A common opinion prevails that the juice has ages ago been pressed out
of the free-will controversy, and that no new champion can do more than
warm up stale arguments which every one has heard. This is a radical
mistake. I know of no subject less worn out, or in which inventive
genius has a better chance of breaking open new ground,--not, perhaps,
of forcing a conclusion or of coercing assent, but of deepening our
sense of what the issue between the two parties really is, of what the
ideas of fate and of free-will imply. At our very side almost, in the
past few years, we have seen falling in rapid succession from the press
works that present the alternative in entirely novel lights. Not to
speak of the English disciples of Hegel, such as Green and Bradley; not
to speak of Hinton and Hodgson, nor of Hazard here,--we see in the
writings of Renouvier, Fouillée, and Delboeuf[2] how completely changed
and refreshed is the form of all the old disputes. I cannot pretend to
vie in originality with any of the masters I have named, and my
ambition limits itself to just one little point. If I can make two of
the necessarily implied corollaries {146} of determinism clearer to you
than they have been made before, I shall have made it possible for you
to decide for or against that doctrine with a better understanding of
what you are about. And if you prefer not to decide at all, but to
remain doubters, you will at least see more plainly what the subject of
your hesitation is. I thus disclaim openly on the threshold all
pretension to prove to you that the freedom of the will is true. The
most I hope is to induce some of you to follow my own example in
assuming it true, and acting as if it were true. If it be true, it
seems to me that this is involved in the strict logic of the case. Its
truth ought not to be forced willy-nilly down our indifferent throats.
It ought to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn their
backs upon it. In other words, our first act of freedom, if we are
free, ought in all inward propriety to be to affirm that we are free.
This should exclude, it seems to me, from the free-will side of the
question all hope of a coercive demonstration,--a demonstration which
I, for one, am perfectly contented to go without.
With thus much understood at the outset, we can advance. But not
without one more point understood as well. The arguments I am about to
urge all proceed on two suppositions: first, when we make theories
about the world and discuss them with one another, we do so in order to
attain a conception of things which shall give us subjective
satisfaction; and, second, if there be two conceptions, and the one
seems to us, on the whole, more rational than the other, we are
entitled to suppose that the more rational one is the truer of the two.
I hope that you are all willing to make these suppositions with me;
{147} for I am afraid that if there be any of you here who are not,
they will find little edification in the rest of what I have to say. I
cannot stop to argue the point; but I myself believe that all the
magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science--our
doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest--proceed
from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational
shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the
crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great
extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much
farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of
finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions
of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality. If a certain
formula for expressing the nature of the world violates my moral
demand, I shall feel as free to throw it overboard, or at least to
doubt it, as if it disappointed my demand for uniformity of sequence,
for example; the one demand being, so far as I can see, quite as
subjective and emotional as the other is. The principle of causality,
for example,--what is it but a postulate, an empty name covering simply
a demand that the sequence of events shall some day manifest a deeper
kind of belonging of one thing with another than the mere arbitrary
juxtaposition which now phenomenally appears? It is as much an altar
to an unknown god as the one that Saint Paul found at Athens. All our
scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
Uniformity is as much so as is free-will. If this be admitted, we can
debate on even terms. But if any one pretends that while freedom and
variety are, in the first instance, subjective demands, necessity and
uniformity are something {148} altogether different, I do not see how
we can debate at all.[3]
To begin, then, I must suppose you acquainted with all the usual
arguments on the subject. I cannot stop to take up the old proofs from
causation, from statistics, from the certainty with which we can
foretell one another's conduct, from the fixity of character, and all
the rest. But there are two words which usually encumber these
classical arguments, {149} and which we must immediately dispose of if
we are to make any progress. One is the eulogistic word _freedom_, and
the other is the opprobrious word _chance_. The word 'chance' I wish
to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.' Its eulogistic
associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that
both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day
insist that they alone are freedom's champions. Old-fashioned
determinism was what we may call _hard_ determinism. It did not shrink
from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and
the like. Nowadays, we have a _soft_ determinism which abhors harsh
words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination,
says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity
understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr.
Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a 'free-will determinist.'
Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of
fact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presents
simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by
it,--whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he
mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law
of the whole,--who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and
sometimes we are not? But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact and
not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often
decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a
sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.
Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may
happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now,
evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for
ourselves. What does determinism profess?
It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The
future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other
future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The
whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
shadow of turning.
"With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."
Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It
admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
ambiguous. Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both
may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that
view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
out of which they are chosen; and, _somewhere_, indeterminism says,
such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.
Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist _nowhere_, and that
necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get realized are,
for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all.
There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all
that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity
virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass
of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which
'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.
The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out. The truth _must_
lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
other false.
The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the
strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be. Both
sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred. The
indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;
the determinists swear that nothing could possibly {152} have occurred
in its place. Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these
two point-blank contradicters of each other is right? Science
professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of
fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of
assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of
information as to whether another thing might or might not have
happened in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With
things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If
we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the
possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with
making us either determinists or indeterminists. Sure enough, we make
a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are
determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict
one another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great
stress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell one
another's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great
and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely
anxious and hazardous a game. But who does not see the wretched
insufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?
What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not
external. What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility
men is different faiths or postulates,--postulates of rationality. To
this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it,--to
that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we will
about having to yield to {153} evidence, what makes us monists or
pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some
sentiment like this.
The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the
idea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our
friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of
alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of
several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name
for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind
can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but
barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law? And
if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the
whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos
from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?
Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as
quickly as anything one can find. I have already told you that
'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use. Let us then examine
exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible
bugbear to us. I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it
of its sting.
The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it
means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it
must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous
sort. Now, chance means nothing of the kind. It is a purely negative
and relative term,[4] giving us {154} no information about that of
which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with
something else,--not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other
things in advance of its own actual presence. As this point is the
most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point
on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to
it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be
in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good
thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the
system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its
origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.
This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
thus considered _ab. extra_, or from the point of view of previous
things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
moment. All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
unconditional property of the whole. If the whole wants this property,
the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.
Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of
disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Since
future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.
What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
moment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
Street are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shall
be chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten
minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door
of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then
that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and
traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see
the two alternative universes,--one of them with me walking through
Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through
Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these
universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have
{156} been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or
accidentality somewhere involved in it. But looking outwardly at these
universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and
which the rational and necessary one? I doubt if the most iron-clad
determinist among you could have the slightest glimmer of light on this
point. In other words, either universe _after the fact_ and once there
would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as
rational as the other. There would be absolutely no criterion by which
we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance. Suppose
now we relieve the gods of their hypothetical task and assume my
choice, once made, to be made forever. I go through Divinity Avenue
for good and all. If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm,
what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of
things I _couldn't_ have gone through Oxford Street,--had I done so it
would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in
nature,--I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is
what the Germans call a _Machtspruch_, a mere conception fulminated as
a dogma and based on no insight into details. Before my choice, either
street seemed as natural to you as to me. Had I happened to take
Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as
the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best
deterministic conscience in the world.
But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it
were present to us, we could by no character whatever distinguish from
a rational necessity! I have taken the most trivial of examples, but
no possible example could lead to any different {157} result. For what
are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human
volition? What are those futures that now seem matters of chance? Are
they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our
example? Are they not all of them _kinds_ of things already here and
based in the existing frame of nature? Is any one ever tempted to
produce an _absolute_ accident, something utterly irrelevant to the
rest of the world? Do not all the motives that assail us, all the
futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the
soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized
through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem
to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous
manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?[5]
The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty
and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found
so great an echo in the hearts of men. It is a word which tells us
absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the _modus operandi_ of
the chancing; and the use of it as a war-cry shows only a temper of
{158} intellectual absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid
block, subject to one control,--which temper, which demand, the world
may not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable and
practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually
distract _your_ choice were decided by pure chance would be by _me_
absolutely undistinguished from the world in which I now live. I am,
therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a
world of chance for me. To _yourselves_, it is true, those very acts
of choice, which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the
opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them. To you
they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are
altogether peculiar psychic facts. Self-luminous and self-justifying
at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside
moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest
of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous;
and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one
possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal
and double future into an inalterable and simple past.
But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening.
The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing
to do with this or that psychological detail. It is a quarrel
altogether metaphysical. Determinism denies the ambiguity of future
volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous.
But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate future
volitions do mean chance. Let us not fear to shout it from the
house-tops if need be; for we now know that {159} the idea of chance
is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,--the one
simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for
anything on which we have no effective _claim_. And whether the world
be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it
will depend altogether on _what_ these uncertain and unclaimable things
turn out to be.
