Determinism

“ Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom. ”

“ I do not dwell here upon the disastrous lapse in determinist logic. Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man. ”

“ As your environment they must be accepted as inevitable, because they are inevitable. But as centres themselves they have their own responsibility: which is not yours. The historic question: 'Have we free-will, or are we the puppets of determinism?' enters now. As a question it is fascinating and futile. It has never been, and it never will be, settled. The theory of determinism cannot be demolished by argument. But in his heart every man, including the most obstinate supporter of the theory, demolishes it every hour of every day. ”

“ Such is this depth of the problem of determinism—howe'er we solve it, we are brothers if we know it to be a problem. No man on either side awakens any sense of intellectual respect in me who regards the solution as a cock-sure and immediately given thing, and wonders that any one should hesitate to choose his party. You find fault with my deterministic disjunction, "pessimism or subjectivism," and ask why I forgot the third way of "objective moral activity," etc. ”

“ But there is a problem, an issue of fact and not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often decided without discussion in one sentence,—nay, in one clause of a sentence,—by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their efforts to show what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night. ”

“ Science may endeavour to tie us down to a belief in universal and rigid determinism, but the human spirit revolts from the acceptance of such a view, and acclaims, to some degree at least, the reality of a freedom which cannot be easily reconciled with the determinist doctrines. ”

“ For my own part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply, determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains difficulties that are greater still. ”

“ Determinism is exemplified in Omar Kháyyám's Rubáiyát: “With earth's first clay they did the last man knead, And there of the last harvest sowed the seed; And the first morning of creation wrote What the last dawn of reckoning shall read.”William James, Will to Believe, 145-183, shows that determinism involves pessimism or subjectivism—good and evil are merely means of increasing knowledge. ”

“ One is the eulogistic word freedom, and the other is the opprobrious word chance. The word 'chance' I wish to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.' Its eulogistic associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day insist that they alone are freedom's champions. Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. ”

“ A theory is responsible for such conclusions or consequences as are logically deducible therefrom, but no more. And what we are now concerned with is, first, will Determinism, properly understood, really have the effect{109} feared; and, second, is it possible for Determinism to account adequately for the belief that it is possible to modify other people's character, and in so doing modify our own? ”

“ The analysis of our moral experience shows that true “freedom” means teleological determination. Hence to be “free” and to “will” are ultimately the same thing. Freedom or “self-determination” is genuine but limited, and is capable of variations of degree. § 4. Determinism and Indeterminism both arise from the false assumption that the mechanical postulate of causal determination by antecedents is an ultimate fact. The question then arises whether mental events are an exception to the supposed principle. § 5. Determinism. The determinist arguments stated. ”

“ Our result thus far is, that determinism and freedom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalistic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the definite order characteristic of intelligence; while so far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and freedom proves to be, like determinism, the spontaneous definiteness of active intelligence. ”

“ Instead of indeterminism, determinism is now most widely accepted. According to the latter, every act of the will is of necessity determined by the character of the agent and the motives which render the action desirable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe {162} as a place in which what ought to be is impossible,—in other words, as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. ”

“ In this fashion a serious ambiguity is dissolved and the errors carried with it are removed. Reasonable and well founded is the tendency of those who aim to subordinate the sum total of human events in their course to the rigorous conception of determinism. There is, on the contrary, no reason for confusing this derived, reflex and complex determinism with the determinism of the immediate struggle for existence which is produced and developed on a field not modified by the continued action of labor. ”

“ Finally, if the belief in the uncausedness of volition is essential to morality, the student of physical science has no more to say against that absurdity than the logical philosopher or theologian. Physical science, I repeat, did not invent determinism, and the deterministic doctrine would stand on just as firm a foundation as it does if there were no physical science. ”

“ And though the Stoic doctrine of determinism did not, when applied to moral problems, advance much beyond the reiteration of arguments derived from the universal validity of the principles of causality, nor the Epicurean counter-assertion of freedom avoid the error of regarding chance as a real cause and universal contingency as an explanation of the universe, it was nevertheless a real step forward to perceive the existence of the problem. ”

“ As I wrote yesterday, Determinism seems to be true as things are at present, but even accepting this does not make me any the less a fighter, for it is quite consistent with that philosophy that my determinism is to be something, and the weak periods are only to strengthen me. ”

