Free will

“ But free will is not only an illusion; it is a word that has really no meaning. It is a word invented by theologians and legislators; and to try to disprove its existence is but wrestling with a windmill. ”

“ I am neither a student nor a philosopher, but I would like some convinced exponent of the doctrine of Free Will to explain how we are anything but the helpless victims of the consequences of the acts of other people. ”

“ The significance of the traditional discussion of free will is that it reflects precisely a separation of moral activity from nature and the public life of men.
One has to turn from moral theories to the general human struggle for political, economic and religious liberty, for freedom of thought, speech, assemblage and creed, to find significant reality in the conception of freedom of will. Then one finds himself out of the stiflingly close atmosphere of an inner consciousness and in the open-air world. ”

“ To stubborn willers this I'll tell,
It's all free grace, and all free will.
6 Those that despise, grow harder still;
Those that adhere, he turns their will;
And thus despisers sink to hell,
While those that hear in glory dwell. ”

“ The true freedom is when, by the direction of our will, we change 'must' into 'I delight to do Thy will.' So we are set free from the bondage and burden of a law that is external, and is not loved, and are brought into the liberty of, for dear love's sake, doing the will of the beloved. ”

“ Our claim to free will is a righteous claim; will can only be free, whether its object be right or [137] wrong; it is a matter of choice and there is no choice but free choice. But we are apt to translate free will into free thought. We allow ourselves to sanction intellectual anarchism and forget that it rests with the will to order the thoughts of the mind fully as much as the feelings of the heart or the lusts of the flesh. Our thoughts are not our own and we are not free to think as we choose. ”

“ Not only our free will, but that sense of right and wrong by which our free will should be governed, and which can always be called up from the lucid depths of the bosom, is an essential support against every trial. Mighty of itself, it leads us, as an unfailing consequence, to rely principally for aid on a still mightier Auxiliary—the eternal and beneficent Dispenser of good and evil. ”

“ To proceed immediately to concrete examples, cast a glance at the belief in 'free will,' demolished with such specious persuasiveness recently by the skilful hand of Professor Fullerton. [Footnote: Popular Science Monthly, N. Y., vols. lviii and lix.] When a common man says that his will is free, what does he mean? He means that there are situations of bifurcation inside of his life in which two futures seem to him equally possible, for both have their roots equally planted in his present and his past. ”

“ Then, again, while affirming that man is a free agent, you at the same time claim that every effect must have a cause, or that something cannot come out of nothing. Now, the reconciliation of these two facts has ever defied the reason of mankind. And those that have adopted the belief in free will have confessed that reason did not lead them to that conclusion, but experience. ”

“ Throughout the controversy as to free will that has been carried on among English psychologists this is the way in which the question has been commonly dealt with. The freedom, claimed or denied for the will, has been claimed or denied for it irrespectively of those objects willed, on the nature of which the goodness or badness of the will depends. ”

“ I will be free with the freedom that consists in doing whatever I am inclined to do, from whatever quarter may come the inclination. To do my own will so long as I feel anything to be my will, is to be free, is to live. To all these principles of hell, or of this world—they are the same thing, and it matters nothing whether they are asserted or defended so long as they are acted upon—the Lord, the king, gives the direct lie. ”

“ Lastly, we may ask: To what purpose is our free-will given us, if all souls, good and bad alike, users and abusers of the liberty they had on earth, enter into their long home all of one uniform and spotless hue? ”

“ Now, as on the part of the intellectual apprehension we have intellect and reason, so on the part of the intellectual appetite we have will, and free-will which is nothing else but the power of choice. ”

“ It is a duty for every will to act thus, directly it is a free will; but the fact that there is a free will that makes this act possible is a favor of nature in regard to this faculty, to which freedom is a necessity. Thus an act of virtue judged by the moral sense—by reason—will give us as its only satisfaction the feeling of approbation, because reason can never find more, and seldom finds as much as it requires. ”

“ C. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject and conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state. ”

“ The fact is that the question of free-will is insoluble on strictly psychologic grounds. ”

“ You’re the only creature with free will. How does that make you feel?” ”

“ How far, and in what sense, can action which is determined by motives be said to be free? For a long time the advocates of free-will, in their eagerness to preserve moral responsibility, went so far as to deny all motives as influencing moral action. ”

“ Thus, if free-will be defined the power of doing what a person desires or wills to do, of deliberating, suspending, choosing, &c. or of resisting the motives of sensuality, ambition, resentment, &c. Free-will, under certain limitations, is not only consistent with the doctrine of mechanism, but even flows from it; since it appears from the foregoing theory, that voluntary and semi-voluntary powers of calling up ideas, of exciting and restraining affections, and of performing and suspending actions, arise from the mechanism of our natures. ”

“ I said, “about conscience, about moral responsibility, about free will. To ninety nine out of a hundred there is no such thing. Only the hundredth has a will that is free, and, for good or evil, he makes slaves of the wills of the ninety and nine. ”