And this at last brings us within sight of our subject. We have seen
what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly
described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very
name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical
pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world,
however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the
whole. But although, in discussing the word 'chance,' I may at moments
have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to
do so yet. We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of
chance or no; at most, we have agreed that it seems so. And I now
repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict theoretical
point of view, the question is insoluble. To deepen our theoretic
sense of the _difference_ between a world with chances in it and a
deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at
last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.
I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a
deterministic world implies. The implications I call your attention to
are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we
constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call
judgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in {160} which we do not
wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of
us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam--
"That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate,
And make the writer on a fairer leaf
Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
"Ah! Love, could you and I with fate conspire
To mend this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"
Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite
on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the
universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The
Atheist and the Acorn,--
"Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.
Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a
botch of remodelling the universe. How much more then from the point
of view of ends we cannot see! Wise men therefore regret as little as
they can. But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard to
stifle,--regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example,
whether performed by others or by ourselves. Hardly any one can remain
_entirely_ optimistic after reading the confession of the murderer at
Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued
existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four
times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn't
do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it on
purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull. Such an
occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
in detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
really have been better in its place.
But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
prisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else
for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place. To
admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a
suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought.
And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficult
implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make
you feel. If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the
universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing
else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are
we to think of the universe? Are we stubbornly to stick to our
judgment of regret, and say, though it _couldn't_ be, yet it _would_
have been a better universe with something different from this Brockton
murder in it? That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing
for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a
kind of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
virtually defines the universe {162} as a place in which what ought to
be is impossible,--in other words, as an organism whose constitution is
afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. The pessimism
of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,--that the murder is a
symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a
vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by
bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot.
Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and
wise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone.
Other things being what they are, _it_ could not be different. What we
should regret is that whole frame of things of which the murder is one
member. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if,
being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at
all.
The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
the judgment of regret. That this can be done, history shows to be not
impossible. The devil, _quoad existentiam_, may be good. That is,
although he be a _principle_ of evil, yet the universe, with such a
principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
have been without. On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
bought. There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
paid for by the uses that follow in their train. An optimism _quand
même_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways in
which a man may train himself to look on life. Bereft of dogmatic
hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
characters that ever lived.
"Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west."
Even cruelty and treachery may be among the absolutely blessed fruits
of time, and to quarrel with any of their details may be blasphemy.
The only real blasphemy, in short, may be that pessimistic temper of
the soul which lets it give way to such things as regrets, remorse, and
grief.
Thus, our deterministic pessimism may become a deterministic optimism
at the price of extinguishing our judgments of regret.
But does not this immediately bring us into a curious logical
predicament? Our determinism leads us to call our judgments of regret
wrong, because they are pessimistic in implying that what is impossible
yet ought to be. But how then about the judgments of regret
themselves? If they are wrong, other judgments, judgments of approval
presumably, ought to be in their place. But as they are necessitated,
nothing else _can_ be in their place; and the universe is just what it
was before,--namely, a place in which what ought to be appears
impossible. We have got one foot out of the pessimistic bog, but the
other one sinks all the deeper. We have rescued our actions from the
bonds of evil, but our judgments are now held fast. When murders and
treacheries cease to be sins, regrets are theoretic absurdities and
errors. The theoretic and the active life thus play a kind of {164}
see-saw with each other on the ground of evil. The rise of either
sends the other down. Murder and treachery cannot be good without
regret being bad: regret cannot be good without treachery and murder
being bad. Both, however, are supposed to have been foredoomed; so
something must be fatally unreasonable, absurd, and wrong in the world.
It must be a place of which either sin or error forms a necessary part.
From this dilemma there seems at first sight no escape. Are we then so
soon to fall back into the pessimism from which we thought we had
emerged? And is there no possible way by which we may, with good
intellectual consciences, call the cruelties and the treacheries, the
reluctances and the regrets, _all_ good together?
Certainly there is such a way, and you are probably most of you ready
to formulate it yourselves. But, before doing so, remark how
inevitably the question of determinism and indeterminism slides us into
the question of optimism and pessimism, or, as our fathers called it,
'the question of evil.' The theological form of all these disputes is
the simplest and the deepest, the form from which there is the least
escape,--not because, as some have sarcastically said, remorse and
regret are clung to with a morbid fondness by the theologians as
spiritual luxuries, but because they are existing facts of the world,
and as such must be taken into account in the deterministic
interpretation of all that is fated to be. If they are fated to be
error, does not the bat's wing of irrationality still cast its shadow
over the world?
