The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Preface to the Third Edition[*]
• Chapter I: Introductory Remarks
• Chapter II: The Relativity of Human Knowledge
• Chapter III: The Doctrine of the Relativity of Human Knowledge, As Held By Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter IV: In What Respect Sir William Hamilton Really Differs From the Philosophers of the Absolute
• Chapter V: What Is Rejected As Knowledge By Sir William Hamilton, Brought Back Under the Name of Belief
• Chapter VI: The Philosophy of the Conditioned
• Chapter VII: The Philosophy of the Conditioned, As Applied By Mr. Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought
• Chapter VIII: Of Consciousness, As Understood By Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter IX: Of the Interpretation of Consciousness
• Chapter X: Sir William Hamilton’s View of the Different Theories Respecting the Belief In an External World
• Chapter XI: The Psychological Theory of the Belief In an External World
• Chapter XII: The Psychological Theory of the Belief In Matter, How Far Applicable to Mind
• Chapter XIII: The Psychological Theory of the Primary Qualities of Matter
• Chapter XIV: How Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Mansel Dispose of the Law of Inseparable Association
• Chapter XV: Sir William Hamilton’s Doctrine of Unconscious Mental Modifications
• Chapter XVI: Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Causation
• Chapter XVII: The Doctrine of Concepts, Or General Notions
• Chapter XVIII: Of Judgment
• Chapter XIX: Of Reasoning
• Chapter XX: On Sir William Hamilton’s Conception of Logic As a Science. Is Logic the Science of the Laws, Or Forms, of Thought?
• Chapter XXI: The Fundamental Laws of Thought According to Sir William Hamilton
• Chapter XXII: Of Sir William Hamilton’s Supposed Improvements In Formal Logic
• Chapter XXIII: Of Some Minor Peculiarities of Doctrine In Sir William Hamilton’s View of Formal Logic
• Chapter XXIV: Of Some Natural Prejudices Countenanced By Sir William Hamilton, and Some Fallacies Which He Considers Insoluble
• Chapter XXV: Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Pleasure and Pain
• Chapter XXVI: On the Freedom of the Will
• Chapter XXVII: Sir William Hamilton’s Opinions On the Study of Mathematics
• Chapter XXVIII: Concluding Remarks
• Appendices
• Appendix A: Manuscript Fragments
• Appendix B: Textual Emendations
• Appendix C: Corrected References
• Appendix D: Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited In the Examination, With Variants and Notes

CHAPTER XXVI

On the Freedom of the Will

the last of the three classes of mental phænomena, that of Conation, in other words, of Desire and Will, is barely commenced upon in the last pages of Sir W. Hamilton’s last lecture:^[*] whether it be that in the many years during which he taught the class, he never got beyond this point, or that his teaching in the concluding part of the course was purely oral, and has not been preserved. Nor has he, in any of his writings, treated ex professo of this subject; though doubtless he would have done so, had his health permitted him to complete the “Dissertations on Reid.” We consequently know little of what his sentiments were on any of the topics comprised in this branch of Psychology, except the vexata quæstio of the Freedom of the Will; on which he could not help giving indications, in various parts of his works, both of his opinion and of the reasons on which he grounded it. The doctrine of Free-will was indeed so fundamental with him, that it may be regarded as the central idea of his system—the determining cause of most of his philosophical opinions; and, in a peculiar manner, of the two which are most completely emanations from his own mind, the Law of the Conditioned, and his singular theory of Causation. He breaks ground on the subject at the very opening of his Lectures, in his introductory remarks on the utility of the study of Metaphysics. He puts in a claim for metaphysics, grounded on the free-will doctrine, of being the only medium “through which our unassisted reason can ascend to the knowledge of a God.” He supports this position by a line of argument which, I think, must be startling to the majority of believers.

“The Deity,” he says,

The reasoning by which he thinks that he establishes this position runs as follows. A God is only an inference from Nature; a cause assumed, as necessary to account for phænomena. Now, fate or necessity, without a God, might account for the phænomena of matter. It is only as man is a free intelligence, that to account for his existence requires the hypothesis of a Creator who is a free intelligence. If our feeling of liberty is an illusion; if our intelligence is only a result of material organization; we are entitled to conclude that in the universe also, the phænomena of intelligence and design are, in the last analysis, the products of brute necessity. Existence in itself being unknown to us, we can only infer its character from the particular order presented to us within the sphere of our experience, which in the case under consideration means observation of our own minds. If, therefore, our intelligence is produced and bounded by a blind fate, the like may be concluded to be true of the Divine Intelligence. If, on the contrary, intelligence in man is a free power, independent of matter, we may legitimately conclude the same thing of the intelligence manifested in the universe. Again, there is properly no God at all unless there is a moral Governor of the world.

Fully to develop all the just criticisms which might be made on this single thesis, would require a long chapter. In the first place, the practice of bribing the pupil to accept a metaphysical dogma, by the promise or threat that it affords the only valid argument for a foregone conclusion—however transcendently important that conclusion may be thought to be—is not only repugnant to all the rules of philosophizing, but a grave offence against the morality of philosophic enquiry. The eager attempts of almost every metaphysical writer to create a religious prejudice in favour of the theory he patronizes, are a very serious grievance in philosophy. If I could permit myself, even by way of retort, to follow so bad an example, I might warn the defenders of religion, of the danger of sacrificing, in turn, every one of its evidences to some other. It has been remarked, with truth, that there is not one of the received arguments in support either of natural religion or of revelation, a formal condemnation of which might not be extracted from the writings of sincerely religious thinkers. I am far from imputing this to them as matter of blame: the rejection of what they deem bad arguments in a good cause must always be honourable to them, when led to it by honestly following the promptings of their reason, and not by an egotistic preference for their own special modes of proof. But, looking at the question as one of prudence, it would be wise in them, whatever else they give up, not to part company with the Design argument. For, in the first place, it is the best; and besides, it is by far the most persuasive. It would be difficult to find a stronger argument in favour of Theism, than that the eye must have been made by one who sees, and the ear by one who hears.^[*] If, after this, it pleases Sir W. Hamilton or any other person to say that unless we believe in free will, the Being who by hypothesis made the ear and the eye is no God; or that to regard the goodness of God as the result of a necessity, which, from the very meaning of a First Cause, can only be a necessity of his own nature, a love of Good which is part of himself and inseparable from him, is denying him to be a moral being; there is really nothing left for us but, with equal positiveness, to aver the contrary: for the two parties will never be able to agree about the meaning of terms.

This is but one specimen among many of the bad logic which pervades Sir W. Hamilton’s attempt to show that Theism depends on the reception of his favourite doctrine. He proceeds, throughout, on the assumption that the falsely called Doctrine of Necessity^* is the same thing with Materialism. He treats those opinions as precisely equivalent.^* Yet no two doctrines can be more distinct. Reid, an enemy of both, affirms that Necessity, “far from being a direct inference,” “can receive no support from” Materialism.^† It may be true, nevertheless, that Materialists are always or generally Necessitarians; and it is not denied that many Necessitarians are Materialists: but nearly all the theologians of the Reformation, beginning with Luther, and the entire series of Calvinistic divines represented by Jonathan Edwards, are proofs that the most sincere Spiritualists may consistently hold the doctrine of so-called Necessity. Of such Spiritualists there is an illustrious example in Leibnitz, to say nothing of Condillac^‡ or Brown. They believe man to be a spiritual being, not dependent on Matter, but yet, in respect of his actions as in all other respects, subject to the law of Causation: his volitions not being self-caused, but determined by spiritual antecedents (e.g. desires, associations of ideas, &c., all of which are spiritual if the mind is spiritual) in such sort that when the antecedents are the same, the volitions will always be the same. But to confound Necessity with Materialism, though an historical and psychological error, is indispensable to Sir W. Hamilton’s argument, which depends for all its plausibility on the picture he draws of a God subject to a “brute necessity” of a purely material character.^[*] For if the necessity predicated of human actions is not a material, but a spiritual necessity; if the assertion that the virtuous man is virtuous necessarily, only means that he is so because he dreads a departure from virtue more than he dreads any personal consequence; there is nothing absurd or invidious in taking a similar view of the Deity, and believing that he is necessitated to will what is good, by the love of good and detestation of evil which are in his own nature.

There is also at the root of our author’s argument another logical error—that of inferring that whatever is given by observation and analysis as a law of human intelligence, must be supposed to be an absolute law extending to the Divine. He says, truly, that the Divine Intelligence is but an assumption, to account for the phænomena of the universe; and that we can only be warranted in referring the origin of those phænomena to an Intelligence, by analogy to the effects of human intellect. But can this analogy be carried up to complete identity in conditions and modes of action between the human and the Divine intelligence? Does Sir W. Hamilton draw this inference in any other case? On the contrary, he holds us bound to believe that the Deity, whether as Will or as Intelligence, is Absolute—unrestricted by any conditions; though, as such, neither knowable nor conceivable by us. And though I do not acknowledge the obligation of believing what can neither be known nor conceived, as little can it be admitted, that the Divine Will cannot be free unless ours is so; any more than that the Divine Intelligence cannot know the truths of geometry by direct intuition, because we are obliged to mount laboriously up to them through the twelve books of Euclid.

So much for Sir W. Hamilton’s attempt to prove that one who disbelieves free-will, has no business to believe in a God. Let us now consider his view of the doctrine itself, and of the evidence for it.

His view of the controversy is peculiar, but harmonizes with his Philosophy of the Conditioned, which seems indeed to have been principally suggested to him by the supposed requirements of this question. He is of opinion that Free-will and Necessity are both inconceivable. Free-will, because it supposes volitions to originate without cause;^* because it affirms an absolute commencement, which, as we are aware, our author deems it impossible for the human mind to conceive. On the other hand, the mind is equally unable to conceive an infinite regress; a chain of causation going back to all eternity. Both the one and the other theory thus involve difficulties insurmountable by the human faculties. But, as Sir W. Hamilton has so often told us, the inconceivability of a thing by us, is no proof that it is objectively impossible by the laws of the universe; on the contrary, it often happens that both sides of an alternative are alike incomprehensible to us, while from their nature we are certain that the one or the other must be true. Such an alternative, according to Sir W. Hamilton, exists between the conflicting doctrines of Free-will and Necessity. By the law of Excluded Middle, one or other of them must be true; and inconceivability, as common to both, not operating more against one than against the other, does not operate against either. The balance, therefore, must turn in favour of the side for which there is positive evidence. In favour of Free-will we have the distinct testimony of consciousness; perhaps directly, though of this he speaks with some appearance of doubt;^* but at all events, indirectly, freedom being implied in the consciousness of moral responsibility. As there is no corresponding evidence in favour of the other theory, the Free-will doctrine must prevail.

The inconceivability of the Free-will doctrine is maintained by our author, not only on the general ground just stated, of our incapacity to conceive an absolute commencement, but on the further and special ground, that the will is determined by motives. In rewriting the preceding passage for the Appendix to his Discussions, he made the following addition to it:

It rests on no such thing, if he believes in a First Cause, which a Necessitarian may. What is more, even if he does not believe in a First Cause, he makes no “assertion of non-commencement;” he only declines to make an assertion of commencement; ^band, therefore, is not in the position of asserting what is inconceivable: which, however, as Sir W. Hamilton is perpetually declaring, is a position perfectly tenable, and the position he avowedly chooses for himself on this very subject^b . But to resume the quotation: “As equally unthinkable, the two counter, the two one-sided, schemes are thus theoretically balanced. But, practically, our consciousness of the moral law, which, without a moral liberty in man, would be a mendacious imperative, gives a decisive preponderance to the doctrine of freedom over the doctrine of fate. We are free in act, if we are accountable for our actions.”