“ Free will again is the sovran motion of an intelligent soul. Choice is desire accompanied by deliberation, or deliberation accompanied by desire for things that lie in our power; for in choosing we desire that which we have deliberately preferred. ”

“ Lastly, from the use of the words free will, no liberty can be inferred of the will, desire, or inclination, but the liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to do. ”

“ "I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second "Essais" and see no reason why his definition of Free Will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. ”

“ V. The problem of free will is so intimately bound up with the analysis of causation that, old as it is, we need not despair of obtaining new light on it by the help of new views on the notion of cause. The free-will problem has, at one time or another, stirred men’s passions profoundly, and the fear that the will might not be free has been to some men a source of great unhappiness. ”

“ How wonderful it is to do your will! For that is freedom. There is nothing else that ever should be called by freedom's name. Unless you do your will you are not free. And would God leave His Son without what he has chosen for himself? God but ensured that you would never lose your will when He gave you His perfect Answer. Hear It now, that you may be reminded of His Love and learn your will. God would not have His Son made prisoner to what he does not want. He joins with you in willing you be free. And to oppose Him is to make a choice against yourself, and choose that you be bound. ”

“ This granted, I say that, when any one can, by the direction or choice of his mind, prefer the existence of one action to the non-existence of that action and to the contrary, that is to say, when he can make it exist or not exist, according to his will, then he is free. And we can scarcely see how it could be possible to conceive a being more free than one who is capable of doing what he wills. ”

“ We ask, How can the mind be free? and they tell us, When the body may be so! We inquire about an attribute of the spiritual principle within, and they turn us off with an answer respecting an accident of the material principle without! An ignoratio elenchi more flagrant—a mistaking of the question more palpable—it is surely not possible to conceive. Yet this definition of the freedom of the will, though so superficially false, is precisely that which has found the most general acceptance among necessitarians. ”

“ This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries. ”

“ Let us admit freely the fallacy of the old axiom of human free-will and endeavor to understand that what we consider as free will is nothing else than the very variable faculty of our brain, more or less developed in different individuals, of adapting its activity to that of its environment, and especially to that of other men. ”

“ And if there be no free will, how does he judge the world?’ And, as St. Bernard says, in the commencement of his book On Grace and Free Will, ‘Take away free will, and there will be nothing to be saved; take away grace, and there will then be nothing from which salvation can come.’ We have had regard to both of them; lest, if we denied the existence of freedom in the will, we should encourage the sloth and listlessness of men ”

“ Are we to suppose that the Free Will predicated of man is an universal possession of all? If it is a theoretical question, it must be granted that all men's wills are free. But if it is a practical question as to the strength of the Will as opposed to external forces, and held to be free in proportion to its relative strength of self-assertion, surely Free Will is a variable quality. ”

“ The present interpretation of the character and nature of the will, and its inclusion as a physical energy, has a distinctly important bearing upon one of the most bitterly disputed points in the whole history of philosophy, viz., the question of the Freedom of the Will.
As is well known, there are two opposing views upon this subject—held by opposite schools—the theory of Determinism, on the one hand, and of Free Will on the other. The Libertarians assert that our wills are free—we having power of choice in all our actions. ”

“ Hence the spiritualistic conception of the free will implies that every human being, in spite of the fact that their internal and external conditions are necessarily predetermined, should be able to come to a deliberate decision by the mere fiat of his or her free will, so that, even though the sum of all the causes demands a no, he or she can decide in favor of yes, and vice versa. ”

“ The free will, as having a being in space (Daseyn) , is the objective mind, right, and the state. In right, morals and the state, the freedom and rationality, which are chosen by the will, take on an objective form. Every natural determination and impulse now becomes moralized, and comes up to view again as ethical institute, as right and duty (the sexual impulse now appears as marriage, and the impulse of revenge as civil punishment, &c.) ”

“ For if the free will is but an illusion of our internal being, it is not a real faculty possessed by the human mind. Free will would imply that the human will, confronted by the choice of making voluntarily a certain determination, has the last decisive word under the pressure of circumstances contending for and against this decision ”

“ I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats. It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free. ”

“ But, by one escape or another, the will, the soul, goes free. Sooner or later, every human being comes to know and prove in his own estate that freedom of will is the only freedom for which there are no chains possible, and that in Nature's whole reign of law nothing is so largely provided for as liberty. Sooner or later, all this must come. But, if it comes later, it comes through clouds of antagonism, and after days of fight, and is hard-bought. ”

“ Granted that we often should have acted differently, if we had chosen differently, yet it is not true that we have Free Will, unless it is also often true in such cases that we could have chosen differently. ”

“ They deem that the explanation of Free Will is included in an explanation of Will, and therefore they only deal incidentally and imperfectly with self-rule. The confusion arises from the term Free Will having two meanings—the theoretic or scientific one, as opposed to Determinism, and the practical one, as implying the power of self-rule, choice, effort, and determination. ”