“ What I wish to urge is that, even if we admit the most extreme claims of determinism and of correlation of mind and brain, still the consequences inimical to what is worth preserving in free will do not follow. The belief that they follow results, I think, entirely from the assimilation of causes to volitions, and from the notion that causes compel their effects in some sense analogous to that in which a human authority can compel a man to do what he would rather not do. ”

“ But if we take advantage of this indifference to reintroduce determinism at the basis of world structure it is because our philosophy predisposes us that way, not because we know of any experimental evidence in its favour. ”

“ Indeterminism signifies pure chance; what place could responsibility have in such a scheme? It would make morality uncertain. Determinism is the postulate of morality as well as of science. We may call a volition free that conforms to all the tendencies of one's nature, one that systematizes or co-ordinates our desires and acts. Such freedom lies at the basis of responsibility. Personality, liberty, finality, systematization, responsibility, define the same general fact: the co-ordination, the teleological unity of psychical elements. ”

“ And as Determinism enables us to read and understand history and life, so it also provides a basis upon which we can work for reform. In the belief that certain influences will produce, in the main, a particular result, we can lay our plans and work{91} with every prospect of ultimate success. Instead of our best endeavours being left at the mercy of an undetermined "will," they take their place as part of the determining influences that are moulding human nature. Every action becomes a portion of the environment with which each has to deal. ”

“ This sort of science is almost the only thing that can with strict propriety be called reactionary. Scientific determinism is simply the primal twilight of all mankind; and some men seem to be returning to it. ”

“ First, it is evident that in the domain of historico-social determinism, the linking of causes to effects, of conditions to the things conditioned, of antecedents to consequents, is never evident at first sight in the subjective determinism of individual psychology. In this last domain it was a relatively easy thing for abstract and formal philosophy to discover, passing above all the baubles of fatalism and free will, the evidence of the motive in every volition, because, in fine, there is no wish without its determining motive. ”

“ The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing to do with this or that psychological detail. It is a quarrel altogether metaphysical. Determinism denies the ambiguity of future volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous. But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate future volitions do mean chance. ”

“ That which precedes the act of the will interests us, ethically, only in so far as it influences the will.
It is a strange assertion, sometimes made, that the consistent Determinist must be a mere spectator of his own and others' lives. As if one could feel no pain or pleasure and no desire to interfere, because one believes life to be subject to law. It is true that theoretical study may weaken practical interest; but Indeterminism is a theory as well as Determinism. ”

“ It is at this point that Determinism lands one in what is apparently an ethical cul-de-sac. If all that is, is the necessary result of all that has been, if nothing different from what does occur could occur, what is the meaning of the sense of power over circumstances that we possess? ”

“ The freedom of the human will is established against determinism in Psychology.460 The difficulties of determinists against this doctrine are for the most part based on misconceptions, or on erroneous and gratuitous assumptions. We may mention two of them here.461 Free activity, they say, would be causeless activity: it would violate the “law of universal causation”. We reply that free activity is by no means causeless activity. The free agent himself is in the fullest and truest sense the efficient cause of his free acts. ”

“ In one sense, paradoxical as it may sound, much of the strenuous modern advocacy of Determinism or semi-Determinism is a kind of inverted acknowledgment of man's consciousness of freedom, viz., where that consciousness appears as the sense of sin. ”

“ Possibilities that fail to get realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which 'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs. ”

“ It is along these lines that we have to look for an explanation of the feeling that we can initiate a reform in character, and of a sense of power in determining events. We start with a sense of power over the course of events—which is interpreted as the equivalent of our ability to initiate absolutely a change in our own character or in that of others. But a little reflection convinces us—particularly if we call ourselves Determinists—that this interpretation is quite erroneous. An absolute beginning is no more conceivable in the mental or moral sphere than it is in the physical world. ”

“ I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a deterministic world implies. The implications I call your attention to are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call judgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in which we do not wish that something might be otherwise ”

“ A very casual study of anti-deterministic literature is enough to show that a great deal of the opposition to a scientific interpretation of human conduct has its origin in a quite wrong conception of what the determinist has in mind when he speaks of the part played by the environment in the determination of conduct. Even writings ostensibly deterministic in aim have not been free from blame in their use of the word. ”

“ We may, then, freely grant the Indeterminist—what he foolishly assumes is inconsistent with the Deterministic position—that environment may be modified by character, that a man is not the creature of circumstances, if we restrict that word to external circumstances, as is so often done. A man, we will say, allowing for the influence of external circumstances, acts according to his character. ”