Sir W. Hamilton is of opinion that both sides are alike unsuccessful in repelling each other’s attacks. The arguments against both are, he thinks, to the human faculties, irrefutable.

These “grounds no less strong” are the mere paralogisms which we examined in a recent chapter,^[*] and with regard to which our author showed so surprising a deficiency in the acuteness and subtlety to be expected from the general quality of his mind.

Conformably to these views, Sir W. Hamilton, in his foot-notes on Reid, promptly puts an extinguisher on several of that philosopher’s arguments against the doctrine of so-called Necessity. When Reid affirms that Motives are not causes—that they may influence to action, but do not act, Sir W. Hamilton observes: “If Motives influence to action, they must co-operate in producing a certain effect upon the agent; and the determination to act, and to act in a certain manner, is that effect. They are thus, on Reid’s own view, in this relation, causes, and efficient causes. It is of no consequence in the argument whether motives be said to determine a man to act, or to influence (that is, to determine) him to determine himself to act.”^* This is one of the neatest specimens in our author’s writings of a fallacy cut clean through by a single stroke.

Again, when Reid says that acts are often done without any motive, or when there is no motive for preferring the means used, rather than others by which the same end might have been attained, Sir W. Hamilton asks, “Can we conceive any act of which there was not a sufficient cause or concourse of causes why the man performed it and no other? If not, call this cause, or these concauses, the motive, and there is no longer a dispute.”^†

Reid asks, “Is there no such thing as wilfulness, caprice, or obstinacy among mankind?”^[*] Sir W. Hamilton, e contra: “But are not these all tendencies, and fatal tendencies, to act or not to act? By contradistinguishing such tendencies from motives strictly so called, or rational impulses, we do not advance a single step towards rendering liberty comprehensible.”^‡

According to Reid, the determination is made by the man, and not by the motive. “But,” asks Sir W. Hamilton,

Nor is it: but if, as our author so strongly inculcates, “every effort to bring the fact of liberty within the compass of our conceptions only results in the substitution in its place of some more or less disguised form of necessity,”^* it is a strong indication that some form of necessity is the opinion naturally suggested by our collective experience of life.^†

Sir W. Hamilton having thus, as is often the case (and it is one of the best things he does), saved his opponents the trouble of answering his friends, his doctrine is left resting exclusively on the supports which he has himself provided for it. In examining them, let us place ourselves, in the first instance, completely at his point of view, and concede to him the coequal inconceivability of the conflicting hypotheses, an uncaused commencement, and an infinite regress. But this choice of inconceivabilities is not offered to us in the case of volitions only. We are held, as he not only admits but contends, to the same alternative in all cases of causation whatsoever. But we find our way out of the difficulty, in other cases, in quite a different manner. In the case of every other kind of fact, we do not elect the hypothesis that the event took place without a cause: we accept the other supposition, that of a regress, not indeed to infinity, but either generally into the region of the Unknowable, or back to an Universal Cause, regarding which, as we are only concerned with it in ^crespect of attributes bearing^c relation to what it preceded, and not as itself preceded by anything, we can afford to ^dconsider this reference as ultimate^d .

Now, what is the reason, which, in the case of all things within the range of our knowledge except volitions, makes us choose this side of the alternative? Why do we, without scruple, register all of them as depending on causes, by which (to use our author’s language) they are determined necessarily, though, in believing this, we, according to Sir W. Hamilton, believe as utter an inconceivability as if we supposed them to take place without a cause? Apparently it is because the causation hypothesis, inconceivable as he may think it, possesses the advantage of having experience on its side. And how or by what evidence does experience testify to it? Not by disclosing any nexus between the cause and the effect, any Sufficient Reason in the cause itself why the effect should follow it. No philosopher now makes this supposition, and Sir W. Hamilton positively disclaims it. What experience makes known, is the fact of an invariable sequence between every event and some special combination of antecedent conditions, in such sort that wherever and whenever that union of antecedents exists, the event does not fail to occur. Any must in the case, any necessity, other than the unconditional universality of the fact, we know nothing of. Still, this à posteriori “does,” though not confirmed by an à priori “must,” decides our choice between the two inconceivables, and leads us to the belief that every event within the phænomenal universe, except human volitions, is determined to take place by a cause. Now, the so-called Necessitarians demand the application of the same rule of judgment to our volitions. They maintain that there is the same evidence for it. They affirm, as a truth of experience, that volitions do, in point of fact, follow determinate moral antecedents with the same uniformity, and (when we have sufficient knowledge of the circumstances) with the same certainty, as physical effects follow their physical causes. These moral antecedents are desires, aversions, habits, and dispositions, combined with outward circumstances suited to call those internal incentives into action. All these again are effects of causes, those of them which are mental being consequences of education, and of other moral and physical influences. This is what Necessitarians affirm: and they court every possible mode in which its truth can be verified. They test it by each person’s observation of his own volitions. They test it by each person’s observation of the voluntary actions of those with whom he comes into contact; and by the power which every one has of foreseeing actions, with a degree of exactness proportioned to his previous experience and knowledge of the agents, and with a certainty often quite equal to that with which we predict the commonest physical events. They test it further, by the statistical results of the observation of human beings acting in numbers sufficient to eliminate the influences which operate only on a few, and which on a large scale neutralize one another, leaving the total result about the same as if the volitions of the whole mass had been affected by such only of the determining causes as were common to them all. In cases of this description the results are as uniform, and may be as accurately foretold, as in any physical enquiries in which the effect depends upon a multiplicity of causes. The cases in which volitions seem too uncertain to admit of being confidently predicted, are those in which our knowledge of the influences antecedently in operation is so incomplete, that with equally imperfect data there would be the same uncertainty in the predictions of the astronomer and the chemist. On these grounds it is contended that our choice between the conflicting inconceivables should be the same in the case of volitions as of all other phænomena; we must reject equally in both cases the hypothesis of spontaneousness, and consider them all as caused. A volition is a moral effect, which follows the corresponding moral causes as certainly and invariably as physical effects follow their physical causes. Whether it must do so, I acknowledge myself to be entirely ignorant, be the phænomenon moral or physical; and I condemn, accordingly, the word Necessity as applied to either case. All I know is, that it always does.^*

This argument from experience Sir W. Hamilton passes unnoticed, but urges, on the opposite side of the question, the argument from Consciousness. We are conscious, he affirms, either of our freedom, or at all events (it is odd that, on his theory, there should be any doubt) of something which implies freedom. If this is true, our internal consciousness tells us ^fthat we have a power, which^f the whole outward experience of the human race tells ^gus that we never use^g . This is surely a very unfortunate predicament we are in, and a sore trial to the puzzled metaphysician. Philosophy is far from having so easy a business before her as our author thinks: the arbiter Consciousness is by no means invoked to turn the scale between two equally balanced difficulties; on the contrary, she has to sit in judgment between herself and a complete induction from experience. Consciousness, it will probably be said, is the best evidence; and so it would be, if we were always certain what is Consciousness. But while there are so many varying testimonies respecting this; when Sir W. Hamilton can himself say, “many philosophers have attempted to establish, on the principles of common sense, propositions which are not original data of consciousness, while the original data of consciousness from which these propositions were derived, and to which they owed all their necessity and truth, these same philosophers were (strange to say) not disposed to admit;”^† when M. Cousin and nearly all Germany find the Infinite and the Absolute in Consciousness, Sir W. Hamilton thinking them utterly repugnant to it; when philosophers, for many generations, fancied that they had Abstract Ideas—that they could conceive a triangle which was neither equilateral, isosceles, nor scalene,^* which Sir W. Hamilton and all other people now consider to be simply absurd; with all these conflicting opinions respecting the things to which Consciousness testifies, what is the perplexed inquirer to think? Does all philosophy end, as in our author’s opinion Hume believed it to do, in a persistent contradiction between one of our mental faculties and another?^[*] We shall find, there is a solution, which relieves the human mind from this embarrassment: namely, that the question to which experience says yes, and that to which consciousness says no, are different questions.

Let us cross-examine the alleged testimony of consciousness. And, first, it is left in some uncertainty by Sir W. Hamilton whether Consciousness makes only one deliverance on the subject, or two: whether we are conscious only of moral responsibility, in which free-will is implied, or are directly conscious of free-will. In his Lectures, Sir W. Hamilton speaks only of the first. In the notes on Reid, which were written subsequently, he seems to affirm both, but the latter of the two in a doubtful and hesitating manner:^[†] so difficult, in reality, does he find it to ascertain with certainty what it is that Consciousness certifies. But as there are many who maintain with a confidence far greater than his, that we are directly conscious of free-will,^† it is necessary to examine that question.

To be conscious of free-will, must mean, to be conscious, before I have decided, that I am able to decide either way. Exception may be taken in limine to the use of the word consciousness in such an application. Consciousness tells me what I do or feel. But what I am able to do, is not a subject of consciousness. Consciousness is not prophetic; we are conscious of what is, not of what will or can be. We never know that we are able to do a thing, except from having done it, or something equal and similar to it. We should not know that we were capable of action at all, if we had never acted. Having acted, we know, as far as that experience reaches, how we are able to act; and this knowledge, when it has become familiar, is often confounded with, and called by the name of, consciousness. But it does not derive any increase of authority from being misnamed; its truth is not supreme over, but depends on, experience. If our so-called consciousness of what we are able to do is not borne out by experience, it is a delusion. It has no title to credence but as an interpretation of experience, and if it is a false interpretation, it must give way.^*

But this conviction, whether termed consciousness or only belief, that our will is free—what is it? Of what are we convinced? I am told that whether I decide to do or to abstain, I feel that I could have decided the other way. I ask my consciousness what I do feel, and I find, indeed, that I feel (or am convinced) that I could^h, and even should,^h have chosen the other course ⁱif I had preferred it, that is, if I had liked it betterⁱ ; but not that I could have chosen one course while I preferred the other. When I say preferred, I of course include with the thing itself, all that accompanies it. I know that I can, because I know that I often do, elect to do one thing, when I should have preferred another in itself, apart from its consequences, or from a moral law which it violates. And this preference for a thing in itself, abstractedly from its accompaniments, is often loosely described as preference for the thing. It is this unprecise mode of speech which makes it not seem absurd to say that I act in opposition to my preference; that I do one thing when I would rather do another; that my conscience prevails over my desires—as if conscience were not itself a desire—the desire to do right. Take any alternative: say to murder or not to murder. I am told, that if I elect to murder, I am conscious that I could have elected to abstain: but am I conscious that I could have abstained if my aversion to the crime, and my dread of its consequences, had been weaker than the temptation? If I elect to abstain: in what sense am I conscious that I could have elected to commit the crime? Only if I had desired to commit it with a desire stronger than my horror of murder; not with one less strong. When we think of ourselves hypothetically as having acted otherwise than we did, we always suppose a difference in the antecedents: we picture ourselves as having known something that we did not know, or not known something that we did know; which is a difference in the external ^jinducements^j ; or as having desired something, or disliked something, more or less than we did; which is a difference in the internal ^kinducements^k .^*

