DETERMINISM
The under-emphasis of sin, we said, is one of the special dangers which
threaten the present age; and nothing is more remarkable or disquieting
to observe than the number of attacks that are being made to-day from
quarter after quarter, all of them converging upon the same point. Now
the cry is raised that sin is a mere mistake, due to ignorance; or that
it is merely the absence of something, as a shadow indicates the absence
of light[1]; or we are assured that "what we call 'evil' is only
incidental to the progress and development of the [universal] order"
[2]--a necessary step in evolution. Now again the burden of
responsibility is shifted from the shoulders of the individual on to
heredity and environment; or compromise with what is known to be moral
evil is not only excused as a necessity, but commended as a duty; or the
average person's feelings are considerately soothed by {142} the
pronouncement that "the mass of a Christian congregation are about as
innocent as men and women can well be in a world where natural
temptations are so rife, and so many social adjustments discountenance
heroic saintliness" [3]--the latter a truly admirable feat of
circumlocution. And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are
themselves in essence negated--generally in virtue of some
pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific "doctrine of a universe"--as when
we read that "in a universe . . . there cannot be any room for
independent and creative wills, actually thwarting the Good Will." [4]
Doubtless, these various statements, whether made in the name of Monism
or Determinism, or some form of neo-Christianity, represent a reaction
against that over-emphasis which taught that man was by nature under
God's wrath and deserving of everlasting torments; but there can be no
question that this reaction has gone very far in the direction of the
opposite extreme, and that the time has come for reconsideration and a
return to more balanced views.
So far as the virtual denial of human freedom, human sin, and indeed of
human selfhood, {143} flows from a perversion of the doctrine of Divine
immanence, we need not add anything to the observations made in earlier
chapters upon this subject; we might, however, quote some pertinent words
of Martineau's, affirming and explaining that distinction between the
Divine and human personality which can only be ignored to the hopeless
confusion of thought:
"The whole external universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious
beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is
the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of
its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than
in any crisis fitly called creative. But the very same principle which
establishes a _Unity_ of all external causality makes it antithetic to
the internal, and establishes a _Duality_ between our own and that which
is other than ours; so that, were not our personal power known to us as
_one_, the cosmical power would not be guaranteed to us as the _other_.
Here, therefore, at the boundary of the proper Ego, the absorbing claim
of the Supreme will arrests itself, and recognises a ground on which it
does not mean to step. Did it still press on and annex this field also,
it would simply abolish the very base of its own recognisable existence,
and, in making itself all in all, would vanish totally from view. . .
Are we, then, to find Him in the sunshine and the rain, and to miss Him
in our thought, our duty and our love? Far from it; He is with us in
both: only in the former it is His _immanent_ life, in the latter His
_transcendent_, with which we are in communion." [5]
Only where this fundamental principle of the non-identity of God and man
is recognised, can the facts of human personality, {144} freedom and
responsibility for willed acts be rationally based and defended.
At the same time this "otherness" of God, while it is the condition, is
not necessarily the guarantee, of our freedom. Determinism is quite
compatible, in theory, and has been so found in history, with belief in
the Divine transcendence; but it is scarcely compatible with belief in
the Divine goodness. There is no _a priori_ reason making it
inconceivable that the doctrine of absolute predestination might be true;
but such a doctrine is not reconcilable with the belief that the Eternal
Other is also the Eternal Father. The Divine Autocrat of Calvinism, who
pre-ordained some of His creatures to eternal damnation--not for any
demerit of theirs, but "just choosing so"--is not unthinkable; what is
unthinkable is that we could love such a One--a God who had predestined
all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that
unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer.
Such a God might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never
affection. Only a good God, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the
making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through
such an endowment can such an aim be realised.
