was because he is such a man as he is; and we can, within certain limits,
predict the fate of a youth with whose character we are familiar. But how
much of our lives depends upon circumstances which could be foreseen only
by an omniscient being, and which, as we might properly say, if we do not
misunderstand the term, is due to chance!
FREE WILL.
Compulsion is generally considered as a synonym of necessity. But the
usage of the term necessity in the sense of compulsion is, in our
opinion, very inappropriate, because misleading. Necessity and compulsion
should not be confounded; for compulsion excludes free will and
“necessity” does not.
A government compels its citizens to obey certain unpopular laws; the
victorious army compels the enemy to surrender. The obedience of the
citizens and the surrender of the enemy are acts done under compulsion;
they are not acts of free will. But a man of a certain character wills,
under given circumstances and in the absence of compulsion, _necessarily_
in the way in which he does. The determination of a free will is not a
matter of chance but of necessity. Yet the determining factors are not
outside but inside; they are not due to compulsion, not to the pressure
of a foreign power, but to the nature of the willing being himself.
This, then, is the definition of “free”: A being is free if it is
unrestrained, so that it acts according to its own nature. As is its
nature, so it wills; as it wills, so it acts. If we know the character
of a man and the situation in which he is placed, we can predict his
choice as the necessary result of his nature. His decision, although it
is free and not under compulsion, is not an outcome of chance which might
under the same conditions be different, but is the inevitable result of
necessity.
If by free will we had to understand that the decisions of the will
are the result either of chance or of absolute chance, the foremost
duty of the educator would be to make man unfree, to insert certain
dominant ideas into his mind, destined to determine his will. The free
man according to this definition of free will as being due to chance,
would be a person whose actions are more whimsical than the fancies of
lunatics. We reject this conception of the freedom of the will.
In our opinion a will is free if it is unrestrained so that it can act
according to its nature. Our conception of free will does not stand in
contradiction to the doctrine of “determinism” as defined by the “Century
Dictionary” in its second sense:
“In general, the doctrine that whatever is or happens is
entirely determined by antecedent causes.”
THE MECHANICAL PHILOSOPHY.
We distinguish between (1) mechanical, (2) physical, (3) chemical, (4)
physiological, and (5) psychical events.
A mechanical phenomenon is a change of place which does not involve a
change of the constitution of the parts moved. E. g., a stone is pushed;
its position is altered, but the stone remains the same.
A physical phenomenon is an event in which the molecular state of the
bodies in action is altered. Water heated becomes steam, frozen it
becomes ice. The three states have different molecular configurations.
Chemical phenomena are such in which the constitution of the atoms is
altered. The characteristic qualities of hydrogen, for example, are
different when combined with different elements or when isolated. Each
combination is a peculiar substance with peculiar qualities and not a
mixture or combination of the qualities of the isolated elements.
Physiological processes are all those changes that take place in the
living irritable substance of plants and animals, such as nutrition,
growth, and propagation. Its characteristic features are (1) hunger or
thirst, i. e. the want of certain materials (food), (2) the reception of
the wanted materials by suction or other means, which in some cases are
a quite mechanical or physical process, not unlike the afflux of oxygen
caused by a burning candle or the suction of water by a sponge, and (3)
the assimilation of food. The materials received are distributed in the
places wanted, thus adding to the building up of the living substance
according to the nature of its structure. This produces as a natural
result (4) the phenomenon of growth with a preservation of form. (5)
Propagation is a special kind of growth; it is the growth of a part that
at some stage of its development becomes an independent individual.
Psychical phenomena are such in which feelings and the meanings of
feelings are the determinant factors.
It is apparent that all these terms, mechanical, physical, chemical,
physiological, and psychical, are mere abstracts. In describing a
mechanical phenomenon, we limit our attention to the mechanical change.
We do not mean to say that the body moved does not possess chemical,
physical, perhaps physiological, or even psychical qualities. The
calculation of the curve of a jump is a mechanical problem, although the
jumping body may be a human being. However, the question why did the man
jump, is a psychical question. The motive of the jump is an idea in that
class of mental activity characterised as purpose. The man had an end in
view. And this idea of an end to be realised is the combined result of
special conditions and of the character of the man.
The different spheres of mechanical, physical, chemical, physiological,
and psychical actions being abstractions, it is obvious that science when
dealing with so-called purely mechanical phenomena, has to do with a
fiction. There are no purely mechanical phenomena. There are features of
reality which are purely mechanical; and these we call motions. But the
world does not consist of motions only. It also possesses other qualities.
The mechanical philosopher assumes that the world consists of matter
and motion only, and so he feels warranted in the hope that every event
that takes place, the actions of man included, can be explained by the
laws of motion. Yet the premiss is wrong, and we may anticipate that the
conclusion also will prove erroneous. And so it is.