^lIn refutation of this it is said, that in resisting a desire, I am conscious of making an effort; that after I have resisted, I have the remembrance of having made an effort; that “if the temptation was long continued, or if I have been resisting the strong will of another, I am as sensibly exhausted by that effort, as after any physical exertion I ever made:” and it is added, “If my volition is wholly determined by the strongest present desire, it will be decided without any effort. . . . When the greater weight goes down, and the lesser up, no effort is needed on the part of the scales.”^* It is implied in this argument, that in a battle between contrary impulses, the victory must always be decided in a moment; that the force which is really the strongest, and prevails ultimately, must prevail instantaneously. The fact is not quite thus even in inanimate nature: the hurricane does not level the house or blow down the tree without resistance; even the balance trembles, and the scales oscillate for a short time, when the difference of the weights is not considerable. Far less does victory come without a contest to the strongest of two moral, or even two vital forces, whose nature it is to be never fixed, but always flowing, quantities. In a struggle between passions, there is not a single instant in which there does not pass across the mind some thought, which adds strength to, or takes it from, one or the other of the contending powers. Unless one of them was, from the beginning, out of all proportion stronger than the other, some time must elapse before the balance adjusts itself between forces neither of which is for any two successive instants the same. During that interval the agent is in the peculiar mental and physical state which we call a conflict of feelings: and we all know that a conflict between strong feelings is, in an extraordinary degree, exhaustive of the nervous energies.^† The consciousness of effort, which we are told of, is this state of conflict. The author I am quoting considers what he calls, I think improperly, an effort, to be only on one side, because he represents to himself the conflict as taking place between me and some foreign power, which I conquer, or by which I am overcome.^[*] But it is obvious that “I” am both parties in the contest; the conflict is between me and myself; between (for instance) me desiring a pleasure, and me dreading self-reproach. What causes Me, or, if you please, my Will, to be identified with one side rather than with the other, is that one of the Me’s represents a more permanent state of my feelings than the other does. After the temptation has been yielded to, the desiring “I” will come to an end, but the conscience-stricken “I” may endure to the end of life.^l

I therefore dispute altogether that we are conscious of being able to act in opposition to the strongest present desire or aversion. The difference between a bad and a good man is not that the latter acts in opposition to his strongest desires; it is that his desire to do right, and his aversion to doing wrong, are strong enough to overcome, and in the case of perfect virtue, to silence, any other desire or aversion which may conflict with them. It is because this state of mind is possible to human nature, that human beings are capable of moral government: and moral education consists in subjecting them to the discipline which has most tendency to bring them into this state. The object of moral education is to educate the will: but the will can only be educated through the desires and aversions; by eradicating or weakening such of them as are likeliest to lead to evil; exalting to the highest pitch the desire of right conduct and the aversion to wrong; cultivating all other desires and aversions of which the ordinary operation is auxiliary to right, while discountenancing so immoderate an indulgence of them, as might render them too powerful to be overcome by the moral sentiment, when they chance to be in opposition to it. The other requisites are, a clear intellectual standard of right and wrong, that moral desire and aversion may act in the proper places, and such general mental habits as shall prevent moral considerations from being forgotten or overlooked, in cases to which they are rightly applicable.

Rejecting, then, the figment of a direct consciousness of the freedom of the will, in other words, our ability to will in opposition to our strongest preference; it remains to consider whether, as affirmed by Sir W. Hamilton, a freedom of this kind is implied in what is called our consciousness of moral responsibility. There must be something very plausible in this opinion, since it is shared even by Necessitarians. Many of these—in particular Mr. Owen and his followers—from a recognition of the fact that volitions are effects of causes, have been led to deny human responsibility. I do not mean that they denied moral distinctions. Few persons have had a stronger sense of right and wrong, or been more devoted to the things they deemed right. What they denied was the rightfulness of inflicting punishment. A man’s actions, they said, are the result of his character, and he is not the author of his own character. It is made for him, not by him. There is no justice in punishing him for what he cannot help. We should try to convince or persuade him that he had better act in a different manner; and should educate all, especially the young, in the habits and dispositions which lead to well-doing: though how this is to be effected without any use whatever of punishment as a means of education, is a question they have failed to resolve. The confusion of ideas, which makes the subjection of human volitions to the law of Causation seem inconsistent with accountability, must thus be very natural to the human mind; but this may be said of a thousand errors, and even of some merely verbal fallacies. In the present case there is more than a verbal fallacy, but verbal fallacies also contribute their part.

What is meant by moral responsibility? Responsibility means punishment. When we are said to have the feeling of being morally responsible for our actions, the idea of being punished for them is uppermost in the speaker’s mind. But the feeling of liability to punishment is of two kinds. It may mean, expectation that if we act in a certain manner, punishment will actually be inflicted upon us, by our fellow creatures or by a Supreme Power. Or it may only mean, ^mknowing^m that we shall deserve that infliction.

The first of these cannot, in any correct meaning of the term, be designated as a consciousness. If we believe that we shall be punished for doing wrong, it is because the belief has been taught to us by our parents and tutors, or by our religion, or is generally held by those who surround us, or because we have ourselves come to the conclusion, by reasoning, or from the experience of life. This is not Consciousness. And, by whatever name it is called, its evidence is not dependent on any theory of the spontaneousness of volition. The punishment of guilt in another world is believed with undoubting conviction by Turkish fatalists, and by professed Christians who are not only Necessitarians, but believe that the majority of mankind were divinely predestined from all eternity to sin and to be punished for sinning. It is not, therefore, the belief that we shall be made accountable, which can be deemed to require or presuppose the free-will hypothesis; it is the belief that we ought so to be; that we are justly accountable; that guilt deserves punishment. It is here thatⁿ issue is joined between the two opinions.

In discussing it, there is no need to postulate any theory respecting the nature or criterion of moral distinctions. It matters not, for this purpose, whether the right and wrong of actions depends on the consequences they tend to produce, or on an inherent quality of the actions themselves. It is indifferent whether we are utilitarians or anti-utilitarians; whether our ethics rest on intuition or on experience. It is sufficient if we believe that there is a difference between right and wrong, and a natural reason for preferring the former; that people in general, unless when they expect personal benefit from a wrong, naturally and usually prefer what they think to be right: whether because we are all dependent for what makes existence tolerable, upon the right conduct of other people, while their wrong conduct is a standing menace to our security, or for some more mystical and transcendental reason. Whatever be the cause, we are entitled to assume the fact: and its consequence is, that whoever cultivates a disposition to wrong, places his mind out of sympathy with the rest of his fellow creatures, and if they are aware of his disposition, becomes a natural object of their active dislike. He not only forfeits the pleasure of their good will, and the benefit of their good offices, except when compassion for the human being is stronger than distaste towards the wrongdoer; but he also renders himself liable to whatever they may think it necessary to do in order to protect themselves against him; which may probably include punishment, as such, and will certainly involve much that is equivalent in its operation on himself. In this way he is certain to be made accountable, at least to his fellow creatures, through the normal action of their natural sentiments. And it is well worth consideration, whether the practical expectation of being thus called to account, has not a great deal to do with the internal feeling of being accountable; a feeling, assuredly, which is seldom found existing in any strength in the absence of that practical expectation. It is not usually found that Oriental despots, who cannot be called to account by anybody, have much consciousness of being morally accountable. And (what is still more significant) in societies in which caste or class distinctions are really strong—a state so strange to us now, that we seldom realize it in its full force—it is a matter of daily experience that persons may show the strongest sense of moral accountability as regards their equals, who can make them accountable, and not the smallest vestige of a similar feeling towards their inferiors who cannot.

^oThis does not imply that the feeling of accountability, even when proportioned very exactly to the chance of being called to account, is a mere interested calculation, having nothing more in it than an expectation and dread of external punishment. When pain has long been thought of as a consequence of a given fact, the fact becomes wrapt up in associations which make it painful in itself, and cause the mind to shrink from it even when, in the particular case, no painful consequences are apprehended: just as the dislike to spending money, which grows up while money can ill be spared, may be an absorbing passion after the possessor has grown so rich that the expenditure would not really cause him the most trifling inconvenience. On this familiar principle of association it is abundantly certain that even if wrong meant merely what is forbidden, a disinterested detestation of doing wrong would naturally grow up, and might become, in its strength and promptitude, and in the immediateness of its action, without reflection or ulterior purpose, undistinguishable from any of our instincts or natural passions.^o

Another fact, which it is of importance to keep in view, is, that the highest and strongest sense of the worth of goodness, and the odiousness of its opposite, is perfectly compatible with even the most exaggerated form of Fatalism. Suppose that there were two peculiar breeds of human beings,—one of them so constituted from the beginning, that however educated or treated, nothing could prevent them from always feeling and acting so as to be a blessing to all whom they approached; another, of such original perversity of nature that neither education nor punishment could inspire them with a feeling of duty, or prevent them from being active in evil doing. Neither of these races of human beings would have free-will; yet the former would be honoured as demigods, while the latter would be regarded and treated as noxious beasts: not punished perhaps, since punishment would have no effect on them, and it might be thought wrong to indulge the mere instinct of vengeance: but kept carefully at a distance, and killed like other dangerous creatures when there was no other convenient way of being rid of them. We thus see that even under the utmost possible exaggeration of the doctrine of Necessity, the distinction between moral good and evil in conduct would not only subsist, but would stand out in a more marked manner than now, when the good and the wicked, however unlike, are still regarded as of one common nature.

^pAn opponent may say, this is not a distinction between moral good and evil; and I am far from intending to beg the question against him. But neither can he be permitted to beg the question, by assuming that the distinction is not moral because it does not imply free-will. The reality of moral distinctions, and the freedom of our volitions, are questions independent of one another. My position is, that a human being who loves, disinterestedly and consistently, his fellow creatures and whatever tends to their good, who hates with a vigorous hatred what causes them evil, and whose actions correspond in character with these feelings, is naturally, necessarily, and reasonably an object to be loved, admired, sympathized with, and in all ways cherished and encouraged by mankind; while a person who has none of these qualities, or so little, that his actions continually jar and conflict with the good of others, and that for purposes of his own he is ready to inflict on them a great amount of evil, is a natural and legitimate object of their fixed aversion, and of conduct conformable thereto: and this whether the will be free or not, and even independently of any theory of the difference between right and wrong; whether right means productive of happiness, and wrong productive of misery, or right and wrong are intrinsic qualities of the actions themselves, provided only we recognise that there is a difference, and that the difference is highly important. What I maintain is, that this is a sufficient distinction between moral good and evil: sufficient for the ends of society and sufficient for the individual conscience:—that we need no other distinction; that if there be any other distinction, we can dispense with it; and that, supposing acts in themselves good or evil to be as unconditionally determined from the beginning of things as if they were phænomena of dead matter, still, if the determination from the beginning of things has been that they shall take place through my love of good and hatred of evil, I am a proper object of esteem and affection, and if that they shall take place through my love of self and indifference to good, I am a fit object of aversion which may rise to abhorrence. And no competently informed person will deny that, as a matter of fact, those who have held this creed have had as strong a feeling, both emotional and practical, of moral distinctions, as any other people.^*p

But these considerations, ^qhowever^q pertinent to the subject, do not touch the root of the difficulty. The real question is one of justice—the legitimacy of retribution, or punishment. On the theory of Necessity (we are told) ^ra^r man cannot help acting as he does; and it cannot be just that he should be punished for what he cannot help.

