Henry Herbert Williams

“ He limits the possession of freedom to Adam, the first man, who, by abusing his prerogative, has corrupted the human race. Man as he now is cannot do otherwise than evil. Inherited incapacity for the choice of good is the punishment for Adam's misuse of freedom. The possibility of redemption depends upon the bestowal of Divine Grace, which, because it is in no instance deserved, can be awarded or withdrawn without injustice. And because Adam's choice necessitates punishment it follows that in some instances Divine Grace can never be bestowed. ”

“ If the question be asked “Where is the evidence for this alleged freedom to choose between alternatives?” the appeal is always made to the witness of the moral consciousness itself. No one, it is said, who ever feels remorse for the committal of a wrong act can honestly avoid the admission that at the moment when the act was committed he could have acted otherwise. No one at the moment of action is ever aware that his will is being necessitated. What he is clearly conscious of is the power to choose. ”

“ These difficulties arise quite naturally from the obligation, which metaphysicians, theologians, moral philosophers, men of science, and psychologists alike recognize, to give an account, consistent with their theories, of the relation of man's power of deliberate and purposive activity to the rest of the universe. In the main, no doubt, the problem is a metaphysical problem, and has its origin in the effort to reconcile that belief in man's freedom which is regarded by the unsophisticated moral consciousness as indisputable, with a belief in a universe governed by rational and necessary laws. ”

“ Thomas Aquinas, for example, develops the Platonic argument which proves the dependence of the will upon the intellect and makes the identification of morality with knowledge. Freedom exists for Thomas, if it exists at all, only as the power of choosing what is necessarily determined by the intellect to be choice worthy, the various possibilities of choice being themselves presented by the understanding to the will. And though in a certain sense Divine foreknowledge is compatible upon his view with human freedom, the freedom with which men act is itself the product of Divine determination. ”

“ The libertarian is not pledged to the belief that acts which alone exhibit real freedom are isolated acts which depend upon a complete change of character, a change which is in no sense continuous with, and is in no kind of relation to, the series of successive changes which make up an individual's mental and moral history. It is true that a consistent advocate of indeterminism must deny that the will is determined by motives, and must admit that no reason can finally be given for the individual's choice beyond the act of choice itself. ”

“ Consciousness and especially self-consciousness, can never be explained upon hypotheses adequate only to explain the blind working of the unconscious world. But the insistence of idealist writers upon the relation of the world of nature to conscious intelligence, and especially to a universal consciousness realizing itself throughout the history of individuals, rendered it alike impossible to deny altogether some influence of environment upon character, and to regard the history of individual willing selves as consisting in isolated and unconnected acts of choice. ”

“ It is not enough merely to repel the incursions of physiological science, armed with hypotheses and theories valid enough in their own sphere, upon the domain of consciousness. If the attack is to be finally repulsed it will be imperatively necessary for the libertarian to maintain that no full explanation of the physical universe can ever gain assent which does not take account of the reality and influence within the material world of human power of initiative and freedom. ”

“ But the materialism of modern times is more subtle than that of Hobbes. And the determinism of modern science no longer consists in a crude denial of the reality of conscious processes, or an attempt to explain them as only a sublimated form of matter and its movements; it is content to admit the relative independence of the world of consciousness, while it maintains that laws and hypotheses sufficient to explain material processes may be extended to and will be discovered to be valid of the changing sequences of conscious states of mind. ”

“ Humanitarian moralists, who hesitate to believe in the retributive theory of punishment because, as they think, its aim is not the criminal's future well-being but merely the vindication through pain of an outrage upon the moral law which the criminal need never have committed, might welcome a theory which urges that the sole aim of punishment should be the exercise of an influence determining the criminal's future conduct for his own or the social good. ”

“ But the real strength of the libertarian position is to be found in the fact that consciousness is capable of distinguishing ends at all. Whenever, for example, there is an admission on the part of any individual that in any previous act he made the attainment of pleasure his end rather than the performance of duty, there is also a tacit admission that he might have acted otherwise. And the existence of penitence and remorse is not merely a sign of the emergence in consciousness of elements in character nobler than and opposed to those tendencies which once held sway. ”

“ Nor, finally, is the last defensive position of scientific determinism—the theory, namely, that the freedom of the will is incompatible with the doctrine of the conservation of energy—to be accepted without question. That doctrine, if it is to possess cogency as a proof of the impossibility of the libertarian position, must assume that the amount of energy sufficient to account for physical and psychical changes is constant and invariable in quantity, an assumption which no scientific investigator is competent to prove. ”

“ So long as libertarians contend that what alone possesses moral value is unmotived choice, acts of will of which no explanation can be given save the arbitrary hat of individual selves at the moment of decision, it is not difficult for determinists to exhibit the absurdities to which their arguments lead. ”

“ Any proof, in the scientific sense, that a man's acts are due to his power of free initiative would be from the nature of the case impossible. For, inasmuch as scientific proof depends upon the evidence of causality, such efforts after scientific demonstration would end only by bringing either the man's whole personality or some element in it within the sequence of the chain of natural causes and effects, under the domination of that natural necessity from which as a conscious being he is free. ”

“ Moral conduct was, according to Socrates, the result of knowledge while it is strictly impossible to do wrong knowingly. Vice, therefore, is the result of ignorance and to this extent Socrates is a determinist. But the subsequent speculations of Aristotle upon the extent to which ignorance invalidates responsibility, though they seem to assume man's immediate consciousness of freedom, do not in reality amount to very much more than an analysis of the conditions ordinarily held sufficient to constitute voluntary or involuntary action. ”