And hence there are perhaps few attitudes so entirely irrational as that
which affects to see in a determinist interpretation of man's {145}
nature a special reason for optimism. Occasionally one is invited to
rejoice in the "great and glorious thought that every man is wholly a
product of the Master Workman"; it is even urged that such a conception
cannot change our appreciation of what is fine in human thought and
action, just as "we do not admire a rose the less because we know that it
could no more help being what it is than could a stinging nettle or a
fungus." We can only say that such a superficial optimism seems
infinitely more open to objection than the temper which, in the face of
so much suffering and sin, has to struggle hard sometimes to preserve its
faith in the Father's love, and half-wonders if some personal power of
evil is not actively engaged in marring God's workmanship. Anyone who
can believe that every man, just as he is, represents the Divine
intention in concrete form--anyone who can believe this, and glory in the
thought--must inhabit a strange world, remote from reality. He can never
have learned anything of the greed which condemns myriads of human beings
to sunless and degraded lives; he can never have been inside a
police-court; he can never have seen hapless womanhood flaunting its
be-rouged and be-ribboned shame under the electric light of West End
thoroughfares--he can never even have reflected upon any of these things,
and rejoiced in the thought that every human being was "wholly the {146}
product of the Master Workman." If such a thought does not produce
something like despair, it ought to do so; if it does not, then it
represents not a conviction but a pose.
As a matter of fact, the determinist creed, with all its professions of
charitableness towards the transgressor, and while pretending to soothe
us by absolving us from responsibility for wrong-doing, fatally paralyses
our endeavours. It is a message, not of liberation from guilt, but of
despair. Christianity, even while condemning sin, in its very
condemnation speaks of hope; it says to the sinner: "You are guilty--you
ought to have done better, and you know it; you are guilty--you ought
still to do better, _and you can_." That is a rousing, vitalising call:
the very censure implies the possibility of better things. But
Determinism says to the moral wreck: "Not only are you a wreck, but that
is all you ever could have been; you not only cannot help being what you
are, but in your wretchedness and degradation you are what you could not
help being--this was your pre-ordained destiny from the beginning of
time. We are not angry with you, any more than we are angry with tigers
for being fierce, or with thorns for not bearing grapes; only, being what
you are, you never _could_ have borne, and never will bear, grapes."
Truly a "great and glorious thought"! Determinism makes of the whole
world of erring men a hospital, and pronounces {147} every patient an
incurable--it is ready to grant kindly, considerate treatment to each,
but holds out hopes of recovery to none. Who would not rather submit to
a sterner physician, whose ministrations promised to medicine him back to
health again! A consistent Determinism, prepared to look stedfastly at
things as they are, can, we repeat, lead nowhere but to despair; a
conclusion from which determinists, fortunately for themselves, escape by
means of the most patent inconsistency.
But we turn to the further contention which we already mentioned in
passing, _viz._, that the acceptance of Determinism would by no means
change our admiration of what was fine in human thought and action--just
as we did not admire a rose the less because it could not help being
fragrant and beautiful. Here we have a very palpable, but all the more
significant confusion between things totally different--aesthetics and
ethics. Our admiration for a rose is aesthetic; our admiration for
goodness is ethical, and we give it with the implicit understanding that
the quality we admire is the result of voluntary acts and decisions. All
moral judgments imply this; and in practice we know that the experience
of moral struggle and moral conquest is intensely real, not to be argued
away any more than we can be argued out of any other primary fact of
consciousness, which is its own sufficient evidence. Let anyone ask
himself quite {148} candidly whether the feeling called forth by some
rare work of art resembles remotely the emotion with which he reads of
some deed of humble heroism or self-sacrifice; the psychology which
discerns here no difference is singularly shallow.
But when the would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity
of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is--a singular
compliment to the "Master Workman"--he executes a _volte-face_ and falls
back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently
practical one. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary "sins," Determinism
would simply have us recognise plain facts: it would arrange for healthy
hereditary influences to cradle the coming generations; it would adopt
the most enlightened educational, hygienic, reformatory methods; it would
provide for all the citizens of the State such an environment as would
steadily make for health and beauty and happiness. There are no
"sinners," it says, but only the unhappy products of conditions which
foster anti-social proclivities as automatically as dirt fosters disease;
instead of punishing the products, let us attack the producing
conditions, and by sweeping them away bring in the millennium.
