary action" is referred to, it is "intentional" action that is connoted by the phrase.

If we analyze any simple act of volition what has just been said will be made quite clear. I am sitting in a room and will to open a window; it may be to get fresh air, to look out, or for some other reason. Assume that the first is the correct reason, the room being close and "stuffy." First of all, then, I become aware of a more or less unpleasant feeling; my experience tells me this is because the air in the room needs purifying. Experience also tells me that by opening a window the desired result will be obtained. Finally, I open the window and experience a feeling of relief and satisfaction. Now had the room been without a window, and the door bolted from the outside, or had the window been too heavy for me to raise, no "volition" would have arisen. I should still have had the desire for fresh air, but not seeing any means by which this could be obtained, I should have had no motive for action, and should have remained perfectly passive. In order that my desire may operate as a motive there must be not only a consciousness of a need, but also a mental representation of the means by which that need is to be gratified. I will to do a thing, when allied to the desire for that thing there is a conception of how it is to be done, of the means to be employed. Without this I have no motive, only a desire; without a consciousness of the nature of the desire, there is nothing but pure feeling. "Willing terminates with the prevalence of the idea...." "Attention with effort is all that any case of volition implies." (Prof. W. James, Princip. of Psychology, II. 560-1.)

The stages of the process are, feeling rising into consciousness as desire, the perception of the means to realize an end which raises the desire from the statical to the dynamic stage of motive, and finally a voluntary or intentional action. Now at no stage of this process is there room for the intervention of any power or faculty not expressed in a strictly sequential process. Of course, the action I have taken as an example is an exceedingly simple one, but the more complex actions only offer greater difficulties of analysis without leading to any different result. This will be seen more clearly when we come to deal with "choice" and "deliberation." From the moment that a certain stimulus creates a desire in an organism, to the time that desire expresses itself in action, there is no gap in the chain through which a "Free-Will" may manifest its being. The physiologist points out that at the basis of all our feelings and ideas there lie certain neural processes. The psychologist takes up the story and from the dawn of desire to action finds no break--or at least none that future knowledge may not reasonably hope to make good. Want of knowledge may at present prevent our tracing all the details of the process, but this is surely a very inadequate ground on which to affirm the existence of a power at variance with our knowledge of nature in other directions.

Whether we work backward or forward the result is the same. Strip off from the mind all feelings, desires, all consciousness of ends and means to ends, and what there is left is not a "will" ready to throw the weight of its preference in this or that direction, but a complete blank.

Now in thus tracing the course of a voluntary action are we doing any more than observing the action of desire in consciousness? If, yes, the writer is quite unaware of the fact. If I remove all feeling, all desire, all motive, "the will" disappears. Excite feeling, generate desire, and there is the occasion for a voluntary action. Multiply the number of desires and the operation of "will" becomes evident. Thus when a writer like Professor Hyslop says, "If two motives offer different attractions to the will," the reply is that the "will" is not one thing, and motives other things, but two aspects of one fact. The "will" is not something that decides or chooses between motives; the "will" is nothing more than the name given to that motive or cluster of motives which is sufficiently strong to overcome resistance and to express itself in action. I emphasize the expression "overcome resistance" because without competing motives and a sense of resistance we have no clear consciousness of volition. Where only one desire is present in consciousness, or where it is of overwhelming strength, feeling is succeeded by action without any recognizable hiatus. It is the sense of conflict, the break, that is essential to creating a lively sense of volition, and also, as shall see later, to the sense of choice and deliberation. But in speaking of an action as the expression of motives, or as an expression of "will," both statements are identical so far as the fact is concerned. We have not desires, motives, and "will," there is simply a desire or desires that assume the quality of a motive by being strong enough to result in action. As Spencer has put it, "Will is no more an existence apart from the predominant feeling than a king is an existence apart from the man occupying the throne."

All that is to be found in any act of "will" is a desire accompanied by the consciousness of an end. To put the same thing in another way, we have a desire, the consciousness of an end and the means of realizing it, and, finally, action. To the physiological and psychological processes that culminate in action we give the name of motive. Properly speaking a motive that does not issue in action--or inhibition--is not a motive at all, it is a mere desire. And apart from the presence of desire, or of desires, "will" does not exist. It is a pure abstraction, valuable enough as an abstraction, but having no more real existence apart from particular motives, than "tree" is a real existence apart from particular trees. Physiologically, says Dr. Maudsley:--

"We cannot choose but reject the will.... As physiologists we have to deal with volition as a function of the supreme centres, following reflection, varying in quantity and quality as its cause varies, strengthened by education and exercise, enfeebled by disuse, decaying with decay of structure.... We have to deal with will not as a single undecomposable faculty unaffected by bodily conditions, but as a result of organic changes in the supreme centres, affected as certainly and as seriously by disorders of them as our motor faculties are by disorders of their centres."