Not if the expectation of punishment enables him to help it, and is the only means by which he can be enabled to help it?

To say that he cannot help it, is true or false, according to the qualification with which the assertion is accompanied. Supposing him to be of a vicious disposition, he cannot help doing the criminal act, if he is allowed to believe that he will be able to commit it unpunished. If, on the contrary, the impression is strong in his mind that a heavy punishment will follow, he can, and in most cases does, help it.

The question deemed to be so puzzling is, how punishment can be justified, if men’s actions are determined by motives, among which motives punishment is one. A more difficult question would be, how it can be justified if they are not so determined. Punishment proceeds on the assumption that the will is governed by motives. If punishment had no power of acting on the will, it would be illegitimate, however natural might be the inclination to inflict it. Just so far as the will is supposed free, that is, capable of acting against motives, punishment is disappointed of its object, and deprived of its justification.

There are two ends which, on the Necessitarian theory, are sufficient to justify punishment: the benefit of the offender himself, and the protection of others. The first justifies it, because to benefit a person cannot be to do him an injury. To punish him for his own good, provided the inflictor has any proper title to constitute himself a judge, is no more unjust than to administer medicine. As far, indeed, as respects the criminal himself, the theory of punishment is, that by counterbalancing the influence of present temptations, or acquired bad habits, it restores the mind to that normal preponderance of the love of right, which ^smany^s moralists and theologians consider to constitute the true definition of our freedom.^* In its other aspect, punishment is a precaution taken by society in self-defence. To make this just, the only condition required is, that the end which society is attempting to enforce by punishment, should be a just one. Used as a means of aggression by society on the just rights of the individual, punishment is unjust. Used to protect the just rights of others against unjust aggression by the offender, it is just. If it is possible to have just rights, ^u(which is the same thing as to have rights at all)^u it cannot be unjust to defend them. Free-will or no free-will, it is just to punish so far as is necessary for this purpose,^v as it is just to put a wild beast to death (without unnecessary suffering) for the same object.

Now, the primitive consciousness we are said to have, that we are accountable for our actions, and that if we violate the rule of right we shall deserve punishment, I contend is nothing else than our knowledge that punishment will be just: that by such conduct we shall place ourselves in the position in which our fellow creatures, or the Deity, or both, will naturally, and may justly, inflict punishment upon us. By using the word justly, I am not assuming, in the explanation, the thing I profess to explain. As before observed, I am entitled to postulate the reality, and the knowledge and feeling, of moral distinctions. These, it is both evident metaphysically and notorious historically, are independent of any theory concerning the will. We are supposed capable of understanding that other people have rights, and all that follows from this. The mind which possesses this idea, if capable of placing itself at the point of view of another person, must recognise it as ^wnot unjust^w that others should protect themselves against any disposition on his part to infringe their rights; and he will do so the more readily, because he also has rights, and his rights continually require the same protection. This, I maintain, is our feeling of accountability, in so far as it can be separated from ^xthe associations engendered by^x the prospect of being actually called to account. No one who understands the power of the principle of association, can doubt its sufficiency to create out of these elements the whole of the feeling of which we are conscious. To rebut this view of the case would require positive evidence; as, for example, if it could be proved that the feeling of accountability precedes, in the order of development, all experience of punishment. No such evidence has been produced, or is producible. Owing to the limited accessibility to observation of the mental processes of infancy, direct proof can as little be produced on the other side: but if there is any validity in Sir W. Hamilton’s Law of Parcimony, we ought not to assume any mental phænomenon as an ultimate fact, which can be accounted for by other known properties of our mental nature.

I ask any one who thinks that the justice of punishment is not sufficiently vindicated by its being for the protection of just rights, how he reconciles his sense of justice to the punishment of crimes committed in obedience to a perverted conscience? Ravaillac, and Balthasar Gérard, did not regard themselves as criminals, but as heroic martyrs. If they were justly put to death, the justice of punishment has nothing to do with the state of mind of the offender, further than as this may affect the efficacy of punishment as a means to its end. It is impossible to assert the justice of punishment for crimes of fanaticism, on any other ground than its necessity for the attainment of a just end. If that is not a justification, there is no justification. All other imaginary justifications break down in their application to this case.^*

If, indeed, punishment is inflicted for any other reason than in order to operate on the will; if its purpose be other than that of improving the culprit himself, or securing the just rights of others against unjust violation, then, I admit, the case is totally altered. If any one thinks that there is justice in the infliction of purposeless suffering; that there is a natural affinity between the two ideas of guilt and punishment, which makes it intrinsically fitting that wherever there has been guilt, pain should be inflicted by way of retribution; I acknowledge that I can find no argument to justify punishment inflicted on this principle. As a legitimate satisfaction to feelings of indignation and resentment which are on the whole salutary and worthy of cultivation, I can in certain cases admit it; but here it is still a means to an end. The merely retributive view of punishment derives no justification from the doctrine I support. But it derives quite as little from the free-will doctrine. Suppose it true that the will of a malefactor, when he committed an offence, was free, or in other words, that he acted badly, not because he was of a bad disposition, but ^yfrom no cause^y in particular: it is not easy to deduce from this the conclusion that it is just to punish him. That his acts were beyond the command of motives might be a good reason for keeping out of his way, or placing him under bodily restraint; but no reason for inflicting pain upon him, when that pain, by supposition, could not operate as a deterring motive.^*

While the doctrine I advocate does not support the idea that punishment in mere retaliation is justifiable, it at the same time fully accounts for the general and natural sentiment of its being so. From our earliest childhood, the ^aidea of doing wrong (that is, of doing what is forbidden, or what is injurious to others) and the idea^a of punishment are presented to our mind together, and the intense character of the impressions causes the association between them to attain the highest degree of closeness and intimacy. Is it strange, or unlike the usual processes of the human mind, that in these circumstances we should retain the feeling, and forget the reason on which it is grounded? But why do I speak of forgetting? In most cases the reason has never, in our early education, been presented to the mind. The only ideas presented have been those of wrong and punishment, and an inseparable association has been created between these directly, without the help of any intervening idea. This is quite enough to make the spontaneous feelings of mankind regard punishment and a wrongdoer as naturally fitted to each other—as a conjunction appropriate in itself, independently of any consequences. Even Sir W. Hamilton recognises as one of the common sources of error, that “the associations of thought are mistaken for the connexions of existence.”^* If this is true anywhere, it is truest of all in the associations into which emotions enter. A strong feeling, directly excited by an object, is felt (except when contradicted by the feelings of other people) as its own sufficient justification—no more requiring the support of a reason than the fact that ginger is hot in the mouth:^[*] and it almost requires a philosopher to recognise the need of a reason for his feelings, unless he has been under the practical necessity of justifying them to persons by whom they are not shared.

That a person holding what is called the Necessitarian doctrine should on that account feel that it would be unjust to punish him for his wrong actions, seems to me the veriest of chimeras. Yes, if he really “could not help” acting as he did, that is, if ^bit did not depend on his will^b ; if he was under physical constraint, or ^ceven if he was^c under the action of such a violent motive that no fear of punishment could have any effect; which, if capable of being ascertained, is a just ground of exemption, and is the reason why by the laws of most countries people are not punished for what they were compelled to do by immediate danger of death. But if the criminal was in a state capable of being operated upon by the fear of punishment, no metaphysical objection, I believe, will make him feel his punishment unjust. Neither will he feel that because his act was the consequence of motives, operating upon a certain mental disposition, it was not his own fault. For, first, it was at all events his own defect or infirmity, for which the expectation of punishment is the appropriate cure. And secondly, the word fault, so far from being inapplicable, is the specific name for the kind of defect or infirmity which he has displayed—insufficient love of ^dgood^d and aversion to ^eevil^e . The weakness of these feelings or their strength is in every one’s mind the standard of fault or merit, or degrees of fault and degrees of merit. Whether we are judging of particular actions, or of the character of a person, we are wholly guided by the indications afforded of the energy of these influences. If the desire of right and aversion to wrong have yielded to a small temptation, we judge them to be weak, and our disapprobation is strong. If the temptation to which they have yielded is so great that even strong feelings of virtue might have succumbed to it, our moral reprobation is less intense. If, again, the moral desires and aversions have prevailed, but not over a very strong force, we hold that the action was good, but that there was little merit in it; and our estimate of the merit rises, in exact proportion to the greatness of the obstacle which the moral feeling proved strong enough to overcome.

Mr. Mansel^* has furnished what he thinks a refutation of the Necessitarian argument, of which it is^f well to take notice, the more so, perhaps, as it is directed against some remarks on the subject by the present writer in a former work:^† remarks which were not intended as an argument for so-called Necessity, but only to place the nature and meaning of that ill-understood doctrine in a truer light. With this purpose in view, it was remarked that “by saying that a man’s actions necessarily follow from his character, all that is really meant (for no more is meant in any case whatever of causation) is that he invariably does act in conformity to his character, and that any one who thoroughly knew his character, could certainly predict how he would act in any supposable case. No more than this is contended for by any one but an Asiatic fatalist.”^[*] “And no more than this,” observes Mr. Mansel, “is needed to construct a system of fatalism as rigid as any Asiatic can desire.”^[†]

Mr. Mansel is mistaken in thinking that the doctrine of the causation of human actions is fatalism at all, or resembles fatalism in any of its moral or intellectual effects. To call it by that name is to break down a fundamental distinction. Real fatalism is of two kinds. Pure, or Asiatic fatalism,—the fatalism of the Œdipus,^[‡] —holds that our actions do not depend upon our desires. Whatever our wishes may be, a superior power, or an abstract destiny, will overrule them, and compel us to act, not as we desire, but in the manner predestined. Our love of good and hatred of evil are of no efficacy, and though in themselves they may be virtuous, as far as conduct is concerned it is unavailing to cultivate them. The other kind, Modified Fatalism I will call it, holds that our actions are determined by our will, our will by our desires, and our desires by the joint influence of the motives presented to us and of our individual character; but that, our character having been made for us and not by us, we are not responsible for it, nor for the actions it leads to, and should in vain attempt to alter them. The true doctrine of the Causation of human actions maintains, in opposition to both, that not only our conduct, but our character, is in part amenable to our will; that we can, by employing the proper means, improve our character; and that if our character is such that while it remains what it is, it necessitates us to do wrong, it will be just to apply motives which will necessitate us to strive for its improvement, and so emancipate ourselves from the other necessity^g. In^g other words, we are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character. We shall not indeed do so unless we desire our improvement, and desire it more than we dislike the means which must be employed for the purpose. But does Mr. Mansel, or any other of the free-will philosophers, think that we can will the means if we do not desire the end, or if our desire of the end is weaker than our aversion to the means?^*