The laws of motion are applicable to and will explain all motions; but
they are not applicable to that which is not motion.
It is inconceivable how we can hope to explain a feeling by the laws of
motion; and so the fond hope of explaining the problems of the nature of
the soul by mechanics is preposterous. No objection can be made to the
possibility of explaining the delicate motions in the nervous substance
of the brain by the laws of molar or molecular mechanics. But these
explanations would throw no light upon the causation that takes place
in the mind. The properly psychical phenomena, the properly intelligent
action of thought, could not be explained in this way. For the world of
mentality introduces quite a new factor into the sphere of being.
What is this new factor?
The nature of mental activity consists in the symbolism of feelings.
Feelings, being different under different conditions and the same under
same conditions, become representative of their corresponding causes, and
thus the objects of experience are depicted in feeling symbols.
Representativeness, accordingly, is the nature of mind.
The question, How certain brain-structures operate, is a question of
the mechanics of nervous substance, and further, the question, How
thought-operations take place, is a question, so to say, of logical
mechanics. But the question, Why a certain idea responds to certain
stimuli and not to others, does not admit of a mechanical explanation or
formulation. The answer to this question will be a description of the
nature of the idea; and the nature of the idea is not a motion: it is the
meaning of which the idea is possessed.
The action of a mind depends upon the meaning of certain symbols. A
written or spoken word has a special meaning, and this meaning becomes
the determinant factor of mind action. The meaning of a word is not a
piece of matter, neither is it a motion. It is something _sui generis_.
I do not say that there is any inexplicable mystery connected with it.
On the contrary, wonderful as the fact is, it is not mysterious; it does
not stand in contradiction to any other fact of nature. Symbols stand for
something; they indicate, denote, or signify something. This significance
is called their meaning; and mind is a system of symbols in states of
awareness.
Now, neither states of awareness are mechanical, nor is the meaning of
words anything mechanical. How can we hope for a mechanical explanation
either of the soul or the mind or of any mental action?
Suppose, for instance, a general receives a message containing a few
words. He opens the paper, he reads it, and all on a sudden, his mind is
in a tumult of excitement. What is it that produces the excitement? Is it
any motion? Yes! In a certain sense, it is a motion: it is the reading
of the paper. This is the cause. Yet not the reading as such excites his
consternation. He might read other messages all the day long without any
such an effect. Plainly, the causative element of the cause is not the
reading, not the motions of which the reading consists, not the shape of
the written characters and their combinations in groups, called words. It
is something more subtle even than that. It is the significance of the
writing. It is the meaning of the written characters. It is the purport
that is attached to the word-symbols.
The origin of mind accordingly introduces a factor which has nothing
to do with mechanics; and the simplest psychical reflexes, including
those physiological reflexes which we must suppose to have originated by
conscious adaptation and then been submerged into unconsciousness, cannot
be explained from mechanical or physical laws alone.
SPONTANEITY.
While we thus reject the conception of the mechanical philosophy and also
of materialism, we do not say that there are motions either in the brain
or anywhere else which form exceptions to the laws of mechanics. The
laws of mechanics hold good for all motions. The laws of mechanics are
formal laws: they do not explain why bodies gravitate; but they describe
how they gravitate; and the latter is much more useful to know than the
former. There is (as we conceive it) no deep secret in the problem why
bodies gravitate; they gravitate because they possess a quality which
attracts them to each other with a force directly as their masses and
inversely as the squares of their distances. In a word, gravity is the
intrinsic nature of masses, it is an inalienable part of their existence.
Thus whenever bodies gravitate, we are confronted with an act of
spontaneity.
Attempts have been made to explain gravitation without the assumption
of spontaneity, by the pressure of an atom-surrounding ether. But that
only defers the question; for the spontaneity, in that case, would have
to be placed in the ether. Whatever be the merits of the explanations
of gravitation by a _vis a tergo_, we must recognise the fact that no
motion can take place in the world, no pressure can be exercised, without
there being somewhere some spontaneous something that moves or presses.
Spontaneity is a universal feature of nature.
Mr. Peirce uses the term “spontaneity” in a different sense from ours.
He identifies spontaneity with absolute chance. He means by it the
irregularities that arise without cause, thus producing departures
from law. We call that action spontaneous which is not due to external
influence but springs from the nature of the things in action.
Spontaneous is derived from the Latin _spons_, “will,” which as a noun
was obsolete at the classical period of Roman literature and occurred
only in such forms as _sponte_, “of one’s own will, of one’s own accord.”
If a man acts of his own will, free from and not biassed by the influence
of other men, his action is spontaneous. A free man’s action is not
arbitrary, unless arbitrariness[15] be the character of the man; it is
not an exception to law; it is, if the character of the man is known,
calculable in advance, for every free action is spontaneous: it springs
immediately from the character of the man; it is the direct expression of
his will; it reveals the nature of his very being, thus showing the man
himself, and not something beyond or outside of him.