And, says Professor Sully, referring to the will:--

"Modern scientific psychology knows nothing of such an entity. As a science of phenomena and their laws, it confines itself to a consideration of the processes of volition, and wholly discards the hypothesis of a substantial will as unnecessary and unscientific."

Neither physiology nor psychology, neither a sane science nor a sound philosophy, knows anything of, or can find use for, an autonomous "will." "Will" as the final term of a discoverable series may be admitted; "will" as a self-directing force, deciding whether particular desires shall or shall not prevail, answers to nothing conformable to our knowledge of man, and is plainly but the ghost of the wills and souls of our savage ancestors. If instead of speaking of the freedom of the will, we spoke of uncaused volitions, the position of the volitionist would be clear, and its indefensible character plain to all. But by giving the abstraction "will" a concrete existence, and by taking from sociology a word such as "freedom" and using it in a sphere in which it has no legitimate application, the issue is confused, and a scientifically absurd theory given an air of plausibility. The dispute between the Determinist and the Indeterminist is certainly not one of words only, but it is one in which the cardinal terms employed need the most careful examination if we are to clear away from the subject the verbal fog created by theologians and metaphysicians.

III.

CONSCIOUSNESS, DELIBERATION, AND CHOICE.

The one argument used by the Indeterminist against the Deterministic position with some degree of universality is that of the testimony of consciousness. It is the one to which practically all have appealed, and which all have flattered themselves was simple in nature and convincing in character. Professor Sidgwick, although he admitted that this testimony might be illusory, yet asserted "There is but one opposing argument of real force, namely, the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the moment of deliberate action." And by the testimony of consciousness must be meant, not, of course, a consciousness of acting, but that at the moment of acting we could, under identical conditions, have selected and acted upon an alternative that has been rejected. I emphasize the phrase "under identical conditions," because otherwise nothing is in dispute, and because, as we shall see, this important consideration has not been always or even frequently borne in mind.

The question is, What does consciousness really tell us, and how far is its testimony valid? In some directions it must be admitted that the testimony of consciousness is absolute. In others it cannot, without verification, claim any authority whatever. When I say that I have a feeling of heat or coldness, of pleasure or pain, there is here a direct deliverance of consciousness against which there is no appeal. But consciousness does not and cannot tell me why I feel hot or cold, or what is the cause of a pain I am experiencing. In this last case the testimony of consciousness may be distinctly misleading. As it tells us nothing of the existence of a brain, a nervous system, viscera, etc., its testimony as to the cause of pain is obviously of no value. We are conscious of states of mind, and that is all. A man seized with sudden paralysis may be conscious of his power to move a limb, only to discover by experience his impotence. In short, consciousness cannot, indeed does not, tell us the causes of our states of mind. For this information we are thrown back upon observation, experiment, and experience. We must, then, make quite sure when we interrogate consciousness, exactly what it is that consciousness says, and whether what it says is on a subject that comes within its province.

What is, then, the testimony of consciousness? When it is said that we are conscious of our ability to have selected one alternative at the time that another is chosen, I think this may be fairly met with the retort that consciousness is unable to inform us as to our actual ability to do anything at all. I may be quite conscious of a desire to jump a six foot fence, or lift a weight of half a ton, but whether I am actually able to do so or not, only experience can decide. What I am really conscious of is a desire to vault a given height or lift a given weight, and it is surely an inexcusable confusion to speak of a desire to do a particular thing as the equivalent of an ability to do it. If a consciousness of desire equalled the ability to perform failure would be but little known among men.

