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principles of Hume. In particular, he attacked the notion of " constraint " suggested in the words necessity and necessarianism, whereas only sequence is affirmed. Given a perfect knowledge of character and motives, we could infallibly predict action. The alleged con- sciousness of freedom is disputed. We merely feel that we choose, not that we could choose the opposite. Moreover the notion of free will is unintelligible. The truth is that for the Sensationalist School, who believe the mind to be merely a series of mental states, free will is an absurdity. On the other side, Reid, and Stewart, and Hamilton, of the Scotch School, with Mansel, Martineau, W. J. Ward, and other Spiritualist thinkers of Great Britain, energetically defended free will against the disciples of Hume. They maintained that a more careful analj'sis of volition justified the argument from consciousness, that the universal con- viction of mankind on such a fact may not be set aside as an illusion, that morality cannot l^e founded on an act of self-deception, that all languages contain terms involving the notion of free will and all laws assume its existence, and that the attempt to render necessarian- ism less objectionable by calling it determinism does not diminish the fatalism involved in it.

The truth that phenomenalism logically involves determinism is strikingly illustrated in Kant's treat- ment of the question. His well-known division of all reality into phenomena and noumena is his key to this problem also. The world as it appears to us, the world of plienomena, including our own actions and mental states, can only be conceived under the form of time and subject to the category of causality, and therefore everythmg in the world of experience happens alto- gether according to the laws of nature; that is, all our actions are rigidly determined. But, on the other hand, freedom is a necessary postulate of morality: "Thou canst, because thou oughtest." The solution of the antinomy is that the determinism concerns only the empirical or phenomenal world. There is no ground for denying liberty to the Ding an sich. We may believe in transcendental freedom, that we are noumenally free. Since, moreover, the belief that I am free and that I am a free cause, is the foundation stone of religion and morality, I must believe in this postulate. Kant thus gets over the antinoniy by con- fining freedom to the world of noumena, which lie out- side the form of time and the category of causality, whilst he affirms necessity of the sensible world, bound by the chain of causality. Apart from the general ob- jection to Kant's system, a grave difficulty here lies in the fact that all man's conduct — his whole moral life as it is revealed in actual experience either to others or himself — pertains in this view to the phenomenal world and so is rigidly determined.

Though much acute philosophical and psychological analysis has been brought to bear on the prol^lcm dur- ing the last century, it cannot be said that any great additional light has been shed over it. In Germany, Schopenhauer made will the noumenal basis of the world and adopted a pessimistic theory of the universe, denying free will to be justified by either ethics or psychology. On the other hand, Lotze, in many re- spects perhaps the acutcst thinker in Germany since Kant, was an energetic defender of moral liberty. Among recent psychologists in America Professors James and Ladd are both advocates of freedom, though laying more stress for positive proof on the ethical than on the psychological evidence.

The Argument. — As the main features of the doc- trine of free will have been sketched in the history of the problem, a very brief account of tlic argument for moral freedom will now suffice. Will viewed as a free power is defiiird by defenders of free will as the capac- ity of self-delcnuiriiilion. By sel/ is here un<lerstood not a single present mental state (James), nor a series of mental states (Hume and Mill), but an abiding rational being which is the subject and cause of these

states. We should distinguish between (1) spontane- ous acts, those proceeding from an internal principle (e. g. the growth of plants and impulsive movements of animals); (2) voluntary acts in a wide sense, those proceeding from an internal principle with apprehen- sion of an end (e. g. all conscious desires); and, finally, (3) those voluntary in the strict sense, that is, deliber- ate or free acts. In such, there is a self-conscious advertence to our own causality, or an awareness that we are choosing the act, or acquiescing in the desire of it. Spontaneous acts and desires are opposed to co- action or external compulsion, but they are not there- by morally free acts. 'They may still be the necessary outcome of the nature of the agent as, e. g. the actions of lower animals, of the insane, of yoimg children, and many impulsive acts of mature life. The essential feature in free volition is the element of choice — the I'is clediin, as St. Thomas calls it. There is a concom- itant interrogative awareness in the form of the query, "shall I acquiesce or shall I resist? Shall I do it or something else?", and the consequent acceptance or refusal, ratification or rejection, though either may be of varying degrees of completeness. It is this act of consent or approval, which converts a mere involun- tary impulse or desire into a free volition and makes me accountable for it. A train of thought or volition dehberately initiated or acquiesced in, but afterward continued merely spontaneously without reflective advertence to our elective adoption of it, remains free in cciusii, and I am therefore responsible for it, though actually the process has passed into the department of merely spontaneous or automatic activity. A large part of the operation of carrjang out a resolution, once the decision is made, is commonly of this kind. The question of free will may now be stated thus: "Given all the conditions requisite for eliciting an act of will, except the act itself, does the act necessarily follow?" Or, "Are all my volitions the inevitable outcome of my character and the motives acting on me at the time?" Fatalists, necessarians, determinists say "Yes". Libertarians, indeterminists or anti-deter- minists say "No. The mind or soul in deliberate ac- tions is a free cause. Given all the conditions requisite for action, it can either act or abstain from action. It can, and sometimes does, exercise its own causality against the weight of character and present motives." Proof. — The evidence usually adduced at the pres- ent day is of two kinds, ethical and psychological — though even the ethical argument is itself psychologi- cal. (1) Ethical Argument. — It is argued that neces- sarianism or determinism in any form is in conflict with the chief moral notions and convictions of man- kind at large. The actual imiversality of such moral ideas is indisputable. Duty, moral obligation, respon- sibility, merit, justice signify notions universally pres- ent in the consciousness of normally developed men. Further, these notions, as universally imderstood, imply that man is really master of some of his acts, that he is, at least at times, capable of self-determina- tion, that all his volitions are not the inevitable out^ come of his circumstances. When I say that I ought not to have performed some forbidden act, that it was my duty to olaey the law, I imply that I could have done so. The judgment of all men is the same on this point. When we say that a person is justly held re- sponsible for a crime, or that he deserves praise or reward for an heroic act of self-sacrifice, we mean that he was author and cause of that act in such fashion that he had it in his power not to perform the act. We exempt the insane or the cliild, because we believe them devoid of moral frecdum and <letermined inevit- ably by the motives which ha[)pcni'd to act on them. So true is this, (hat determinists have had to admit that, the meaning of these terms will, according to their view, have to be changed. But this is to admit that their theory is in direct conflict with universal psychological facts. It thereby stands disproved.