The manner in which Hobbes, Collins, and others, endeavour to reconcile
necessity with free and accountable agency.
The celebrated philosopher of Malmsbury viewed all things as bound
together in the relation of cause and effect; and he was, beyond doubt,
one of the most acute thinkers that ever advocated the doctrine of
necessity. From some of the sentiments expressed towards the conclusion of
“The Leviathan,” which have, not without reason, subjected him to the
charge of atheism, we may doubt his entire sincerity when he pretends to
advocate the doctrine of necessity out of a zeal for the Divine
Sovereignty and the dogma of Predestination. If he hoped by this avowal of
his design to propitiate any class of theologians, he must have been
greatly disappointed; for his speculations were universally condemned by
the Christian world as atheistical in their tendency. This charge has been
fixed upon him, in spite of his solemn protestations against its
injustice, and his earnest endeavours to reconcile his scheme of necessity
with the free-agency and accountability of man.
“I conceive,” says Hobbes, “that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but
from the action of some other immediate agent without itself. And that
therefore, when first a man hath an appetite or will to something, to
which immediately before he had no appetite nor will, the cause of his
will is not the will itself, but something else not in his own disposing;
so that it is out of controversy, that of voluntary actions the will is
the necessary cause, and by this which is said, the will is also caused by
other things whereof it disposeth not, it followeth, that voluntary
actions have all of them necessary causes, and therefore are
necessitated.” This is clear and explicit. There is no controversy, he
truly says, that voluntary actions, that is, external actions proceeding
from the will, are necessitated by the will. And as according to his
postulate, the will or volition is also caused by other things of which it
has no disposal, so they are also necessitated. In other words, external
voluntary actions are necessarily caused by volitions, and volitions are
necessarily caused by something else other than the will; and consequently
the chain is complete between the cause of volition and its effects. How,
then, is man a free-agent? and how is he accountable for his actions?
Hobbes has not left these questions unanswered; and it is a mistake to
suppose, as is too often done, that his argument in favour of necessity
evinces a design to sap the foundations of human responsibility.
He answers these questions precisely as they were answered by Luther and
Calvin more than a hundred years before his time. In order to solve this
great difficulty, and establish an agreement between necessity and
liberty, he insists on the distinction between co-action and necessity.
Sir James Mackintosh says, that “in his treatise _de Servo Arbitrio_
against Erasmus, Luther states the distinction between co-action and
necessity as familiar a hundred and fifty years before it was proposed by
Hobbes, or condemned in the Jansenists.”(10) According to his definition
of liberty, it is merely a freedom from co-action, or external compulsion.
“I conceive liberty,” says he, “to be rightly defined in this manner:
Liberty is the absence of all the impediments to action that are not
contained in the nature and intrinsical qualities of the agent: as for
example, the water is said to descend freely, or to have liberty to
descend by the channel of the river, because there is no impediment that
way; but not across, because the banks are impediments; and though the
water cannot ascend, yet men never say it wants liberty to ascend, but the
faculty or power, because the impediment is in the nature of the water and
intrinsical.” According to this definition, though a man’s volitions were
thrown out, not by himself, but by some irresistible power working within
his mind, say the power of the Almighty, yet he would be free, provided
there were no impediments to prevent the external effects of his
volitions. This is the liberty which water, impelled by the power of
gravity, possesses in descending the channel of a river. It is the liberty
of the winds and waves of the sea, which, by a sort of metaphor, is
supposed to reign over the dominions of a mechanical and materialistic
fate. It is the most idle of all idle things to speak of such a liberty,
_or rather, to use the word in such a sense_, when the controversy relates
to the freedom of the mind itself. What has such a thing to do with the
origin of human volitions, or the nature of moral agency? Is there no
difference between the motion of the body and the action of mind? Or is
there nothing in the universe of God but mere body and local motion? If
there is not, then, indeed, we neither have nor can conceive any higher
liberty than that which the philosopher is pleased to allow us to possess;
but if there be mind, then there may be things in heaven and earth which
are not dreamed of in his philosophy.