Mr. Mansel is more rigid in his ideas of what the free-will theory requires, than one of the most eminent of the thinkers who have adopted it. According to Mr. Mansel, the belief that whoever knew perfectly our character and our circumstances could predict our actions, amounts to Asiatic fatalism.^[*] According to Kant, in his Metaphysics of Ethics, such capability of prediction is quite compatible with the freedom of the will.^[†] This seems, at first sight, to be an admission of everything which the rational supporters of the opposite theory could desire. But Kant avoids this consequence, by changing (as lawyers would say) the venue of free-will, from our actions generally, to the formation of our character. It is in that, he thinks, we are free, and he is almost willing to admit that while our character is what it is, our actions are necessitated by it. In drawing this distinction, the philosopher of Königsberg saves inconvenient facts at the expense of the consistency of his theory. There cannot be one theory for one kind of voluntary actions, and another theory for the other kinds. When we voluntarily exert ourselves, as it is our duty to do, for the improvement of our character, or when we act in a manner which (either consciously on our part or unconsciously) deteriorates it, these, like all other voluntary acts, presuppose that there was already something in our character, or in that combined with our circumstances, which led us to do so, and accounts for our doing so. The person, therefore, who is supposed able to predict our actions from our character as it now is, would, under the same conditions of perfect knowledge, be equally able to predict what we should do to change our character: and if this be the meaning of necessity, that part of our conduct is as necessary as all the rest. If necessity means more than this abstract possibility of being foreseen; if it means any mysterious compulsion, apart from simple invariability of sequence, I deny it as strenuously as any one ^hin the case of human volitions, but I deny it just as much of all other phænomena^h . To enforce this distinction was the principal object of the remarks which Mr. Mansel has criticised.^[‡] If an unessential distinction from Mr. Mansel’s point of view, it is essential from mine, and of supreme importance in a practical aspect.

The free-will metaphysicians have made little endeavour to prove that we can will in opposition to our strongest desire, but have strenuously maintained that we can will when we have no strongest desire. With this view Dr. Reid formerly, and Mr. Mansel now, have thrown in the teeth of Necessitarians the famous asinus Buridani.^[*] If, say they, the will were solely determined by motives, the ass, between two bundles of hay, exactly alike, and equally distant from him, would remain undecided until he died of hunger. From Sir W. Hamilton’s notes on this chapter of Reid,^* I infer that he did not countenance this argument; and it is surprising that writers of talent should have seen anything in it. I wave the objection that if it applies at all, it proves that the ass also has free-will; for perhaps he has. But the ass, it is affirmed, would starve before he decided. Yes, possibly, if he remained all the time in a fixed attitude of deliberation; if he never for an instant ceased to balance one against another the rival attractions, and if they really were so exactly equal that no dwelling on them could detect any difference. But this is not the way in which things take place on our planet. From mere lassitude, if from no other cause, he would intermit the process, and cease thinking of the rival objects at all: until a moment arrived when he would be seeing or thinking of one only, and that fact, combined with the sensation of hunger, would determine him to a decision.

But the argument on which Mr. Mansel lays most stress (it is also one of Reid’s)^[†] is the following. Necessitarians say that the will is governed by the strongest motive: “but I only know the strength of motives in relation to the will by the test of ultimate prevalence; so that this means no more than that the prevailing motive prevails.”^[‡] I have heretofore complimented Mr. Mansel on seeing farther, in some things, than his master. In the present instance I am compelled to remark, that he has not seen so far. Sir W. Hamilton was not the man to neglect an argument like this, had there been no flaw in it. The fact is that there are two. First, those who say that the will follows the strongest motive, do not mean the motive which is strongest in relation to the will, or in other words, that the will follows what it does follow. They mean the motive which is strongest in relation to pain and pleasure; since a motive, being a desire or aversion, is proportional to the pleasantness, as conceived by us, of the thing desired, or the painfulness of the thing shunned. And when what was at first a direct impulse towards pleasure, or recoil from pain, has passed into a habit or a fixed purpose, then the strength of the motive means the completeness and promptitude of the association which has been formed between an idea and an outward act. This is the first answer to Mr. Mansel. The second is, that even supposing there were no test of the strength of motives but their effect on the will, the proposition that the will follows the strongest motive would not, as Mr. Mansel supposes, be identical and unmeaning.^[*] We say, without absurdity, that if two weights are placed in opposite scales, the heavier will lift the other up; yet we mean nothing by the heavier, except the weight which will lift up the other. The proposition, nevertheless, is not unmeaning, for it signifies that in many or most cases there is a heavier, and that this is always the same one, not one or the other as it may happen. In like manner, even if the strongest motive meant only the motive which prevails, yet if there is a prevailing motive—if, all other antecedents being the same, the motive which prevails to-day will prevail to-morrow and every subsequent day—Sir W. Hamilton was acute enough to see that the free-will theory is not saved. I regret that I cannot, in this instance, credit Mr. Mansel with the same acuteness.

Before leaving the subject, it is worth while to remark, that not only the doctrine of Necessity, but Predestination in its coarsest form—the belief that all our actions are divinely preordained—though, in my view, inconsistent with ascribing any moral attributes whatever to the Deity, yet if combined with the belief that God works according to general laws, which have to be learnt from experience, has no tendency to make us act in any respect otherwise than we should do if we thought our actions really contingent. For if God acts according to general laws, then, whatever he may have preordained, he has preordained that it shall take place through the causes on which experience shows it to be consequent: and if he has predestined that I shall attain my ends, he has predestined that I shall do so by studying and putting in practice the means which lead to their attainment. When the belief in predestination has a paralysing effect on conduct, as is sometimes the case with Mahomedans, it is because they fancy they can infer what God has predestined, without waiting for the result. They think that either by particular signs of some sort, or from the general aspect of things, they can perceive the issue towards which God is working, and having discovered this, naturally deem useless any attempt to defeat it. Because something will certainly happen if nothing is done to prevent it, they think it will certainly happen whatever may be done to prevent it; in a word, they believe in Necessity in the only proper meaning of the term—an issue unalterable by human efforts or desires.

[[*] ]I.e., the last lecture on Metaphysics; see Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 517-20.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 25-6.

[† ]Ibid., pp. 32-3. See also a passage in the essay on the Study of Mathematics, Discussions, pp. 307-8.

[[*] ]Cf. Psalms, 94:9.

[* ]Both Sir W. Hamilton and Mr. Mansel sometimes call it by the fairer name of Determinism. But both of them, when they come to close quarters with the doctrine, in general call it either Necessity, or, less excusably, Fatalism. The truth is, that the assailants of the doctrine cannot do without the associations engendered by the double meaning of the word Necessity, which, in this application, signifies only invariability, but in its common employment, compulsion. Vide System of Logic, Bk. VI, Chap. ii [Collected Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 836ff.].

[* ]“The atheist who holds matter or necessity to be the original principle of all that is.” (Lectures, Vol. I, pp. 26-7.) “Those who do not allow that mind is matter—who hold that there is in man a principle of action superior to the determinations of a physical necessity, a brute or blind fate.” (Ibid., p. 133.) And the entire argument in page 31 of the same volume.

[† ]Reid’s [Essays on the Active Powers,] Works, Hamilton’s edition, p. 635.

[‡ ]That Condillac was a Spiritualist, is shown by the chapter on the Soul, which stands as the first chapter of his Art de Penser. [See Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, La Logique, ou les premiers développemens de l’art de penser, in Œuvres complètes, 31 vols. (Paris: Dufart, 1803), Vol. XXX, pp. 5-15 (Part I, Chap. i).]

[[*] ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 31.

[* ][67] Sir W. Hamilton thinks it a fair statement of the Free-will doctrine, that it supposes our volitions to be uncaused. But the “Inquirer” considers this a misstatement, and thinks the real free-will doctrine to be that “I” am the cause. (P. 45.) I prefer the other language, as being more consistent with the use of the word cause in other cases. If we take the word, we must take the acknowledged Law of Causation along with it, viz., that a cause which is the same in every respect, is always followed by the same effects. But on the free-will theory, the a“I”a is the same, and all the other conditions the same, and yet the effect may not only be different, but contrary. For instead of saying that “I” am the cause, the “Inquirer” should at least say, some state or mode of me, which is different when the effect is different: though what state or mode this could be, unless it were a will to will (the notion so justly ridiculed by Hobbes [see “Of Liberty and Necessity,” Discourse III of Tripos, in English Works, ed. Molesworth, Vol. IV, pp. 239-41]), it is difficult to imagine. I persist, therefore, in saying, with Sir W. Hamilton, that, on the free-will doctrine, volitions are emancipated from causation altogether.

[* ]Foot-notes to Reid, pp. 599n, 602n, 624n.

[† ]Lectures, Vol. II, pp. 412-13.

[‡ ]To the same effect in another passage: “That, though inconceivable, a motiveless volition would, if conceived, be conceived as morally worthless, only shows our impotence more clearly.” (Appendix [I(A)] to Discussions, pp. 614-15.) And in a foot-note to Reid, “Is the person an original undetermined cause of the determination of his will? If he be not, then he is not a free agent, and the scheme of Necessity is admitted. If he be, in the first place, it is impossible to conceive the possibility of this; and, in the second, if the fact, though inconceivable, be allowed, it is impossible to see how a cause, undetermined by any motive, can be a rational, moral, and accountable cause.” (P. 602n.)

[* ]Appendix [I(A)] to Discussions, pp. 624-5.

[b-b]651, 652 a distinction of which Sir W. Hamilton, of all men, ought to recognise the importance

[† ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 602n.

[[*] ]Chap. xxiv, pp. 424ff.

[* ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 608n. To the same effect see Discussions, Appendix [I(A)] on Causality, p. 614.

[† ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 609n.

[[*] ]Essays on the Active Powers, Works, p. 610.

[‡ ]Foot-note to Reid, p. 610n.

[§ ]Ibid., p. 611n.

[* ]Lectures, Vol. I, p. 34.

[† ]So difficult is it to escape from this fact, that Sir W. Hamilton himself says, “Voluntary conation is a faculty which can only be determined to energy through a pain or pleasure—through an estimate of the relative worth of objects.” (Ibid., p. 188.) If I am determined to prefer innocence to the satisfaction of a particular desire, through an estimate of the relative worth of innocence and of the gratification, can this estimate, while unchanged, leave me at liberty to choose the gratification in preference to innocence?

[c-c]+67, 72

[d-d]651, 652 make a plain avowal of our ignorance

[* ][67] The “Inquirer” accuses this argument of “gratuitously assuming that free-will is inconsistent with foreknowledge.” (P. 45.) This is a misapprehension. That vexed question is not even approached in the text. All that is maintained is that the possibility eto human intelligence,e of predicting human actions, implies a constancy of observed sequence between the same antecedents and the same consequents, which, in the case of all events except volitions, is deemed to justify the assertion of a law of nature (called in the language of the free-will philosophers Necessity). This constancy of sequence between motives, mental dispositions, and actions, is a strong reason against admitting free-will as a fact; but I have not meddled, and do not intend to meddle, with the metaphysical question whether a contingent event can be foreknown.

[f-f]651, 652 one thing, and

[g-g]651, 652 another

[† ]“Dissertations on Reid,” [Note A,] p. 749.

