The subject which we now approach presents at once a problem and a task. The nature of freedom has been keenly debated from the earliest times, and the history of the problem of the will is almost the history of philosophy. The practical question which arises is whether the individual has any power by which the gulf between the natural and the spiritual can be transcended. Can man choose and decide for a spiritual world above that in which he is by nature involved? The revelation of the good must, indeed, precede the activity of man. But at the same time the change cannot merely happen to him. He cannot simply be a passive recipient. The new life must be taken up by his own activity, and be made his by his own decision and acceptance. This responsive activity on the part of man is the task which life presents to the will.
Much obviously depends upon the answer we are able to give to this question. If man has no power of choice, no capacity of self-determination, and is nothing more than a part of the natural world, then the ethical life is at once ruled out of court.
The difficulties connected with the problem of moral freedom resolve themselves mainly into three: a scientific, a psychological, and a theological.
The wonderful progress of the natural sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century has tended to banish the old idea of freedom from the realm of experience. Science, it is maintained, clearly shows that man belongs to a great world-movement, in relation to which his whole life and work are completely determined.
Though even in earlier ages, and especially in Stoic philosophy, this conception of life was not ignored, it is more particularly in recent times, under the influence of the evolutionary theory, that the idea of determination has been applied with relentless insistence to the structure of the soul.
There is, it is alleged, no room for change or spontaneity. Everything, down to the minutest impulse, depends upon something else, and proceeds from a definite cause. The idea of choice is simply the remnant of an unscientific mode of thinking.
It might be sufficient to reply that in thus reducing life and experience to a necessary part of a world-whole, more is surrendered than even science is willing to yield. The freedom which some writers reject in the interests of science they attempt to introduce in an altered form.
Why are these philosophers so anxious to conserve the ethical consequences of life? Is it not because they feel that there is something in man which will not fit into a rigid world-mechanism, and that conduct would cease to have moral worth if life were reduced to a causal series of happenings? But it may be further argued that, if the mechanical conception of life, which reduces the spiritual to the natural, were consistently carried out it would lead not merely to the destruction of the moral life, but to the destruction of science itself.
If man is merely a part of nature, subject entirely to nature's law, then the realities of the higher life--love, self-sacrifice, devotion to ends beyond ourselves--must be radically re-interpreted or regarded simply as illusions.
But it is also true that from this standpoint science itself is an illusion. For if reality lies only in the passing impressions of our sensible nature, the claim of science to find valid truth must end in the denial of the very possibility of knowledge.
Does not the very existence of physical science imply the priority of thought? While in one sense it may be conceded that man is a part of nature, does not the truth, which cannot be gainsaid, that he is aware of the fact, prove a certain priority and power which differentiates him from all other phenomena of the universe? If he is a link in the chain of being, he is at least a link which is conscious of what he is.
He is a being who knows himself, indeed, through the objective world, but also realises himself only as he makes himself its master and the agent of a divine purpose to which all things are contributing, and for which all things exist.
In all our reasoning and endeavour we must start from the unity of the self-conscious soul. Whatever we can either know or achieve, is _our_ truth, _our_ act presented in and through our self-consciousness. It is impossible for us to conceive any standard of truth or object of desire outside of our experience.
As a thinking and acting being man pursues ends, and has the consciousness that they are his own ends, subject to his own choice and control. It is always the self that the soul seeks; and the will is nothing else than the man making and finding for himself another world.
The attempt has recently been made to measure mental states by their physical stimuli and explain mental {85} processes by cerebral reaction. It is true that certain physical phenomena seem to be invariably antecedent to thought, but so far science has been unable to exhibit the form of nexus between these physical antecedents and ideas.
Even if the knowledge of the topography of the brain were immeasurably more advanced than it now is, even though we could observe the vast network of nerve-fibres and filaments of which the brain is composed, and could discern the actual changes in brain-cells under nerve stimulations, we should still be a long way off from understanding the nature and genesis of ideas which can only be known to us as immediate in their own quality.
All that we can ever affirm is that a certain physical excitation is the antecedent of thought. It is illegitimate to say that it is the 'cause' of thought; unless, indeed, the word 'cause' be invested with no other meaning than that which is involved in such a conception. It is, however, in a very general way only, and within an exceedingly narrow range, that such measurement is possible. We do not even know at present what nerves correspond to the sensations of heat and cold, pain and joy; and all attempts to localise will-centres have proved unavailing.
The finer and more delicate feelings cannot be gauged. But even though the alleged parallelism were entirely demonstrated, the immediate and pertinent question would still remain, Who or what is the investigator? Is it an ego, a thinking self? or is it only a complex of vibrations or mechanical impressions bound together in a particular body which, for convenience, is called an ego? Are the so-called entities--personality, consciousness, self--but symbols, as Professor Mach says, useful in so far as they help us to express our physical sensations, but which with further research must be pronounced illusions?
Monistic naturalism, which would explain all psychical experiences in terms of cerebral action, must not be allowed to arrogate to itself powers which it does not possess, and quietly brush aside facts which do not fit into its system.
The moral sanctions so universally and deeply rooted in the consciousness of mankind, the feelings of responsibility, of guilt and regret; the soul's fidelities and heroisms, its hopes and fears, its aims and ideals--the poetry, art, and religion that have made man what he is, all that has contributed to the uplifting of the world--are, to say the least, unaccounted for, if it must be held that 'man is born in chains.' Primary facts must not be surrendered nor ultimate experiences sacrificed in the interests of theoretic simplicity.
In the recent anti-metaphysical movement of Germany, of which Haeckel, Avenarius, Oswald and Mach are representatives, there is presented the final conflict. It is not freedom of will only that is at stake, it is the very existence of a spiritual world. 'Es ist der Kampf um die Seele.
If the world forms a closed and 'given' system in which every particular is determined completely by its position in the whole, then there can be no place for spontaneity, initiative, creation, which all investigation shows to be the distinctive feature in human progress and upward movement. So far from its being true that the world makes man, it would be nearer the truth to say that man makes the world. A 'given' world can never be primary.
There must be a mind behind it. We fall back, therefore, upon the principle which must be postulated in the whole discussion--the unity and self-determining activity of the self-conscious mind.