The refuge from the quandary lies, as I said, not far off. The
necessary acts we erroneously regret {165} may be good, and yet our
error in so regretting them may be also good, on one simple condition;
and that condition is this: The world must not be regarded as a machine
whose final purpose is the making real of any outward good, but rather
as a contrivance for deepening the theoretic consciousness of what
goodness and evil in their intrinsic natures are. Not the doing either
of good or of evil is what nature cares for, but the knowing of them.
Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of _knowledge_. I am
in the habit, in thinking to myself, of calling this point of view the
_gnostical_ point of view. According to it, the world is neither an
optimism nor a pessimism, but a _gnosticism_. But as this term may
perhaps lead to some misunderstandings, I will use it as little as
possible here, and speak rather of _subjectivism_, and the
_subjectivistic_ point of view.
Subjectivism has three great branches,--we may call them scientificism,
sentimentalism, and sensualism, respectively. They all agree
essentially about the universe, in deeming that what happens there is
subsidiary to what we think or feel about it. Crime justifies its
criminality by awakening our intelligence of that criminality, and
eventually our remorses and regrets; and the error included in remorses
and regrets, the error of supposing that the past could have been
different, justifies itself by its use. Its use is to quicken our
sense of _what_ the irretrievably lost is. When we think of it as that
which might have been ('the saddest words of tongue or pen'), the
quality of its worth speaks to us with a wilder sweetness; and,
conversely, the dissatisfaction wherewith we think of what seems to
have driven it from its natural place gives us the severer pang.
Admirable artifice of {166} nature! we might be tempted to
exclaim,--deceiving us in order the better to enlighten us, and leaving
nothing undone to accentuate to our consciousness the yawning distance
of those opposite poles of good and evil between which creation swings.
We have thus clearly revealed to our view what may be called the
dilemma of determinism, so far as determinism pretends to think things
out at all. A merely mechanical determinism, it is true, rather
rejoices in not thinking them out. It is very sure that the universe
must satisfy its postulate of a physical continuity and coherence, but
it smiles at any one who comes forward with a postulate of moral
coherence as well. I may suppose, however, that the number of purely
mechanical or hard determinists among you this evening is small. The
determinism to whose seductions you are most exposed is what I have
called soft determinism,--the determinism which allows considerations
of good and bad to mingle with those of cause and effect in deciding
what sort of a universe this may rationally be held to be. The dilemma
of this determinism is one whose left horn is pessimism and whose right
horn is subjectivism. In other words, if determinism is to escape
pessimism, it must leave off looking at the goods and ills of life in a
simple objective way, and regard them as materials, indifferent in
themselves, for the production of consciousness, scientific and
ethical, in us.
To escape pessimism is, as we all know, no easy task. Your own studies
have sufficiently shown you the almost desperate difficulty of making
the notion that there is a single principle of things, and that
principle absolute perfection, rhyme together with {167} our daily
vision of the facts of life. If perfection be the principle, how comes
there any imperfection here? If God be good, how came he to
create--or, if he did not create, how comes he to permit--the devil?
The evil facts must be explained as seeming: the devil must be
whitewashed, the universe must be disinfected, if neither God's
goodness nor his unity and power are to remain impugned. And of all
the various ways of operating the disinfection, and making bad seem
less bad, the way of subjectivism appears by far the best.[6]
For, after all, is there not something rather absurd in our ordinary
notion of external things being good or bad in themselves? Can murders
and treacheries, considered as mere outward happenings, or motions of
matter, be bad without any one to feel their badness? And could
paradise properly be good in the absence of a sentient principle by
which the goodness was perceived? Outward goods and evils seem
practically indistinguishable except in so far as they result in
getting moral judgments made about them. But then the moral judgments
seem the main thing, and the outward facts mere perishing instruments
for their production. This is subjectivism. Every one must at some
time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that,
though the {168} pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils,
the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffocation and
death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or
on earth, awaken such yawnings for nirvana and escape? The white-robed
harp-playing heaven of our sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table
elysium represented in Mr. Spencer's Data of Ethics, as the final
consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this
respect,--lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all.[7] We look upon
them from this delicious mess of insanities and realities, strivings
and deadnesses, hopes and fears, agonies and exultations, which forms
our present state, and _tedium vitae_ is the only sentiment they awaken
in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the
Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the shifting struggle of the sunbeam
in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and
expressionless, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If _this_ be
the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the generations of mankind
suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs
sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end
than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should
succeed, and protract _in saecula saeculorum_ their contented and
inoffensive lives,--why, at such a rate, better lose than win the
battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last
act of the play, so that a business that began so importantly may be
saved from so singularly flat a winding-up.