[* ]“Does it not require,” says Locke, “some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle (which yet is none of the most abstract, comprehensive and difficult?) for it must be neither oblique nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalene; but all and none of these at once. In effect, it is something imperfect, that cannot exist; an idea wherein some parts of several different and inconsistent ideas are put together.” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding [Works, Vol. III, pp. 27-8], Bk. IV, Chap. vii, §9.) Yet this union of contradictory elements such a philosopher as Locke was able to fancy that he conceived. I scarcely know a more striking example of the tendency of the human mind to believe that things can exist separately because they can be separately named; a tendency strong enough, in this case, to make a mind like Locke’s believe itself to be conscious of that which by the laws of mind cannot be a subject of consciousness to any one.

[[*] ]See Lectures, Vol. I, App. i(b), p. 395.

[[†] ]See, e.g., Foot-notes to Reid, pp. 599n, and 602n.

[† ]Mr. Mansel, among others, makes the assertion in the broadest form it is capable of, saying, “In every act of volition, I am fully conscious that I can at this moment act in either of two ways, and that, all the antecedent phænomena being precisely the same, I may determine one way to-day and another way to-morrow.” (Prolegomena Logica, p. 152.) Yes, though the antecedent phænomena remain the same: but not if my judgment of the antecedent phænomena remains the same. If my conduct changes, either the external inducements or my estimate of them must have changed.

Mr. Mansel (as I have already observed) goes so far as to maintain that our immediate intuition of Power is given us by the ego producing its own volitions, not by its volitions producing bodily movements (pp. 139-40, and 151).

[* ][67] In answer to the statement that what I am able to do is not a subject of consciousness, Mr. Alexander says, “Perhaps it is not; but what I feel I am able to do is surely a subject of consciousness. . . . As to ‘consciousness is not prophetic, we are conscious of what is, not of what will or can be,’ it seems enough to say that if we are conscious of a free force of volition continuously inherent in us, we are conscious of what is.” (Alexander, Mill and Carlyle, pp. 22-3 [quoting Mill, p. 449 above].) If we can be conscious of a force, and can feel an ability, independently of any present or past exercise thereof, the fact has nothing similar or analogous in all the rest of our nature. We are not conscious of a muscular force continuously inherent in us. If we were born with a cataract, we are not conscious, previous to being couched, of our ability to see. We should not feel able to walk if we had never walked, nor to think, if we had never thought. Ability and force are not real entities, which can be felt as present when no effect follows; they are abstract names for the happening of the effect on the occurrence of the needful conditions, or for our expectation of its happening. It is of course possible that this may be all wrong, and that there may be a concrete real thing called ability, of which consciousness discloses to us the positive existence in this one case, though there is no evidence of it in any other. But it is surely, to say the least, much more probable that we mistake for consciousness our habitual affirmation to ourselves of an acquired knowledge or belief. This very common mistake may have escaped the notice of Mr. Alexander, who (p. 23) considers knowledge to be the same thing as direct consciousness! but it is a possibility which it will not do to overlook, when one takes for one’s standard the “general consciousness of the race;” especially if, with Mr. Alexander, one restricts “the race” to those who are not philosophers, on the ground that no philosopher “unless he be one of a thousand,” can see or feel anything that is inconsistent with his preconceived opinion. (P. 25.) If this be the normal effect of philosophy on the human mind; if, nine hundred and ninety-nine times against one, the effect of cultivating our power of mental discrimination is to pervert it; let us close our books, and accept Hodge as a better authority in metaphysics than Locke or Kant, and, I suppose, in astronomy than Newton. An appeal to consciousness, however, to be of any value, must be to those who have formed a habit of sifting their consciousness, and distinguishing what they perceive or feel from what they infer; to those who can be made to understand that they do not see the sun move: and, to have attained this power of criticising their own consciousness on metaphysical subjects, they must have reflected on those subjects, in a manner and degree which quite entitle any one to the name of a philosopher.

Mr. Alexander denies that the belief that I was free to act can possibly be tested by experience à posteriori, since experience only tells me the way in which I did act, and says nothing about my having been able to act otherwise. [Pp. 23-4.] Mr. Alexander’s idea of the conditions of proof by experience is not a very enlarged one. Suppose that my experience of myself afforded two undeniable cases, alike in all the mental and physical antecedents, in one of which cases I acted in one way, and in the other in the direct opposite: there would then be proof by experience that I had been able to act either in the one way or in the other. It is by experience of this sort I learn that I can act at all, viz., by finding that an event takes place or not, according as (other circumstances being the same) a volition of mine does or does not take place. But when this power of my volitions over my actions has become a familiar fact, the knowledge of it is so constantly present to my mind as to be popularly called, and habitually confounded with, consciousness. And the supposed power of myself over my volitions, which is termed Free-will, though it cannot be a fact of consciousness, yet if true, or even if believed, would similarly work itself into our inmost knowledge of ourselves, in such a manner as to be mistaken for consciousness.

It would hardly be worth while to notice a pretended inconsistency discovered by Mr. Alexander between what is here said, and my recognition in a former work of a “practical feeling of Free Will”—“a feeling of Moral Freedom which we are conscious of,” if Mr. Alexander had not inferred from it that I “was at one time conscious” of what I now, for the convenience of my argument, deny to be a subject of consciousness. [Alexander, p. 22-3, quoting Mill, A System of Logic, Bk. VI, Chap. ii, §§1, 3, in Collected Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 836, 841.] Mr. Alexander himself quotes the words in which I spoke of this practical feeling of free-will as not one of free-will at all, in a sense implying the theory; and took pains to describe what it really is, expressly declaring our feeling of moral freedom to be a feeling of our being able to modify our own character if we wish. When I applied the words feeling and consciousness to this acquired knowledge, I did not use those terms in their strict psychological meaning, there being no necessity for doing so in that place; but, agreeably to popular usage, extended them to (what there is no appropriate scientific name for) the whole of our familiar and intimate knowledge concerning ourselves.

[h-h]+67, 72

[i-i]651, 652if I had preferred it

[j-j]651, 652 motives

[k-k]651, 652 motives

[* ][67] Preferring, as he says, a homely instance, Mr. Alexander supposes that a man puts his finger to his nose, and asks, “Is not he conscious of being able to touch at will either the right side of his nose or the left? Having touched, let us say, the left side, is he not conscious he could have touched the right side had he so willed it, and conscious that he could have so willed, chosen, or preferred?” (P. 29.) Mr. Alexander’s naïf expectation that his opponent’s answer will be different because of the futility of the example, reminds one of the asinus Buridani. I should, on the supposition which he makes, be aware (I will not say conscious) that I could have touched the right side had I so willed it; and aware that I could, and even should, have so willed, chosen, and preferred, if there had existed a sufficient inducement to make me do so, and not otherwise. If any one’s consciousness tells him that he could have done so without an inducement, or in opposition to a stronger inducement, I venture to express my opinion, in words borrowed from Mr. Alexander, that it is not his “veritable consciousness.” I will not imitate Mr. Alexander in calling it “a fraudulent substitute palmed upon him” by his philosophical system. [Ibid.]

[l-l]452+67, 72

[* ][67] [Phillipps,] The Battle of the Two Philosophies, pp. 43-4.

[† ][67] The writer I quote says, “Balancing one motive against another is not willing but judging.” [P. 43.] The state of mind I am speaking of is by no means a state of judging. It is an emotional, not an intellectual state, and the judging may be finished before it commences. If there were any indispensable act of judging in this stage, it could only be judging which of the two pains or pleasures was the greatest: and to regard this as the operative force would be conceding the point in favour of Necessitarianism.

[[*] ]Ibid., pp. 43-4.

[m-m]651, 652 being conscious

[n]651, 652 the main

[n]651, 652 the main

[p-p]452+67, 72

[* ][67] Mr. Alexander draws a woful picture of the pass which mankind would come to, if belief in so-called Necessity became general. All “our current moralities” would come to be regarded “as a form of superstition,” all “moral ideas as illusions,” by which “it is plain we get rid of them as motives:” consequently the internal sanction of conscience would no longer exist. “The external sanctions remain, but not quite as they were. That important section of them which rests on the moral approval or disapproval of our fellow-men has, of course, evaporated:” and “in virtue of a deadly moral indifference,” the remaining external sanctions “might come to be much more languidly enforced than as now they are,” and the progressive degradation would in a sufficient time “succeed in reproducing the real original gorilla.” (Pp. 118-21.) A formidable prospect: but Mr. Alexander must not suppose that other people’s feelings, about the matters of highest importance to them, are bound up with a certain speculative dogma, and even a certain form of words, because, it seems, his are. As long as guilt is thoroughly regarded as an evil, it would be quite safe even to hold with Plato, that it is the mental equivalent of bodily disease [see, e.g., Republic, p. 418 (IV, 444d10-e4)]: people would be none the less anxious to avoid it for themselves, and to cure it in others. Whatever else may be an illusion, it is no illusion that some types of conduct and character are salutary, and others pernicious, to the race and to each of its members; and there is no fear that mankind will not retain the property of their nature by which they prefer what is salutary to what is pernicious, and proclaim and act upon the preference. It is no illusion that human beings are objects of sympathy or of antipathy as they belong to the one type or to the other, and that the sympathies and antipathies excited in us by others react on ourselves. The qualities which each man feels to be odious in others, are odious, without illusion, in himself. The basis of Mr. Alexander’s gloomy prophecy thus fails him. I might add, that even if his groundless anticipations came to pass in some other manner, and disinterested love of virtue and hatred of guilt faded away from the earth; though the human race, thus degenerated, would be little worth preserving, it would probably find the means of preserving itself notwithstanding. The external sanctions, instead of being more languidly, would probably be far more rigidly enforced than at present; for more rigorous penalties would be necessary when there was less inward sentiment to aid them: and however destitute of pure virtuous feeling mankind might be, each one of them would be far too well aware of the importance of other people’s conduct to his own interest, not to exact those penalties without stint, and without any of the scruples which at present make conscientious men afraid of carrying repression too far.

[q-q]651, 652 though

[r-r]+67, 72

[s-s]651, 652 the best

[* ]“La liberté, complète, réelle, de l’homme, est la perfection humaine, le but à atteindre.” From a paper by M. Albert Réville, [“De la liberté et du progrès à propos des anciens et des modernes,”] in the Revue Germanique [et Française, XXVII, 21,] for September, 1863, in which the question of free-will is discussed (though only parenthetically) with a good sense and philosophy seldom found in recent writings on that subject.

tThe “Inquirer” accuses me (pp. 49-51) of throwing aside “a well considered and deliberate opinion, because it refuses to fit in with a foregone conclusion on another subject,” when I affirm that the good of the person punished can ever be one of the ends of punishment; and he quotes, on that subject, my essay on Liberty. I am responsible for the Essay, but not for this absurd perversion of its doctrines. Does it anywhere assert that children ought not to be punished for their own good? that parents, and even the magistrate, when dealing with that class of delinquents, are not entitled to constitute themselves judges of the delinquent’s good, and even bound to make it the principal consideration? Did I not expressly leave open, as similar to the case of children, that of adult communities which are still in the infantine stage of development? [See On Liberty, in Collected Works, Vol. XVIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 224.] And did I say, or did any one ever say, that when, for the protection of society, we punish those who have done injury to society, the reformation of the offenders is not one of the ends to be aimed at, in the kind and mode, at least, of the punishment?