Such a plea, it must be admitted, harmonises well with our modern
tolerance, our modern zeal for reform; and yet it rests upon a
fundamental fallacy. No one, of course, denies the {149} moulding power
of heredity and environment; no one denies such an obvious truism as that
we cannot expect to grow fine specimens of humanity in the reeking slum
or the sweater's workshop. But as environment is a greater power than
heredity, so there is only one power greater than environment--and that
is our power to alter environment. "But that," protests the determinist,
"is just what we hold ought to be done." Certainly; only it is just what,
on his presupposition, cannot be done. For if the slum-dweller cannot
help being what he is, owing to his environment, neither can the
slum-owner, or the legislator, or the community, help being what they
are, owing to the self-same cause. In fact, we cannot get the word
"ought" from Determinism; it is as much out of place in that connection
as a free worker in a slave-compound. But every reform springs from a
sense of "oughtness"; and the sense of moral obligation is itself the
spontaneous expression of the consciousness of moral freedom. So far as
we believe in the duty of reform--or in "duty" itself, _sans phrase_--we
have already renounced Determinism, and proclaimed our belief in liberty.
Let it be said once more, before we pass from this particular aspect of
our subject, that too much may be set down to, or expected from, even
environment; everybody knows that from gentle homes, surrounded by what
seemed the most favouring influences, {150} there have sprung vicious and
depraved characters. We ask ourselves, in encountering such cases,
"Wanting is--what?" And the answer must be given in Kant's famous
dictum: that which is "the only good thing in the world--_a good will_."
In one sense, paradoxical as it may sound, much of the strenuous modern
advocacy of Determinism or semi-Determinism is a kind of inverted
acknowledgment of man's consciousness of freedom, _viz._, where that
consciousness appears as the sense of sin. Of course, when a writer like
Mr. Dole assures us that "there is no objection to a moral and spiritual
Determinism that binds all things over into the unity of good," [6] we
merely reply that on the contrary there is the very serious objection
that "all things" are not good. But most advocates of the determinist
position are, to do them justice, well aware of the existence of wrong
and discord in human life; and their object is, by emphasising the
influence of heredity and environment, to remove or at least materially
to lighten, the crushing burden of the sense of sin. The same intention
underlies the effort, occasionally made, to persuade men that, seeing
they are such as God created them, it is not for them to repine at being
what they are, nor to "take too serious a view" of any "penchant for
{151} revolt"--another delightful phrase--they may discover within
themselves; as a recent writer has it, "The responsibility of its
presence _and action_ does not rest with us, nor are we justified in
insulting God who made us, by repenting of what He has done. _We might
as well repent of the tiger and the snake, the earthquake and the tempest
in nature._" [7] What are we to say of this attempt to make God
answerable, not merely for the presence, but for the action, of whatever
impulse to "revolt" of which we may be conscious?
To be quite frank, we cannot think the utterance we have just quoted
other than extraordinarily ill-considered. The simple fact that we
cannot follow _all_ the impulses which arise in us, but have to choose
between higher and lower--the fact that we are well aware of this
conflict of unharmonisable elements within ourselves, some of which can
only triumph at the expense of others--seems sufficiently to dispose of
this writer's main contention. We may not be responsible for the
presence of these warring instincts, but we are undoubtedly responsible
for translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in
check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for
mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or
practise the impartiality with which Montaigne's singular devotee lighted
one candle {152} to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would
realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify "the
penchant for revolt," but exert ourselves to lay--
The ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet and be free;
we must
Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
Granted that the lower impulses, the inheritance from our animal
ancestry, are left in us by Divine decree, they are there, not to be
indulged on the plea that to repent would be tantamount to "insulting God
who made us," but to be conquered by the exercise of that freedom which
is the earnest of our call to claim our birthright as children of God.