All that consciousness really tells us is of the existence of passing states of mind. It can tell us nothing of their origin, their value, or their consequences. In the particular instance under consideration consciousness informs us of the fact of choice, and this no Determinist has ever dreamed of denying. He does assert that choice, as the Indeterminist persists in using the term, is a delusion, but otherwise, as will be shown later, he claims that it is only on deterministic lines that choice can have any meaning or ethical significance. In any voluntary action I am conscious of the possibility of choice and of having chosen, and that is really all. What is the nature of that possibility, and why I choose one thing rather than another--on these points consciousness can give us no information whatever. One might as reasonably argue that a consciousness of hunger gives us a knowledge of the process of digestion, as argue that a consciousness of choice supplies us with a knowledge of the mechanism of the process. We are conscious of the presence of several desires, we are also conscious that out of these several desires one is strong enough to rank as a motive, but it tells us absolutely nothing of the causes or conditions that have resulted in the emergence of that motive. Instead of telling us that we could have acted in opposition to the strongest motive--which is really the indeterminist position--consciousness simply reveals which desire is the most powerful. We are conscious that other desires were present, we are also aware of the possibility that another desire than the one that actually prevailed might have been the most powerful; but when we admit this and say that we could have acted differently, we have really displaced the actual conditions by imaginary ones. We might have preferred to act differently. This is not denied. It is not questioned that we do choose, or that the same person chooses, differently or different occasions. The question really is, Why have we chosen thus or thus? And so far as consciousness is concerned we are quite in the dark as to why one choice is made rather than another, what are the conditions that give rise to our conscious desires, or why one desire is more powerful than another.

Consciousness, then, can testify only to the reality of its own states; no more. It can tell us nothing of their causes. It cannot tell us that man has a brain and nervous system, and can tell us nothing of the connection between mental states and the condition of the bodily organs. The chief factor in conduct (habit) lies outside the region of consciousness altogether. In most cases we act as we have been in the habit of acting, and our present conduct expresses the sum of our previous actions and inclinations. Every action we perform assists the formation of a habit, and with every repetition of a particular action we find its performance easier. Indeed, a very powerful criticism of the trustworthiness of consciousness is found in the fact that the determining causes of conduct lie largely in the region of the unconscious or subconscious, and of this territory consciousness can tell us no more than a ripple on the surface of a river can tell us of its depths.

Next to the emphasis upon the testimony of consciousness the Indeterminist lays special stress upon the facts of choice and deliberation. Can we really say, it is asked, that man chooses and deliberates, or even that in any genuine sense he does anything at all, if all his actions are pre-determined by his constitution and environment? If every act of man is determined and man himself a mere stage in the process unending and unbroken, is it not idle to speak of man deliberating on alternatives and choosing that which seems to him best? We continue using words that on deterministic lines have lost all meaning. And if Determinists do not realise this, it is because the logical implications of their doctrines have never been fully explored.

Well, it entirely depends upon the sense in which one uses the cardinal terms in the discussion. If deliberation and choice when applied to mental processes are used in the same sense as when these terms are used as descriptive of the proceedings of a committee, then we can all agree that deliberation would be as great a sham as it would be if the members of a committee before meeting had determined upon their decision. But, we may note in passing, that even here, when the deliberations are genuine, the votes of each member are supposed to be decided by the reasons advanced during the discussion--that is the decision of each individual member is determined by the forces evoked during the deliberations.

The scientific method, and it may be added, the sane and profitable method, is not to come to the study of a problem with ready-made meanings and compel the facts, under penalty of disqualification, to agree with them, but to let the facts determine what meaning is to be attached to the words used. It is mere childish petulance for the Indeterminist to say that unless certain words are used with his meaning they shall not be used at all, but shall be expelled from our vocabulary. When gravity was conceived as a force moving downward through infinite space, the existence of people on the other side of the earth was denied as being contrary to the law of gravitation. A more correct knowledge of the phenomena did not lead people to discard gravity; the meaning of the word was revised. And really neither language nor morality is the private property of the Indeterminist, and he is, therefore, not at liberty to annihilate either for not coming up to his expectations. He must submit to such revision of his ideas, or his language, or of both, as more accurate knowledge may demand.