{169}
All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for
gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I
am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more. Regarded
as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to
the flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness
to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No one
knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that
money cannot buy it back. Not the saint, but the sinner that
repenteth, is he to whom the full length and breadth, and height and
depth, of life's meaning is revealed. Not the absence of vice, but
vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human
state. And there seems no reason to suppose it not a permanent human
state. There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer
insists on,--the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress. The
more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle
and more poisonous. Our moral horizon moves with us as we move, and
never do we draw nearer to the far-off line where the black waves and
the azure meet. The final purpose of our creation seems most plausibly
to be the greatest possible enrichment of our ethical consciousness,
through the intensest play of contrasts and the widest diversity of
characters. This of course obliges some of us to be vessels of wrath,
while it calls others to be vessels of honor. But the subjectivist
point of view reduces all these outward distinctions to a common
denominator. The wretch languishing in the felon's cell may be
drinking draughts of the wine of truth that will never pass the lips of
the so-called favorite of fortune. And the peculiar consciousness of
{170} each of them is an indispensable note in the great ethical
concert which the centuries as they roll are grinding out of the living
heart of man.
So much for subjectivism! If the dilemma of determinism be to choose
between it and pessimism, I see little room for hesitation from the
strictly theoretical point of view. Subjectivism seems the more
rational scheme. And the world may, possibly, for aught I know, be
nothing else. When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its
forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal
and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an
integral part of the total richness,--why, then it seems a grudging and
sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its
facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point
of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which
the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is
eternally thinking out and representing to itself.[8]
No one, I hope, will accuse me, after I have said all this, of
underrating the reasons in favor of subjectivism. And now that I
proceed to say why those reasons, strong as they are, fail to convince
my own mind, I trust the presumption may be that my objections are
stronger still.
I frankly confess that they are of a practical order. If we
practically take up subjectivism in a sincere and radical manner and
follow its consequences, we meet with some that make us pause. Let a
subjectivism {171} begin in never so severe and intellectual a way, it
is forced by the law of its nature to develop another side of itself
and end with the corruptest curiosity. Once dismiss the notion that
certain duties are good in themselves, and that we are here to do them,
no matter how we feel about them; once consecrate the opposite notion
that our performances and our violations of duty are for a common
purpose, the attainment of subjective knowledge and feeling, and that
the deepening of these is the chief end of our lives,--and at what
point on the downward slope are we to stop? In theology, subjectivism
develops as its 'left wing' antinomianism. In literature, its left
wing is romanticism. And in practical life it is either a nerveless
sentimentality or a sensualism without bounds.
Everywhere it fosters the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who
are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless
those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find
how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts itself in
every sort of spiritual, moral, and practical license. Its optimism
turns to an ethical indifference, which infallibly brings dissolution
in its train. It is perfectly safe to say now that if the Hegelian
gnosticism, which has begun to show itself here and in Great Britain,
were to become a popular philosophy, as it once was in Germany, it
would certainly develop its left wing here as there, and produce a
reaction of disgust. Already I have heard a graduate of this very
school express in the pulpit his willingness to sin like David, if only
he might repent like David. You may tell me he was only sowing his
wild, or rather his tame, oats; and perhaps he was. But the point is
{172} that in the subjectivistic or gnostical philosophy oat-sowing,
wild or tame, becomes a systematic necessity and the chief function of
life. After the pure and classic truths, the exciting and rancid ones
must be experienced; and if the stupid virtues of the philistine herd
do not then come in and save society from the influence of the children
of light, a sort of inward putrefaction becomes its inevitable doom.
Look at the last runnings of the romantic school, as we see them in
that strange contemporary Parisian literature, with which we of the
less clever countries are so often driven to rinse out our minds after
they have become clogged with the dulness and heaviness of our native
pursuits. The romantic school began with the worship of subjective
sensibility and the revolt against legality of which Rousseau was the
first great prophet: and through various fluxes and refluxes, right
wings and left wings, it stands to-day with two men of genius, M. Renan
and M. Zola, as its principal exponents,--one speaking with its
masculine, and the other with what might be called its feminine, voice.