The “Inquirer” adds, “If I deserve punishment, only because my love of right is too weak, and my desire for wrong pleasures is too strong, and therefore punishment will help me to dislike the latter the most, then I equally deserve rewards; ‘by counterbalancing the influence of present temptation or bad habits,’ rewards ‘restore the mind to the normal preponderance of the love of right.’ . . . And the more wicked I am, the greater reward I deserve. . . . For children, and for all so far as their own improvement is concerned, rewards for evil-doers must be more moral than punishments, as tending directly to diminish misery, and increase the sum of human happiness.” (P. 49.)

Supposing even that the matter of reward were sufficiently plentiful to allow of compensating everybody for every temptation he foregoes, I submit that this plan would scarcely fulfil the other, and still more important end of punishment, the discouragement of future offenders. And even in the case of children, whose own improvement, as long as their education lasts, is the main end to be considered, every one knows, though he may forget it in confuting an adversary, that pain is a stronger thing than pleasure, and punishment vastly more efficacious than reward. Punishment, too, can alone produce the associations which make the conduct that incurs it, ultimately hateful in itself, and which by rendering that which is injurious to society, sincerely distasteful to its individual members, produces the fellowship of feeling which gives them a sense of common interest, and enables them to sympathize and cooperate as creatures of one kin. Thus much to show (if it needs showing) that the preference of punishment to reward as a protection against violations of right, is no inconsistency in the conception of social justice laid down in the text. If the objector now asks—But, supposing this were not so, and that rewarding an offender were as effectual a means of improving his own character and protecting society as punishing him, would it equally commend itself to our feeling of desert? I answer, no. It would conflict with that natural, and even animal, desire of retaliation—of hurting those who have hurt us, either in ourselves or in anything we care for—which, as I have elsewhere maintained, is the root of all that distinguishes our feeling of justice from our ordinary sense of expediency. This natural feeling, whether instinctive or acquired, though in itself it has nothing moral in it, yet when moralized by being allied with, and limited by, regard for the general welfare, becomes, in my view of the matter, our moral sentiment of justice. And this sentiment is necessarily offended by rewarding delinquents, and gratified by their punishment. The sentiment is entitled to consideration in a world like ours, in which punishment is really necessary: but granting the absurd supposition of a state of human affairs in which rewarding offenders would really be more expedient than punishing them, there would be no need of this particular moral sentiment, and, like other sentiments the use of which is superseded by changes in the circumstances of mankind, it might, and probably would, die away.

The chapter in which I have discussed this question (Utilitarianism, Chap. v [in Collected Works, Vol. X, pp. 240ff.]) is quite familiar to Mr. Alexander; who shows himself extremely well acquainted with all parts of it, except those which tell against his own side. Even when he accomplishes (pp. 52 and 59) the great feat of finding in it the two statements, that justice, in the general mind, has a great deal to do with the notion of desert, and that justice is not synonymous with expediency, no one who reads him would suspect that I had explained in the same chapter what, in my view, the notion of desert is, and what there is in our idea of justice besides expediency. Mr. Alexander’s perpetual insinuations, and more than insinuations, of bad faith, since he makes a kind of retractation of their grossest meaning in one line of his essay [see p. 72], I pardon, as one of the incidents of his rollicking style; but it is well that he should be aware how easy, if any one were disposed, it would be to retaliate them.

How far Mr. Alexander understands the first elements of the ethical system which he denounces, is shown by one of his arguments, which he is so fond of that he repeats it several times; that if the protection of society is a sufficient reason for hanging any one, it holds good for hanging an innocent person, or a madman (pp. 36, 37, 65, 89). He repeatedly says, that this has just as deterring an effect as hanging a real criminal; being of opinion, apparently, that hanging a person who is not guilty gives people a motive to abstain from being guilty. As to the madman, he asks, “How should the state of mind of the maniac, as unamenable to motive, any way affect the efficacy of our hanging him for murder, as a means to deter others from murder?” (P. 65.) Mr. Alexander really has no claim to be answered, until he has got a step or two beyond this. Perhaps, however, he may be able to see, that all the deterring effect which hanging can produce on men who are amenable to motive, is produced by hanging men who are amenable to motive. Hanging, in addition, those who are not amenable to motive, adds nothing to the deterring effect, and is therefore a gratuitous brutality.t

[u-u]+67, 72

[v]651, 652 exactly

[w-w]651, 652 just

[x-x]+67, 72

[* ][67] The force of this argument is attested by the straits to which my most persevering assailant, Mr. Alexander, is reduced by it (pp. 63-4). He finds himself obliged to say that, “could we have positive assurance,” in the case of such people, “that their outrage of the obligation to respect life was solely an act of self-sacrifice to what they considered a higher and more sacred one, we should be obliged to admit that their doom was not just in the particular instance.” This is very well, but we want practice as well as theory. Would you hang them? Mr. Alexander makes a halting half-admission that he would. “A dubious point of justice—dubious, because the true motive of the act must always remain obscure—may here be allowed to be overridden by a plain and potent mandate of expediency.” Mr. Alexander therefore would hang men when it is doubtful whether they deserve it; would hang them for what “may really have been an act of sublime virtue.” But what is the amount of real dubiousness in cases like these? Of all acts that a man can do, those by which he knowingly sacrifices his life, sometimes with the addition of horrible torments, are the clearest from suspicion of any motives but honest ones. Mr. Alexander talks of Brutus and Charlotte Corday, but I am content with Ravaillac. Is there the smallest reason to doubt that Ravaillac’s “outrage of the obligation to respect life” was “an act of self-sacrifice” to what, in his opinion, was “a higher and more sacred one?” What motive had Ravaillac for his abominable action except a supposed duty to God, and did he not deem this his highest and most sacred duty? As for Mr. Alexander’s hint [p. 63] that such a man, if not culpable in the act, was “culpable in the perversion of his conscience which led to it,” it is the old odious assumption of persecutors, that acts which they cannot show to have been wicked in intention, must have originated in previous wickedness. The act of Ravaillac simply originated in false teaching, coming to him from the same quarter from which had come most of the good teaching which he had received during life. It came from the fountain of goodness, not of wickedness.

[y-y]651, 652 for no reason

[* ]Several of Sir W. Hamilton’s admissions are strong arguments against the alleged self-evident connexion between free-will and accountability. We have found him affirming that a volition not determined by motives “would, if conceived, be conceived as morally worthless;” that “the free acts of an indifferent, are, morally and rationally, as worthless as the preordained passions of a determined will;” and that “it is impossible to see how a cause, undetermined by any motive, can be a rational, moral, and accountable cause.” [Appendix I(A) to Discussions, pp. 614-15, 624-5, and Foot-note to Reid, p. 602n; cf. pp. 442-3 and 442n above.] If all this be so, there can be no intuitive perception of a necessary connexion between free-will and morality; it would appear, on the contrary, that we are naturally unable to recognise an act as moral, if it is, in the sense of the theory, free.

zMr. Alexander actually thinks that in these passages, Sir W. Hamilton is “asserting the determination of the will by motives;” and cannot believe that he intended “to assert an absolute commencement as the mode under which Freedom, though inconceivable, has yet to be believed:” since this “would have been to rush with his eyes open on the staring contradictory, of a thing at once caused and uncaused.” (P. 80.) Yet, presently after, he himself charges Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine with requiring belief in two contrary inconceivables. [Pp. 81n-2n.] In the present case it only requires a belief in one of them, an absolute, or uncaused, commencement. Mr. Alexander does not lay claim to much knowledge of Sir W. Hamilton; and certainly no one who understood what that philosopher, and most others who discuss this question, mean by “to determine,” could fail to see that with him the determination of the will by motives means Determinism, or as it is commonly called, Necessity.z

[a-a]651, 652 ideas of doing wrong and

[* ]Lectures, Vol. III, p. 47.

[[*] ]For the image, see William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II, iii, 115-16.

[b-b]651, 652 his will could not have helped it

[c-c]+67, 72

[d-d]651, 652 right

[e-e]651, 652 wrong

[* ]Prolegomena Logica, Note C at the end [pp. 298-305].

[f]651, 652 as

[† ]System of Logic, Bk. VI, Chap. ii. [Collected Works, Vol. VIII, pp. 836ff.]

[[*] ]Quoted by Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, pp. 298-9, from Logic, Bk. III, Chap. v, §8 (§7 in the 2nd ed., from which Mansel quotes), Collected Works, Vol. VII, p. 347n.

[[†] ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 299.

[[‡] ]See Sophocles, Œdipus the King, Œdipus at Colonus.

[g-g]651, 652 necessity: in

[* ][67] This vital truth in moral psychology, that we can improve our character if we will, is a great stumbling block both to the “Inquirer” and to Mr. Alexander. They maintain that this fact makes no difference at all, and that the Causation of human actions is exactly the same thing with Modified Fatalism. That the “Inquirer” cannot see any difference, excites no surprise, since he professes himself unable to understand “how our conduct is amenable to our will if it is wholly caused by our character and circumstances.” (P. 46n.) Is not the very doctrine he is contending against, that our character and circumstances cause it through our will? Both he and Mr. Alexander protest vehemently, and Mr. Alexander at much length, that the Causation doctrine is as incompatible with Free will as Fatalism is. [See Phillipps, pp. 46-7, and Alexander, pp. 100-18.] As if anybody had denied that. In the very next paragraph, when arguing against Kant, I expressly affirmed it. But, if it is not too much to ask, let them try to put their own opinion in abeyance, and condescend for a few moments to look at the question from mine. Suppose (I have as much right to make the supposition as they have) that a person dislikes some part of his own character, and would be glad to change it. He cannot, as he well knows, change it by a mere act of volition. He must use the means which nature gives to ourselves, as she gave to our parents and teachers, of influencing our character by appropriate circumstances. If he is a Modified Fatalist, he will not use those means, for he will not believe in their efficacy; but will remain passively discontented with himself, or what is worse, will learn to be contented, thinking that his character has been made for him, and that he cannot make it over again, however willing. If, on the contrary, he is a Moral Causationist, he will know that the work is not finally and irrevocably done; that the improvement of his character is still possible by the proper means, the only needful condition being that he should desire, what by the supposition he does desire: consequently if the desire is stronger than the means are disagreeable, he will set about doing that which, if done, will improve his character. I cannot suppose my critics capable of maintaining that such a difference as this, between the two theories, is of no practical importance; and I must, with all courtesy, decline to recognise as entitled to any voice in the question, whoever is not able to seize a distinction so broad and obvious.

Mr. Alexander’s curious dictum that a motive is itself an act, can only have a true meaning, or any meaning at all, if understood of this indirect influence of our voluntary acts over our mental dispositions. (Pp. 18-20.) That a person can, by an act of will, either give to himself, or take away from himself, a desire or an aversion, I suppose even Mr. Alexander will hardly affirm: but we can, by a course of self-culture, finally modify, to a greater or less extent, our desires and aversions; which is the doctrine of Moral Causation, as distinguished from Modified Fatalism.