“ The Christian doctrine of the Creation at once challenged the pantheistic presuppositions of Hellenic thought and reinforced the belief already existing in will as a real cause. At the same time the dualism involved in the simultaneous acceptance of an optimistic account of the origin and nature of the universe (such as is implied in Christian theology) and a belief in the reality of moral evil witnessed to by the Christian doctrine of Redemption, intensified the difficulties already felt concerning man's responsibility and God's omnipotence. ”

“ On the contrary, a belief that conduct necessarily results upon the presence of certain motives, and that upon the application of certain incentives, whether of pain or pleasure, upon the presence of certain stimuli whether in the shape of rewards or punishments, actions of a certain character will necessarily ensue, would seem to vindicate the rationality of ordinary penal legislation, if its aim be deterrent or reformatory, to a far greater extent than is possible upon the libertarian hypothesis. ”

“ The science of morality must be content in its search for causes to recognize the rationality of choice as a real determining agent in human affairs. And no account of the psychology of human action which regards conduct as due to self-determination, but leaves open the question whether the self is free to choose is, so it is argued, capable of providing an adequate theory of the admitted facts of moral consciousness. ”

“ And if freedom of choice be a possibility at all, it must in future be regarded as the prerogative of a man's whole personality, exhibited continuously throughout the development of his character, displayed to some extent in all conscious conative processes, though especially apparent in crises necessitating deliberate and serious purpose. ”

“ But it was inevitable that the enormous advances made by the physical and other sciences in modern times should bring with them a reasoned attempt to bring the phenomena of consciousness within the sphere controlled by physical laws and natural necessity. There will never perhaps in any period of the world's history be wanting advocates of materialism, who find in the sensible the only reality. ”

“ For whatever may have been the character of the individual in the past, it is possible upon the libertarian view that by the exercise of his freedom he has brought about in himself a complete change of character: he may be now the exact opposite in character of what he was then. ”

“ The doctrine of self-determination, advocated by T. H. Green and idealist writers of his school, has little or nothing in common with the doctrine that the self manifests its freedom in unmotived acts of will. The advocates of self-determination maintain that conduct is never determined, in the sense in which, e.g. movements in the physical world are determined, because man in virtue of his self-consciousness has a power of distinguishing himself from, even while he identifies himself with, a purely natural object of desire ”

“ While it is not easy to avoid the suspicion that a choice of which nothing can be predicated, which is guided by no motive, influenced by no desire, which is due neither to the natural display of character nor to the influence of environment, is either merely fortuitous or the product of a philosophical theory. ”

“ But, nevertheless, the new light thrown upon the unity of the self and the more careful and accurate scrutiny made by recent psychologists of the phenomena of decision have rendered it no longer possible either for determinists to deny the fact of choice (whatever be their theory as to its nature) or for libertarians to regard the self or the will as isolated from and unaffected by other mental constituents and antecedents, and hence, by an appeal to wholly fictitious entities, to prove the truth of freedom. ”

“ The timeless foreknowledge of the Deity foresees human actions as contingent, not as causally determined. But when Augustine is concerned to reconcile the reality of individual freedom with humanity's universal need of redemption and with the absolute voluntariness of Divine Grace, he is constrained to contradict most of those postulates of which in his advocacy, of libertarianism he was an eager champion. ”

“ If, however, it be argued by libertarians that no explanation is possible of the manner in which the self or the will makes its decisions and inclines to this motive or to that, while they still assert the independent existence of the self or will, then they are undoubtedly open to the retort of their opponents that upon such a theory no rational explanation of conduct will be possible. ”

“ It can easily be shown that men do as a matter of fact attach moral adjectives to environment, temperamental tendencies, natural endowments, instinctive desires, in a word to all or most of those forces moulding character, from which, according to libertarians, the individual's freedom of choice should be clearly distinguished and separated, and to which it can be and is frequently opposed. ”

“ Moreover, remorse and penitence are witnesses in the wrongdoer to the truth of the interpretation. On the other hand we have no such immediate consciousness of the necessity which is said to control our wills. We sharply distinguish that freedom which is the prerogative of human action from the necessary causation discoverable in nature. ”

“ Just as the phenomena of sudden conversion, complete revolutions of character occurring to outward appearance in a momentary space of time, are no valid argument against determinism—they may be due to the sudden emergence of elements in life and character long concealed—so what locks like the orderly and necessary development of a character growing and exhibiting its activity in accordance with fixed laws may in reality be due to innumerable secret struggles and momentous decisions, acts of choice of which only the results are outwardly apparent. ”

“ It is true that the precise relation between the activities of human wills and other forms of activity in the natural world is a highly speculative problem and one with which the ordinary man is not immediately concerned. It is true also that the ordinary moral consciousness accepts without hesitation the postulate of freedom, and is unaware of, or imperfectly acquainted with, the speculative difficulties that surround its possibility. ”

“ The further question whether the voluntary acts for which a man is ordinarily held responsible are really the outcome of his freedom of choice, is barely touched upon, and most of the problems which surround the attempt to distinguish human agency from natural and necessary causation and caprice or chance are left unsolved. For Aristotle remained content with a successful demonstration of the dependence of “voluntariness” as an attribute of conduct upon knowledge and human personality. ”