Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/359

 THE SOCIAL WILL 343

ondly, nobody can deny at least in the case of man the fact of consciousness. Moreover, thirdly, if we may trust psychol- ogy, consciousness is always incident to existing activity, it is always an accompaniment of what is doing, and in its meaning or content is determined by the conditions of what is doing. Con- sciousness is no message from another world, whether as a mere memory out of a dead past or as a present perception of wholly external things, or as a sudden vision of an unborn, unrelated future ; in its content and in its function it is here and now, even its memories and its foresights being relations of the present. If we may even speak of it at all as a thing by itself the abstrac- tion and the special name being perhaps necessary for descrip- tion it is so essential to the activity that it inseparably accompanies as to be at once conditioned by and always condi- tioning that activity. In summary, then, these are the facts with which we of today have to deal : adaptation ; conscious- ness ; and activity, that is adaptive of course, to which con- sciousness is vital, of which consciousness is no indifferent, gratuitous, epi-phenornenal accompaniment ; and upon these facts the foregoing definition of will is based. Will is, to repeat, adaptive activity that is at once conscious of its meaning and con- strained by its consciousness.

But not free will ? Yes, free will, really free will, substan- tially free will. When has freedom been recklessness ? How are men free when the will can be taken for the deed or when the thing done or doing or to be done can be treated according to convenience as external or not external to the will, as intended or as not intended ? Freedom is not in being able to do or not to do something that was never done or ever done before, or to escape or appropriate the consequences of some- thing that was done or not done in the past. Neither the commission nor the omission of past activity or of future activ- ity can make freedom or unmake it. Only, first, in having something doing now, the more mechanical it is the better, and then in at once knowing what it is and being a party to it, is man or any creature free. Enough for freedom, the free- dom of your will or the freedom of mine, if meeting our world