[[*] ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 303.

[[†] ]See Metaphysik der Sitten, in Werke, Vol. IX, pp. 21-30.

[h-h]+67, 72

[[‡] ]Prolegomena Logica, pp. 299-300.

[[*] ]See Reid, Essays on the Active Powers, Works, p. 609; Mansel, Prolegomena Logica, p. 301.

[* ]Pp. 609n-11n.

[[†] ]See Essays on the Active Powers, Works, pp. 599-636.

[[‡] ]Prolegomena Logica, p. 302.

[[*] ]Ibid., pp. 302-3.

[* ][67] Sir W. Hamilton thinks it a fair statement of the Free-will doctrine, that it supposes our volitions to be uncaused. But the “Inquirer” considers this a misstatement, and thinks the real free-will doctrine to be that “I” am the cause. (P. 45.) I prefer the other language, as being more consistent with the use of the word cause in other cases. If we take the word, we must take the acknowledged Law of Causation along with it, viz., that a cause which is the same in every respect, is always followed by the same effects. But on the free-will theory, the a“I”a is the same, and all the other conditions the same, and yet the effect may not only be different, but contrary. For instead of saying that “I” am the cause, the “Inquirer” should at least say, some state or mode of me, which is different when the effect is different: though what state or mode this could be, unless it were a will to will (the notion so justly ridiculed by Hobbes [see “Of Liberty and Necessity,” Discourse III of Tripos, in English Works, ed. Molesworth, Vol. IV, pp. 239-41]), it is difficult to imagine. I persist, therefore, in saying, with Sir W. Hamilton, that, on the free-will doctrine, volitions are emancipated from causation altogether.

[* ][67] The “Inquirer” accuses this argument of “gratuitously assuming that free-will is inconsistent with foreknowledge.” (P. 45.) This is a misapprehension. That vexed question is not even approached in the text. All that is maintained is that the possibility eto human intelligence,e of predicting human actions, implies a constancy of observed sequence between the same antecedents and the same consequents, which, in the case of all events except volitions, is deemed to justify the assertion of a law of nature (called in the language of the free-will philosophers Necessity). This constancy of sequence between motives, mental dispositions, and actions, is a strong reason against admitting free-will as a fact; but I have not meddled, and do not intend to meddle, with the metaphysical question whether a contingent event can be foreknown.

[* ]“La liberté, complète, réelle, de l’homme, est la perfection humaine, le but à atteindre.” From a paper by M. Albert Réville, [“De la liberté et du progrès à propos des anciens et des modernes,”] in the Revue Germanique [et Française, XXVII, 21,] for September, 1863, in which the question of free-will is discussed (though only parenthetically) with a good sense and philosophy seldom found in recent writings on that subject.

tThe “Inquirer” accuses me (pp. 49-51) of throwing aside “a well considered and deliberate opinion, because it refuses to fit in with a foregone conclusion on another subject,” when I affirm that the good of the person punished can ever be one of the ends of punishment; and he quotes, on that subject, my essay on Liberty. I am responsible for the Essay, but not for this absurd perversion of its doctrines. Does it anywhere assert that children ought not to be punished for their own good? that parents, and even the magistrate, when dealing with that class of delinquents, are not entitled to constitute themselves judges of the delinquent’s good, and even bound to make it the principal consideration? Did I not expressly leave open, as similar to the case of children, that of adult communities which are still in the infantine stage of development? [See On Liberty, in Collected Works, Vol. XVIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 224.] And did I say, or did any one ever say, that when, for the protection of society, we punish those who have done injury to society, the reformation of the offenders is not one of the ends to be aimed at, in the kind and mode, at least, of the punishment?

The “Inquirer” adds, “If I deserve punishment, only because my love of right is too weak, and my desire for wrong pleasures is too strong, and therefore punishment will help me to dislike the latter the most, then I equally deserve rewards; ‘by counterbalancing the influence of present temptation or bad habits,’ rewards ‘restore the mind to the normal preponderance of the love of right.’ . . . And the more wicked I am, the greater reward I deserve. . . . For children, and for all so far as their own improvement is concerned, rewards for evil-doers must be more moral than punishments, as tending directly to diminish misery, and increase the sum of human happiness.” (P. 49.)

Supposing even that the matter of reward were sufficiently plentiful to allow of compensating everybody for every temptation he foregoes, I submit that this plan would scarcely fulfil the other, and still more important end of punishment, the discouragement of future offenders. And even in the case of children, whose own improvement, as long as their education lasts, is the main end to be considered, every one knows, though he may forget it in confuting an adversary, that pain is a stronger thing than pleasure, and punishment vastly more efficacious than reward. Punishment, too, can alone produce the associations which make the conduct that incurs it, ultimately hateful in itself, and which by rendering that which is injurious to society, sincerely distasteful to its individual members, produces the fellowship of feeling which gives them a sense of common interest, and enables them to sympathize and cooperate as creatures of one kin. Thus much to show (if it needs showing) that the preference of punishment to reward as a protection against violations of right, is no inconsistency in the conception of social justice laid down in the text. If the objector now asks—But, supposing this were not so, and that rewarding an offender were as effectual a means of improving his own character and protecting society as punishing him, would it equally commend itself to our feeling of desert? I answer, no. It would conflict with that natural, and even animal, desire of retaliation—of hurting those who have hurt us, either in ourselves or in anything we care for—which, as I have elsewhere maintained, is the root of all that distinguishes our feeling of justice from our ordinary sense of expediency. This natural feeling, whether instinctive or acquired, though in itself it has nothing moral in it, yet when moralized by being allied with, and limited by, regard for the general welfare, becomes, in my view of the matter, our moral sentiment of justice. And this sentiment is necessarily offended by rewarding delinquents, and gratified by their punishment. The sentiment is entitled to consideration in a world like ours, in which punishment is really necessary: but granting the absurd supposition of a state of human affairs in which rewarding offenders would really be more expedient than punishing them, there would be no need of this particular moral sentiment, and, like other sentiments the use of which is superseded by changes in the circumstances of mankind, it might, and probably would, die away.

The chapter in which I have discussed this question (Utilitarianism, Chap. v [in Collected Works, Vol. X, pp. 240ff.]) is quite familiar to Mr. Alexander; who shows himself extremely well acquainted with all parts of it, except those which tell against his own side. Even when he accomplishes (pp. 52 and 59) the great feat of finding in it the two statements, that justice, in the general mind, has a great deal to do with the notion of desert, and that justice is not synonymous with expediency, no one who reads him would suspect that I had explained in the same chapter what, in my view, the notion of desert is, and what there is in our idea of justice besides expediency. Mr. Alexander’s perpetual insinuations, and more than insinuations, of bad faith, since he makes a kind of retractation of their grossest meaning in one line of his essay [see p. 72], I pardon, as one of the incidents of his rollicking style; but it is well that he should be aware how easy, if any one were disposed, it would be to retaliate them.

How far Mr. Alexander understands the first elements of the ethical system which he denounces, is shown by one of his arguments, which he is so fond of that he repeats it several times; that if the protection of society is a sufficient reason for hanging any one, it holds good for hanging an innocent person, or a madman (pp. 36, 37, 65, 89). He repeatedly says, that this has just as deterring an effect as hanging a real criminal; being of opinion, apparently, that hanging a person who is not guilty gives people a motive to abstain from being guilty. As to the madman, he asks, “How should the state of mind of the maniac, as unamenable to motive, any way affect the efficacy of our hanging him for murder, as a means to deter others from murder?” (P. 65.) Mr. Alexander really has no claim to be answered, until he has got a step or two beyond this. Perhaps, however, he may be able to see, that all the deterring effect which hanging can produce on men who are amenable to motive, is produced by hanging men who are amenable to motive. Hanging, in addition, those who are not amenable to motive, adds nothing to the deterring effect, and is therefore a gratuitous brutality.t

[* ]Several of Sir W. Hamilton’s admissions are strong arguments against the alleged self-evident connexion between free-will and accountability. We have found him affirming that a volition not determined by motives “would, if conceived, be conceived as morally worthless;” that “the free acts of an indifferent, are, morally and rationally, as worthless as the preordained passions of a determined will;” and that “it is impossible to see how a cause, undetermined by any motive, can be a rational, moral, and accountable cause.” [Appendix I(A) to Discussions, pp. 614-15, 624-5, and Foot-note to Reid, p. 602n; cf. pp. 442-3 and 442n above.] If all this be so, there can be no intuitive perception of a necessary connexion between free-will and morality; it would appear, on the contrary, that we are naturally unable to recognise an act as moral, if it is, in the sense of the theory, free.

zMr. Alexander actually thinks that in these passages, Sir W. Hamilton is “asserting the determination of the will by motives;” and cannot believe that he intended “to assert an absolute commencement as the mode under which Freedom, though inconceivable, has yet to be believed:” since this “would have been to rush with his eyes open on the staring contradictory, of a thing at once caused and uncaused.” (P. 80.) Yet, presently after, he himself charges Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine with requiring belief in two contrary inconceivables. [Pp. 81n-2n.] In the present case it only requires a belief in one of them, an absolute, or uncaused, commencement. Mr. Alexander does not lay claim to much knowledge of Sir W. Hamilton; and certainly no one who understood what that philosopher, and most others who discuss this question, mean by “to determine,” could fail to see that with him the determination of the will by motives means Determinism, or as it is commonly called, Necessity.z

[a“I”a]67 “I”

[eto human intelligence,e]+72

[tThe “Inquirer” accuses me (pp. 49-51) of throwing aside “a well considered and deliberate opinion, because it refuses to fit in with a foregone conclusion on another subject,” when I affirm that the good of the person punished can ever be one of the ends of punishment; and he quotes, on that subject, my essay on Liberty. I am responsible for the Essay, but not for this absurd perversion of its doctrines. Does it anywhere assert that children ought not to be punished for their own good? that parents, and even the magistrate, when dealing with that class of delinquents, are not entitled to constitute themselves judges of the delinquent’s good, and even bound to make it the principal consideration? Did I not expressly leave open, as similar to the case of children, that of adult communities which are still in the infantine stage of development? [See On Liberty, in Collected Works, Vol. XVIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 224.] And did I say, or did any one ever say, that when, for the protection of society, we punish those who have done injury to society, the reformation of the offenders is not one of the ends to be aimed at, in the kind and mode, at least, of the punishment?]+67, 72

[zMr. Alexander actually thinks that in these passages, Sir W. Hamilton is “asserting the determination of the will by motives;” and cannot believe that he intended “to assert an absolute commencement as the mode under which Freedom, though inconceivable, has yet to be believed:” since this “would have been to rush with his eyes open on the staring contradictory, of a thing at once caused and uncaused.” (P. 80.) Yet, presently after, he himself charges Sir W. Hamilton’s doctrine with requiring belief in two contrary inconceivables. [Pp. 81n-2n.] In the present case it only requires a belief in one of them, an absolute, or uncaused, commencement. Mr. Alexander does not lay claim to much knowledge of Sir W. Hamilton; and certainly no one who understood what that philosopher, and most others who discuss this question, mean by “to determine,” could fail to see that with him the determination of the will by motives means Determinism, or as it is commonly called, Necessity.z]+67, 72