The question is not, then, whether Determinism destroys deliberation and choice and responsibility, but what meaning Determinism can legitimately place upon these words, and is this meaning in harmony with what we know to be true. With responsibility we will deal at length later. For the present let us see what is really involved in the fact of choice. Determinism, we are advised, must deny the reality of choice, because choice assumes alternatives, and there can be no genuine alternatives if events are determined. Let us see. If I am watching a stone rolling down a hillside, and am in doubt as to whether it will pass to the right or to the left of a given point, I shall not recognize any resident capacity in the stone for choosing one path rather than the other. The absence of consciousness in the stone precludes such an assumption. But suppose we substitute for the stone a barefooted human being, and assume that one path is smooth while the other is liberally sprinkled with sharp pointed stones. There would then be an obvious reason for the selection of one path, and no one would hesitate to say that here was an illustration of the exercise of choice. Choice, then, is a phenomenon of consciousness, and it implies a recognition of alternatives. But a recognition of alternatives does not by any means imply that either of two are equally eligible. It is merely a consciousness of the fact that they exist, and that either might be selected were circumstances favourable to its selection. Without labouring the point we may safely say that all that is given in the fact of choice is the consciousness of a choice. There is nothing in it that tells us of the conditions of the selection, or whether it was possible for the agent to have chosen differently or not.

So far there is nothing in Determinism that is discordant with the fact of choice, indeed, it has a perfectly reasonable theory of the process. Why is there a choice or selection of things or actions? Clearly the reason must be looked for in the nature of the thing selected, or in the nature of the agent that selects, or in a combination of both factors. Either there is an organic prompting in favour of the thing selected, as when a baby takes a bottle of milk and rejects a bottle of vinegar, or there is a recognition that the selection will enable the agent to better realize whatever end he has in view. The alternatives are there, and they are real in the only sense in which they can be real. But they are not real in the sense of their being equally eligible--which is the sense in which the Indeterminist uses the word. For that would destroy choice altogether. Unless a selection is made because certain things offer greater attractions than other things to the agent, no intelligible meaning can be attached to such a word as "Choice." We should have a mere blind explosion of energy, the direction taken no more involving choice than the stone's path down a hillside. And if the "Will" chooses between alternatives because one is more desirable than the other, its "freedom" (in the Indeterminist sense) is sacrificed, and the selection is correspondingly determined. There can be no real choice in the absence of a determinative influence exercised by one of the things chosen.

But it is urged that this line of reasoning does not explain the feeling of possibility that we have at the moment of action. I think it explains possibility as it explains choice, provided we allow facts to determine the meaning of words instead of torturing facts to suit certain forms of language. If by possibility we mean that under identical conditions, other things than those which actually occur are possible, then this may be confidently met with a flat denial. If, on the other hand, it is meant that by varying the conditions other possibilities become actualities, this is a statement that to a Determinist is self-evident. As a matter of fact, there are only two senses in which the word "possibility" may be rightly used, and neither sense yields any evidence against Determinism.

One of these meanings is simply an expression of our own ignorance on the matter that happens to be before us. If I am asked what kind of weather we are likely to have a month hence, I should reply that it is equally possible the day may be dry or wet, bright or dull. I do not mean to imply that had I adequate knowledge it would not be as easy to predict the kind of weather on that date as it is to predict the position of Neptune. It is simply an expression of my own ignorance. But, as Spinoza pointed out, possibility narrows as knowledge grows. To complete ignorance anything is possible because the course of events is unknown. As a comprehension of natural causation develops, people speak less of what may possibly occur, and more of what will occur. Possibility here has no reference to the course of events, only to our knowledge, or want of knowledge, concerning their order. To say that it is possible for a man to do either this or that is, so far as a spectator is concerned, only to say that our knowledge concerning the man's whole nature is not extensive enough, or exact enough for us to predict what he will do. Nor is the case altered if instead of an outsider, it is the agent himself who is incapable of prediction. For all that amounts to is the assertion that the agent is ignorant of the relative strength of desires that may be aroused under a particular conjuncture of circumstances.

The second sense of "possibility" depends upon our ability to imagine conditions not actually present at the moment of action. By a trick of imagination I can picture myself acting differently, or, on looking back, I can see that I might have acted differently. But in either case I have altered in thought the conditions that actually existed at the moment of action. Generally, all it means is that with a number of conflicting desires present, I am conscious that a very slight variation in the relative strength of these desires would result in a different course of conduct. And the conditions affecting conduct are so complex and so easily varied that it is small wonder there is lacking in this instance that sense of inevitability present when one is dealing with physical processes. But the essential question is not whether a slight change of conditions would produce a different result, but whether under identical conditions two opposite courses of action are equally possible? And this is not only untrue in fact, it is unthinkable, as a formal proposition. Even the old adage, "There, but for the grace of God, go I," while recognizing a different possibility, also recognized that a variation in the factors--the elimination of the grace of God--is essential if the possibility was to become an actuality. That the sense of possibility implies more than this may be safely denied, let who will make the opposite affirmation.