Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/390

374 fact of deliberation; namely, that the mechanical series of caused events, which Necessitarianism must assume, is interrupted and perhaps modified. He, therefore, succeeds in evading the issue and precipitates another and graver problem, making the facts of experience to support man's inability to do otherwise than he does, and assuming meanwhile that his ability to choose another alternative is a condition of freedom. Here, however, we demur to this assumption and propose to maintain that such an ability is the ratio cognoscendi, but not the ratio essendi of freedom, while we regard it as the ratio essendi of responsibility. This gives us three questions to consider: first, the relation of deliberation to "motives," and of "motives " to volition; second, the function of inhibition, which makes deliberation possible; and, third, the relation between freedom and responsibility.

There is a class of actions which we call "our own" and which are motivated by reflex impulses and instincts. As "motives" of conduct, instincts are supposed to be outside of our consciousness or deliberate intention. Reflex action, perhaps, never obtains the credit of being instigated by motives except as external stimuli may be given that name. Yet, since modern psychology considers such action as the original type of all our later modes of activity, it presents us with a phenomenon which very largely determines our conception of the relation between "motives" and conduct, even when we assume other than external stimuli as the cause or occasion of such conduct. This we shall observe in a moment. In the case of the instincts we neither conceive external stimuli as the sufficient cause of the action initiated by them, nor intelligent choice as the condition of it. It is but one step to the consideration of emotions and desires as the motives of volition. Assuming instinctive impulses as the blind initiatives of volition, we have attributed neither freedom nor responsibility to agents governed by them; and then passing from these to conduct under the influence of emotion or desire, which are either expressions of instinctive impulse or necessary consequents of our nature and at the same time the "motives" or causes of volition, we very naturally carry with us the presumption that the volition excludes deliberation and choice between