But when we are further told that, as well as repent of our actions, we
might repent of the tiger and the snake, we are immediately conscious of
a double confusion of thought behind that statement; for in the first
place, we are not even called upon to repent of _each other's_ failings
but only of our own, and in the second there is no analogy between
ourselves and the tiger and snake, creatures which act according to their
animal natures, and are incapable of desiring to be other than they are.
Our capacity of, and desire for, better things attest our possession of a
measure of liberty, and {153} indicate at once our responsibility for the
course we take, and the essential distinction between the animal creation
and ourselves--a distinction wittily expressed in the remark that
"everybody would admit that very few men are really manly; but nobody
would contend that very few whales were really whaley."
But those who seek to spare us the discomfort of repentance by teaching
us to declare with a new inflection, "It is He that hath made us, and not
we ourselves," forget that there is another side to this argument. It
is, of course, very alluring to be told that we are not really
blameworthy for acts which hitherto we have blamed ourselves for--that
our impulses are God-given--that "the sinner is merely a learner in a
lower grade in the school," [8] and so forth; one can understand how
grateful is such a morphia injection for deadening the pangs of an
accusing conscience. The art of making excuses, as old as the Garden of
Eden, will never lack ardent professors or eager disciples. Says Cassius
to Brutus:--
Have you not love enough to bear with me
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?
And Brutus answers with a smile:--
Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so!
{154} But, after all, we none of us do exclusively things for which we
wish to escape being blamed; there is hardly anyone who could not name
some occasion on which he has made some sacrifice, foregone an unfair
advantage, declined to listen to selfish promptings, or held some baser
impulse in check. None of these things were done for the sake of
receiving praise; nevertheless, and quite inevitably, the doer felt
praise_worthy_, conscious of an inner accord whose self-attesting power
stamped it a reality, and not an illusion. But Determinism leaves no
room for this emotion, any more than for that of remorse or
blame-worthiness; we cannot get rid of the sense of sin, yet retain the
sense of righteousness. The determinist sponge passes over the whole
moral vocabulary, not only over the inconvenient parts; it obliterates
the terms self-indulgence, dishonesty, cowardice, but the same fate
overtakes self-conquest, integrity, bravery. To vary the phrase
slightly, we must not, on the determinist hypothesis, insult God by
taking credit to ourselves for what He has done. Are we prepared to
surrender the approval of our conscience, the new-won self-respect which
rewards the successful resistance offered to temptation, as having no
basis in fact? And if we are not, what is this but to affirm our freedom
and our responsibility alike in doing and forbearing?
{155}
And this inner sense of peace or discord, according as we have acted thus
or thus--this immediate consciousness that it lay with us to choose
aright or amiss--is both anterior and superior to all argument; it
asserts itself victoriously against all merely intellectual perplexities,
such as are apt to arise when we ask ourselves how man could be free to
commit or not to commit an act, in view of the Divine omniscience. The
contradiction seems a stubborn one, yet in practice we never feel our
freedom circumscribed by it. Probably our difficulty arises largely from
the mistake of applying time-relations to God at all, and thinking of
eternity as an enormously long period instead of timeless Present,
excluding both "unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday." We, of course, have
to think under the category of time, remembering and looking forward; but
the Divine _modus cognoscendi_ excludes either of these processes, being
the timeless act of One who "knoweth altogether"--in whose sight a
thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years. To the
Eternal Intelligence, living in an unbeginning and unending Present,
"past" and "future" must be equally unmeaning; to such a One we cannot
but think that all events must be equally and simultaneously present,
"for all live unto Him." If we could behold the drama of existence _sub
specie aeternitatis_, we might be able to understand how {156} Divine
omniscience can co-exist with human freedom; as it is, we can only say,
"Such knowledge is too wonderful for us--it is high, and we cannot attain
unto it." We know that we cannot know. In any case, even while the
Divine omniscience may present itself to us as a necessity of thought,
human freedom remains a reality of experience and a postulate of
morals.[9]
There are, however, those to whom human freedom presents itself, not as a
contradiction to Divine omniscience, but as a contradiction in terms.
