Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/780

746 text-book on "Mental Philosophy," postulates that "freedom of will is power to do as I like," and that "the will is free when I can will to do just what I please"—seemingly unconscious that the whole question is why "I like" or why "I please." Others make both free-will and necessity utterly unfathomable mysteries, and then choose between them. Sir William Hamilton, while admitting that freedom of the will is "wholly incomprehensible"; that we "can not conceive a free volition"; that we are "utterly unable speculatively to understand how moral liberty is possible to man or God"—insists, nevertheless, that the doctrine of necessity is equally unthinkable, because we can not conceive an infinite regression of causes to all eternity; and then finds in "our consciousness of an uncompromising law of duty" a decisive proof of free-will. This is certainly to claim for consciousness of duty, as a witness, a superior function to that which it fills as an agent; for if it has proved again and again an unreliable guide to conduct—leading Calvin to burn Servetus, the Inquisition to torture heretics, and the Puritans to hang witches and Quakers—it is not easy to see why so imperfect a guide to action should be of such supreme value as a testimony to freedom of action. Nor is it clear how a Christian philosopher should have found in our consciousness of the moral law an evidence for a "wholly incomprehensible" theory, superior in force to that which the theistic hypothesis supplies to the doctrine of universal causation.

As it stands to-day, the question is very nearly one between science and theology. On the one hand, science asserts that to the law of causation there are no known exceptions; that mind as well as matter is subject to law. Theology, on the contrary, clings to the freedom of volition as the apparent foundation of morality; and insists that each man is a new cause—a new, unconditioned, responsible factor in the conduct of the universe; and this is the view most generally accepted by the world. The reason is not far to seek: it lies in the teaching of theology regarding man's future state. We instinctively feel that, if upon the nature of our actions depends the awful fate of unending happiness or misery in another existence, justice to the creature demands that his liberty be undetermined in any way by the Creator. Now, theology for the past eighteen centuries has taught, as it yet teaches, this doctrine of eternal punishment. While at the present day it is rarely pushed forward into the old-time prominence, it stands in the creed of every orthodox church; it is yet an essential element of Christian faith. Let us look at it for a moment as presented by a theologian, the greatest that America ever produced, the Rev. Jonathan Edwards. The extracts quoted are from the edition of his sermons published in 1879:

You have often seen a spider when thrown into the midst of a fierce fire; and have observed how immediately it yields to the force of the flames, and the fire takes possession of it, and at once it becomes full of fire, and is burned into