Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/393

No. 4.] free, and the presence of efficiency in that cause, at the same time, brings the volition under the general law of causality, but with the limitation, due to the fact that the motive is a final cause also, that the causality is subjective or internal, and not objective or external. It is the latter kind of cause or "motive" that excludes deliberation. The former admits it, and the possibility of deliberation insures the existence of action quite distinct and independent of the law of mechanical causation however otherwise we may choose to consider it. The main question then is to determine how this deliberation is possible, especially when we observe or suppose that the first members of the series of phenomena on the way to volition are necessary events, subject to a purely mechanical law of causation.

The Necessitarian, as we know, supports himself upon the real or supposed fact that the early stages of action, preceding what is properly called volition, are an uninterrupted causal series, and the question is whether we ever really get beyond that stage. It will not be necessary to state at any length the nature of the earliest muscular movements of organic structures. We shall admit for the sake of argument, although the claim may either be contested or require modification, that the primitive actions of all animal life are instinctive, reflex, or automatic. Such actions are never regarded as free actions by either party to the controversy, although this assumption also may have its proviso. But they are certainly unconscious actions and do not involve responsibility, besides having the fundamental characteristic of being the final term of a distinctly causal series in which purely mechanical law seems to have the predominating agency. Now, if with later speculation we assume that all subsequent conduct is but a complex adjustment of instincts and reflexes, carrying with it the characteristic of the actions from which they originated, all volitions must have the mark of necessity. But in order to show how the transition from the lower to the higher order of actions involves the introduction of new elements we represent the reflexes by the following diagram, indicating a mechanical series of events, of which the first term is stimulus and the last a muscular movement.