Taking the word spontaneity in this sense, we say: Masses gravitate
spontaneously; they are self-moving; their motion is due to their
gravity, and gravity is their intrinsic nature.
Exactly as the laws of mechanics explain the “how” of motions but not
why there is motion at all, the “why” depending upon the nature of
each moving body, so the “how” of the brain-motions is explicable by
mechanical laws, but the “why” depends upon the nature of the moving
material. The brain-atoms are possessed of the same spontaneity as the
atoms of a gravitating stone. Yet there is present an additional feature;
there are present states of awareness, and these states of awareness
possess meaning, both of which are items which the chemist cannot find
by chemical analysis. Neither states of awareness nor their meanings
can be weighed on any scales, be they ever so delicate, nor are they
determinable in foot-pounds.
Yet while mechanics is not applicable to mental facts, the realm of
mentality is by no means to be surrendered to indeterminism. Mr. Peirce
describes the domain of mind as the absence of law and the prevalence of
absolute chance, of an indetermined and indeterminable sporting. This is
not so. While the fact must be recognised that the nature of the mind
is not something mechanical, its action is nevertheless determined by
laws—not by mechanical laws, but by psychical and mental laws. These
psychical and mental laws are in one respect of exactly the same nature
as mechanical laws; they describe the samenesses of certain facts of
reality. And the facts of the ideal domain of thought, the facts of
subjectivity, are no less real than the grosser facts of mechanical
motion, which are the facts of objectivity.
The term mechanical is often used in the sense of “lacking life or
spirit” (“Century Dictionary,” p. 3679). This is justifiable in so far
only as when we speak of mechanical phenomena we do not mean psychical
or any other phenomena. It is true that that which makes this or that
idea respond to a certain stimulus is not a mechanical but a mental
quality, but the action itself, in so far as it is a motion, is and
remains mechanical. Thus it happens that the laws of mechanics, far from
being anti-spiritual, are the means by which we learn to understand and
objectively to represent the action of mental phenomena.
In this connection attention may be called to the efforts of modern
logicians to construct thinking machines which will perform the work of
mental operations in a purely mechanical way. You propose the problem by
adjusting certain indicators; then you turn the crank, and the machine
does the rest. The results will come out with unfailing exactness.
The attempt made to construct thinking machines cannot as yet be called
successful. Nevertheless they are not impossibilities. Calculating
machines of various constructions are in practical use and doing
satisfactory work, not only in addition and subtraction but also in
multiplication and division, and even in extracting roots and in raising
numbers to higher powers. Calculations are undoubtedly one kind of
thought, and if calculations can be performed by machines, there is
no theoretical reason why we should not be able to construct logical
machines, which shall perform the operations of deductive and even of
inductive thought with perfect accuracy.
CONCLUSION.
Determinism does not make freedom impossible and natural laws do not
suppress the spontaneity of nature.
Natural laws are not a power forcing a certain mode of action upon
things; they are not an oppression of nature. Natural laws are simply a
description of nature as nature is. There is no “must” in nature in the
sense of compulsion, as if there were two things, (1) a master (i. e. the
law) giving a command, and (2) a slave (i. e. the single facts) obeying
the command. The situation is not dualistic, but monistic. There is an
“is” in nature, and this “is” is constant. There is a certain sameness in
nature. In spite of all changes it remains the same; and thus even the
apparent irregularities preserve throughout an unvarying consistency. The
facts of nature express the character of nature; they are nature herself.
Briefly, the “is” of nature (if we are permitted to personify her) does
not describe that which nature must do, but that which nature wills to
do; it describes how she acts spontaneously, of her own free will, in
conformity with her innermost being and consistently with her permanent
character.
The main difference that obtains between the actions of inanimate
nature so-called and rational beings is not the absence and presence of
spontaneity, (for spontaneity is in both,) but the absence and presence
of mind: and mind is not only the subjectivity of existence; mind is
not merely sentiency, i. e. the awareness of feelings; mind is the
representative symbolism of subjectivity.
There are sufficient reasons to assume that all objective existence,
which appears to us as matter in motion, possesses a subjectivity, the
nature of which depends upon the mode of the interaction of its elements.
This subjectivity appears in organised substance as feeling and develops
naturally into mind.
The essence of nature, accordingly, is not materiality, but spirituality.
Materiality is the character of nature as it affects sentient beings; but
its innermost self, as it were, its subjectivity, its psychical aspect is
revealed in the appearance of the spirit-life of rational beings—of minds.