I prefer not to think now of less noble members of the school, and the
Renan I have in mind is of course the Renan of latest dates. As I have
used the term gnostic, both he and Zola are gnostics of the most
pronounced sort. Both are athirst for the facts of life, and both
think the facts of human sensibility to be of all facts the most worthy
of attention. Both agree, moreover, that sensibility seems to be there
for no higher purpose,--certainly not, as the Philistines say, for the
sake of bringing mere outward rights to pass and frustrating outward
wrongs. One dwells on the sensibilities for their energy, the other
for their sweetness; one speaks with a voice of {173} bronze, the other
with that of an Æolian harp; one ruggedly ignores the distinction of
good and evil, the other plays the coquette between the craven
unmanliness of his Philosophic Dialogues and the butterfly optimism of
his Souvenirs de Jeunesse. But under the pages of both there sounds
incessantly the hoarse bass of _vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas_,
which the reader may hear, whenever he will, between the lines. No
writer of this French romantic school has a word of rescue from the
hour of satiety with the things of life,--the hour in which we say, "I
take no pleasure in them,"--or from the hour of terror at the world's
vast meaningless grinding, if perchance such hours should come. For
terror and satiety are facts of sensibility like any others; and at
their own hour they reign in their own right. The heart of the
romantic utterances, whether poetical, critical, or historical, is this
inward remedilessness, what Carlyle calls this far-off whimpering of
wail and woe. And from this romantic state of mind there is absolutely
no possible _theoretic_ escape. Whether, like Renan, we look upon life
in a more refined way, as a romance of the spirit; or whether, like the
friends of M. Zola, we pique ourselves on our 'scientific' and
'analytic' character, and prefer to be cynical, and call the world a
'roman experimental' on an infinite scale,--in either case the world
appears to us potentially as what the same Carlyle once called it, a
vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and mill of death.
The only escape is by the practical way. And since I have mentioned
the nowadays much-reviled name of Carlyle, let me mention it once more,
and say it is the way of his teaching. No matter for Carlyle's life,
no matter for a great deal of his {174} writing. What was the most
important thing he said to us? He said: "Hang your sensibilities!
Stop your snivelling complaints, and your equally snivelling raptures!
Leave off your general emotional tomfoolery, and get to WORK like men!"
But this means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy of
things. It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact for
our recognition. With the vision of certain works to be done, of
certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our
intellectual horizon terminates. No matter how we succeed in doing
these outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them undone is
perdition. No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful in the
outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far be safe,
and we quit of our debt toward it. Take, then, the yoke upon our
shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
our law; be willing to live and die in its service,--and, at a stroke,
we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
lights and noises, to find one's self bathed in the sacred coolness and
quiet of the air of the night.
But what is the essence of this philosophy of objective conduct, so
old-fashioned and finite, but so chaste and sane and strong, when
compared with its romantic rival? It is the recognition of limits,
foreign and opaque to our understanding. It is the willingness, after
bringing about some external good, to feel at peace; for our
responsibility ends with the {175} performance of that duty, and the
burden of the rest we may lay on higher powers.[9]
"Look to thyself, O Universe,
Thou art better and not worse,"
we may say in that philosophy, the moment we have done our stroke of
conduct, however small. For in the view of that philosophy the
universe belongs to a plurality of semi-independent forces, each one of
which may help or hinder, and be helped or hindered by, the operations
of the rest.
But this brings us right back, after such a long detour, to the
question of indeterminism and to the conclusion of all I came here to
say to-night. For the only consistent way of representing a pluralism
and a world whose parts may affect one another through their conduct
being either good or bad is the indeterministic way. What interest,
zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we
are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural
way,--nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can
there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we
need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us
as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we
feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad. I cannot
understand the belief that an act is bad, without regret at its
happening. I cannot understand regret without the admission of real,
genuine possibilities in the world. Only _then_ is it {176} other than
a mockery to feel, after we have failed to do our best, that an
irreparable opportunity is gone from the universe, the loss of which it
must forever after mourn.
If you insist that this is all superstition, that possibility is in the
eye of science and reason impossibility, and that if I act badly 'tis
that the universe was foredoomed to suffer this defect, you fall right
back into the dilemma, the labyrinth, of pessimism and subjectivism,
from out of whose toils we have just wound our way.
Now, we are of course free to fall back, if we please. For my own
part, though, whatever difficulties may beset the philosophy of
objective right and wrong, and the indeterminism it seems to imply,
determinism, with its alternative of pessimism or romanticism, contains
difficulties that are greater still. But you will remember that I
expressly repudiated awhile ago the pretension to offer any arguments
which could be coercive in a so-called scientific fashion in this
matter. And I consequently find myself, at the end of this long talk,
obliged to state my conclusions in an altogether personal way. This
personal method of appeal seems to be among the very conditions of the
problem; and the most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he
can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to
work on others as it may.
