Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/547

533 The expression 'freedom of the will,' as has often been pointed out, is not so much incorrect as tautological. That all volitions are determined by motives, that is, ideal presentations which are pleasurable, and that such motives owe their existence to the character and past experience of the individual, does not militate against their freedom in the least. Let us take an example in the ethical sphere. Suppose a man has alternative courses of action, with the probable results of each, presented to his mind. A merchant, for instance, is conscious that he must either commit an act of dishonesty or suffer a serious loss to his business. What he will do depends on his character, and that is constituted by his inherited disposition as modified and developed by the complex influences of family life, education, and social and business environment. Could we know all these antecedent circumstances in their entirety, we would have all needful materials for judging what the man's conduct would be under the given circumstances. But none the less the individual is a free agent. His freedom means just this, that he is not a mere machine, without consciousness and therefore without volition, but that he has a purpose in view, an idea of which he desires the realization. The product of the man, his conduct, is as certainly predetermined as is the manufactured article that the machine turns out when a particular material has been supplied to it; but the man is a conscious mechanism, he knows what will be the result of such and such movements, and why they will subserve an end that he desires better than certain other movements would do; or it may be, that, having two or more desirable ends before his mental vision, he recognizes the superior attractiveness of one of them. Only so far as the act is thus consciously performed, only in so far as it is a product of a reasoning process, can we call it voluntary or free. A man is not a free agent when he does something to all intents unconsciously, as in the case of somnambulism, or in making reflex motions; he is only very imperfectly free when his act is done with a low degree of consciousness, as when he performs some habitual action, as we sometimes say, 'without thinking'; he is only perfectly free when,—having before him an ideal