While we fully recognise the spirituality of nature as nature’s
innermost essence and as an ineradicable feature of reality, we cannot
with Mr. Peirce place mind at the beginning of the world. There is a
great difference between spirituality and mind. One is the source and
condition of the other. One is permanent, the other is transient. One
is the abstract view of a universal quality of the world, eternal and
everlasting, as much indestructible as matter and energy; the other is an
individual formation that originates, grows, and develops; that can be
broken and built again; that dies with the body and rises again in new
generations; that decays, as the foliage of the trees falls in winter,
yet reappears, as the verdure reappears in spring; for the life of nature
is immortal.
Mr. Peirce, regarding determinism as that view which does not recognise
the freedom of will, has an original and in our conception a wrong
view on the one hand of natural laws, which are to him mere habits
acquired by the world, and on the other hand of chance, or arbitrary
sportiveness, (i. e. that which is not determinable by law,) which he
identifies with mind and with the spontaneity of freedom. Mind is to
him the beginning of all. Mind remains mind, according to his view, so
long as it is irregular, producing out of its own undetermined being
sporadic effects without order or consistency. As soon as mind takes to
habits, it grows mechanical; by creating regularity it disappears; and
the result is matter in motion according to mechanical laws. Matter,
accordingly, is said to be “effete mind.” Law in our view is the divinity
of nature; according to Mr. Peirce it is the termination of nature’s
irregularities: it comes to suppress her freedom and to supplant her
mentality by mechanicalism. An element of pure chance, however, survives,
which, appears in the free will of man, in miracles, and in nature’s
irregularities, and this element of pure chance will remain until in the
infinitely distant future, mind becomes crystallised into an absolutely
perfect, rational, and symmetrical system. Such is in brief Mr. Peirce’s
view of the rôle played by mind in the world-process.
Mr. Peirce’s views of chance and law seem to come to the rescue of
certain theological dogmas, which represent the world-order as the
product of a divine mind. We doubt very much whether Mr. Peirce’s
position be tenable even from the standpoint of the scientific
theologian. For the order of the world, as it appears in natural laws,
must be, and is recognised even by the theist, as part and parcel
of God’s eternal being. The scientist who formulates _sub specie
aeternitatis_ certain facts of nature, say the “how” of gravitating
bodies, describes a certain quality of God himself; he describes
something that is immutable, eternal, everlasting; it is not the whole of
God, but it is certainly one feature of Jahveh, of that which is, was,
and will be as it is.
In contradistinction to Mr. Peirce, we recognise, that the regularity
of the whole is preserved in the specificalness of its individual
particulars, that there are samenesses in this world of changes and
diversities, and that if all reality is regarded as being essentially
the same throughout, all the diversities and apparent irregularities can
very well be explained as resulting from peculiar forms, combinations,
and relations. Furthermore, we recognise that natural laws are compatible
with the spontaneity of nature and that the necessity with which a free
man acts according to his character, does not reverse his freedom of will.
Nature is self-acting throughout; nature is free; even inanimate nature
is spontaneous. But a higher freedom rises with the appearance of mind.
And there are degrees of this higher freedom which can be determined
with great exactness, for they correspond to the range of the mentality
of each creature. Mentality develops by the observation of samenesses,
and it reaches rationality by the recognition of natural laws. The
recognition of natural laws is a view of some natural phenomena in their
eternal aspect, and we call them truths. So much is natural law and
freedom interconnected that the recognition of natural laws widens the
range of freedom; and obedience to them raises man out of his dependence
upon his surroundings to a state of dominion over the creation in which
he becomes the master of natural forces.
What a deep significance lies in the saying of the apostle: “The truth
shall make you free!”
EDITOR.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] The adjective “like” is an abbreviation of “alike”; and “a-like”
(M.E. _alyke_, A.S. _gelic_, O.H.G. _galih_, M.H.G. _gelich_, M.G.
_gleich_) is a compound of the prefix a with _lic_ body, shape, figure.
[11] I am satisfied that logical identity is intended to mean sameness. I
suppose that the word identity, being Latin and a kind of international
term, appeared to logicians preferable to the Saxon word “sameness” or
the German “Gleichheit.” We need not look for any deeper reason for the
adoption of the term.
[12] Knowing that Mr. Peirce is one of the most prominent contributors to
the _Century Dictionary_, I may be pardoned for surmising that, perhaps
with the exception of the parenthesised word “(supposed)” he is the
author of this passage and very likely of most of the other quotations of
philosophical terms we have adduced from the same source.
[13] _Die Principien der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung_ by Johannes von
Kries. See also Meinong’s review of the book (in _Gött. gel Anz._,
No. 2, p. 56 et seqq.) and Ad. Nitsche’s article on the subject (in
_Vierteljahrsschrift für wiss. Phil._ of 1892. XVI. 1, p. 26).
[14] By irregularity of detail we understand simply a lack of uniformity,
but not exceptions to law. If irregularity be defined as exception to
law, we should say, There is no irregularity in the world, while at the
same time nothing is uniform: for every particle of the world is in
its time and space relations and otherwise different from every other
particle.