Let me, then, without circumlocution say just this. The world is
enigmatical enough in all conscience, whatever theory we may take up
toward it. The indeterminism I defend, the free-will theory of popular
sense based on the judgment of regret, represents {177} that world as
vulnerable, and liable to be injured by certain of its parts if they
act wrong. And it represents their acting wrong as a matter of
possibility or accident, neither inevitable nor yet to be infallibly
warded off. In all this, it is a theory devoid either of transparency
or of stability. It gives us a pluralistic, restless universe, in
which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene; and to
a mind possessed of the love of unity at any cost, it will, no doubt,
remain forever inacceptable. A friend with such a mind once told me
that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism
with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all,
perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism
with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion
as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I
deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of
the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which
{178} I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining
alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple
objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose-flesh the murder
excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the 'roman
naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
Parisian _littérateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs by
which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
objective carrion I called it in to take away.
No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar
about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to
think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That 'chance'
whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish {179} from my
view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
'chance' is--what? Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the
future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the
only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather,
on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air
which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
admitted by others to-night. But I know that if I do stop here,
misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all
I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few
more words.
In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word 'chance'
will still be giving trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to
the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' to
name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my
preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part.
It certainly _is_ a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had
not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term.
Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice.
The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft
determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and,
rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am
willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be
unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for
them; and the best word is the one that enables men to {180} know the
quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word
'chance,' with its singular negativity, is just the word for this
purpose. Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom,' squarely and resolutely
gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free. For
_him_, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be.
It is a word of _impotence_, and is therefore the only sincere word we
can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it
honestly, and really risk the game. "Who chooses me must give and
forfeit all he hath." Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets
us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of
restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other
we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get
beyond our sight.
But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of
such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a
Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the
universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?
Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate
peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free-will is not
in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you
do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_
decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; {181}
and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
from all eternity.
An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men before
a chessboard,--the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what
any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all
the _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
novice's king.
Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
the infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be
thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him
to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]
decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous
possibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a given
instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations
become real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keep
things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[11]
The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down. The
realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, their
decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
absolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including its
final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So the
creator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actuality
until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
surely bring it home at last.
{183}
Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the
possibilities are really _here_. Whether it be we who solve them, or
he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. _That_ is what
gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This
reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
alike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here and
now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
of continuing to believe in liberty.[12] It is fortunate for the
winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
this _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word.
[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
[2] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,--see the Monist, for 1892-93.
[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
perceptions. Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
their contradictions on the other.
"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
not discovered; _till the order is looked for_. The first impulse to
look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion
for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest,
or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
those in which it is linked to something else. _The former processes
harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking_: the latter do not.
In the former, his _concepts_, _general judgments_, and _inferences_
apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application. And
thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized
throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
guiding principle of his own thought." (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)
[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
a connotation that is negative. Other things must be silent about
_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
reveals itself.
[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
debate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free-will' does not
say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
possible. It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ our
will more than one is really possible. Of course, the alternatives
that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
possibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often do
murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.
[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
little further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied. If,
however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does not
prevent his acceptance of a universe whose _other_ parts give him
satisfaction, I welcome him as an ally. He has abandoned the notion of
the _Whole_, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and views
things as a pluralism, just as I do in this paper.
[7] Compare Sir James Stephen's Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862,
pp. 138, 318.
[8] Cet univers est un spectacle que Dieu se donne à lui-même. Servons
les intentions du grand chorège en contribuant à rendre le spectacle
aussi brillant, aussi varié que possible.--RENAN.
[9] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the _end_ of all our
righteousness be some positive universal gain.
[10] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of
time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I
have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously
present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some
form to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their
content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity
will have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mental
judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one
from which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mind
rather a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity being
given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon
us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--just
the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is
only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that
the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may
be its form.
[11] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not
necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in
representing, and which has so lost its magic for us. Emerson quotes
some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the
sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out
in spasms. But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and
centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long. We may
think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as
invisible and molecular and slowly self-summating a form as we please.
We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which he inspires
_ad hoc_. In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and
sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans of
which it is possible to think.
[12] As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists,
following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least
resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated,"
to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus
excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.
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