The definition which Collins, the disciple of Hobbes, has given of
liberty, is the same as that of his master. “I contend,” says he, “for
liberty, as it signifies a power in man to do as he wills or pleases.” The
doing here refers to the external action, which, properly speaking, is not
an act at all, but merely a change of state in the body. The body merely
_suffers_ a change of place and position, in obedience to the act of the
will; it does not act, nor can it act, because it is passive in its
nature. To _do_ as one wills, in this sense, is a freedom of the body from
co-action; it is not a freedom of the will from internal necessity.
Collins says this is “a valuable liberty,” and he says truly; for if one
were thrown into prison, he could not go wherever he might please, or do
as he might will. But the imprisonment of the body does not prevent a man
from being a free-agent. He also tells us truly, that “many philosophers
and theologians, both ancient and modern, have given definitions of
liberty that are consistent with fate and necessity.” But then, their
definitions, like his own, had no reference to the acts of the mind, but
to the motions of the body; and it is a grand irrelevancy, we repeat, to
speak of such a thing, when the question relates, not to the freedom of
the body, but the freedom of the mind. Calvin truly says, that to call
this external freedom from co-action or natural necessity a freedom of the
will, is to decorate a most diminutive thing with a superb title; but the
philosopher of Malmsbury, and his ingenious disciple, seem disposed to
confer the high-sounding title and empty name on us, in order to reconcile
us to the servitude and chains in which they have been pleased to bind us.
This idea of liberty, common to Hobbes and Collins, which Mackintosh says
was familiar to Luther and Calvin at least a hundred and thirty years
before, is in reality of much earlier origin. It was maintained by the
ancient Stoics, by whom it is as clearly set forth as by Hobbes himself.
The well-known illustration of the Stoic Chrysippus, so often mentioned by
Leibnitz and others, is a proof of the correctness of this remark:
“Suppose I push against a heavy body,” says he: “if it be square, it will
not move; if it be cylindrical, it will. What the difference of form is to
the stone, the difference of disposition is to the mind.” Thus his notion
of freedom was derived from matter, and supposed to consist in the absence
of friction! The idea of liberty thus deduced from that which is purely
and perfectly passive, from an absolutely necessitated state of body, was
easily reconciled by him with his doctrine of fate.
Is it not strange that Mr. Hazlitt, after adopting this definition of
liberty, should have supposed that he allowed a real freedom to the will?
“I prefer exceedingly,” says he, “to the modern instances of a couple of
billiard-balls, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysippus.” We
cannot very well see, how the instance of a cylinder is so great an
improvement on that of a billiard-ball; especially as a sphere, and not a
cylinder, is free to move in all directions.
The truth is, we must quit the region of dead, inert, passive matter, if
we would form an idea of the true meaning of the term liberty, as applied
to the activity of living agents. Mr. Hazlitt evidently loses himself amid
the ambiguities of language, when he says, that “I so far agree with
Hobbes and differ from Locke, in thinking that liberty, in the most
extended and abstracted sense, is applicable to _material as well as
voluntary agents_.” Still this very acute writer makes a few feeble and
ineffectual efforts to raise our notion of the liberty of moral agents
above that given by the illustration of Chrysippus in Cicero. “My notion
of a free agent, I confess,” says he, “is not that represented by Mr.
Hobbes, namely, one that when all things necessary to produce the effect
are present, can nevertheless not produce it; but I believe a free-agent
of whatever kind is one which, where all things necessary to produce the
effect are present, can produce it; its own operation not being hindered
by anything else. The body is said to be free when it has the power to
obey the direction of the will; so the will may be said to be free when it
has the power to obey the dictates of the understanding.”(11) Thus the
liberty of the will is made to consist not in the denial that its
volitions are produced, but in the absence of impediments which might
hinder its operations from taking effect. This idea of liberty, it is
evident, is perfectly consistent with the materialistic fatalism of
Hobbes, which is so much admired by Mr. Hazlitt.