Man's choice of a course of conduct, they argue, cannot be thought of as
other than {157} determined by an efficient cause; but if it is so
determined, in what sense can it be free? An uncaused act is strictly
speaking unthinkable; but do we not affirm that acts are uncaused when we
speak of them as free--in other words, is not the only alternative to
Determinism what might be called _in_determinism? The answer is (_a_)
that every choice is certainly the result of an efficient cause; but
(_b_) the fact of this being so interferes in no wise with the reality of
liberty, nor does it contradict the universality of the law of causation.
For _the efficient cause is the man himself_, and the fact that he can
choose is attested in the very act of choice--which would not be "choice"
if there were not at least two real alternatives. We do not quarrel with
the obvious truth, stated by Mill, that the will is determined by
motives; we contest the assumption that a "free" act is an "uncaused"
act. The act is caused or determined by the free choice of a causal
self; in strict parlance, indeed, we should have to say that neither acts
nor wills, but only human selves, are free. The will is not
self-determined, but determined by a self; and this self is able not only
to choose between different motives, but to attend to one set of motives
to the neglect of others, and even to create motives in order to become
able to make a difficult decision.
Let us, however, guard against a possible misconstruction by saying that
there is all the difference between this conception of _freedom_ {158}
and the mere _spontaneity_ which is recognised by the followers both of
Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by
Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton
points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its
antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in
this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because he wants it; he is
_not_ free in the sense that he _could_ have wanted something
different.[12] Nothing could be more frank than Mr. Picton's statements
on this point--as when he speaks of the "_free_ man's" sense that "all
things are of God, and _could not have been otherwise_:"
Of course the obvious retort occurs, (he continues,) that if indeed
everything . . . occurs by invariable sequence, all this intellectual
gospel of freedom is vain, and exhortations to its acceptance thrown
away. And to those who are not satisfied with the freedom of conscious
spontaneity, a condition in which we do just as we want to do, though our
will is a link in an endless series of untraceable sequences, I suppose
this objection must still be final.[13]
The objection is undoubtedly final, because it is absolutely valid; for
by freedom we mean the ability to do or leave undone, to act thus or
thus, and apart from such an ability moral judgments are quite
unthinkable. Where we pronounce praise or blame, the tacit {159}
presupposition is always that the object of the pronouncement could have
acted differently; and this Spinozism denies.
The same remark applies to the teaching of that modern Absolute Idealism
which declares, with Green, that man is his motives, and that he is
"free" inasmuch as it is by his own motives that he is governed. It
would be as accurate to call an automatic machine "free" on the ground
that it is by its own works that it is moved. This is only, as Professor
William James aptly calls it, "soft Determinism." If the automaton could
decide to slacken or increase its rate of speed, to go or to stop as it
liked and where it liked--above all, if it could aim at and devise
improvements in its own mechanism so as to make itself a better
automaton--it would then be appropriate to speak of it as free; only it
would no longer be appropriate to call it an automaton. And similarly it
is only if man is able to determine his course of action--if he can
"choose" in any real sense, _i.e._, in the sense that he might choose
differently, if he wished to do so--that it can be anything but an abuse
of language to speak of him as free; for only in that case can he be an
object of approbation or condemnation. If he is merely the sum-total of
his motives, he is as little free to act other than he does as a number
of chemical elements combined in certain proportions are free to form
anything but a definite chemical substance. As {160} Mr. Balfour has
well expressed it,[14] "It may seem at first sight plausible to describe
a man as free whose behaviour is due to 'himself' alone. But without
quarrelling over words, it is, I think, plain that whether it be proper
to call him free or not, he at least lacks freedom in the sense in which
freedom is necessary in order to constitute responsibility. It is
impossible to say of him that he 'ought,' and therefore he 'can,' for at
any given moment of his life his next action is by hypothesis strictly
determined." But the freedom of which we are conscious--_e.g._, in every
experience of conflict between inclination and duty--is something
altogether different; we know that we can yield or resist, choose
between, reinforce, and if necessary _make_, our motives.[15]
{161}
But is not sin, it is sometimes asked, inevitable _per se_, and in that
sense natural to man, and if so, how can we be blamed for what we could
not avoid? And again, is there not some truth in the statement that much
that we call evil has been incidental to the progress of the race, just
as the discords produced by the learner on a musical instrument are
necessary incidents in the process which will teach him by and by to
charm the ear with the perfect harmony? Such questions are frequently
put forward; let us see if we are able to clear away the
misunderstandings to which they bear witness.
(1) Admitting that a free moral being must be able in theory to choose
the wrong as well as the right, it should in the first place be observed
that the possibility of that or any course does not render it
_inevitable_ for him to take it, and it is only the possibility that is
given. But it may be justly argued that since as a matter of fact all
men sin, we cannot pretend that we are merely dealing with a theoretical
possibility, but must pronounce sin to be _de facto_ natural to man as
well as inevitable--for who has ever avoided it? Let us observe what
follows: this, and no more, that sin is "natural" only in the sense in
which disease is "natural"--_viz._, as a disorder to which the human
frame may become subject, but nevertheless a disorder. As physical
disease entails a diminution of physical life, so sin entails a
diminution of {162} our moral and spiritual life, an alienation of the
soul from God; and while anyone may thus choose to describe sin--the
wilful misuse of faculties lent us for other ends--as natural, it is
significant that the result of sin is quite _un_natural, _viz._, a state
of disunion between the soul and God. So much is this the case that the
aim of all religion is to bring about a cessation of this unhappy state,
and to effect the healing of the discord created by man's transgression.
True religion treats sin, not as an error to be explained away, but as a
wall of partition to be broken down; the essential aim of religion is
atonement, man's reconciliation to God.
(2) But it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the
light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the
course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all
manner of ills--bloodshed, slavery, etc.--have been necessary stages; may
not, then, sin be claimed as constituting part of the Divine plan? And
if such was the case once, may it not be the case still? Here we are
dealing with a very obvious confusion; for while man is in a low and
undeveloped state, a good many acts which would be sins if committed by
people on a higher level, have not that character at all. It is quite
impossible, _e.g._, to read the Homeric poems and find in them any trace
or indication that deceit, war and massacres are {163} regarded with so
much as moral distaste; the men of the Homeric age had simply not risen
to that moral height, and it would be futile to judge them by the
standards of a more advanced civilisation. Undoubtedly, in its slow
evolution from sub-human origins, the race passes through long sub-moral
stages during which the animal instincts--"moods of tiger or of ape"--are
still in the ascendant; it is only gradually that man becomes aware of
certain practices with shame, disgust or remorse, and it is only then
that we can begin to speak of the indulgence of the passions which prompt
those practices as "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin,
or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a
truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not
arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as
offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind,
acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on
this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even when our moral
perceptions have thus been quickened, we shall not always "rule our
province of the brute" with a strong hand--true also that, owing to our
earthly nature, "in many things we all stumble;" but so far from viewing
these failures complacently, they ought to spur us to more earnest
endeavours to leave our lower inheritance behind. The truth {164}
concerning the "inevitableness" of sin was stated by our Lord when He
said, "It must needs be that occasions"--_viz._, of stumbling--"come; but
woe to that man through whom the occasion cometh." Sin as such, as an
"occasion," is inevitable; but for any particular sin, for acting
contrarily to the known best, the individual is responsible--and greatest
of all is the responsibility of one who knowingly and of design becomes
an "occasion of stumbling" to another, making sin more difficult to
avoid, or positively inciting another to wrong-doing. We do not forget
the inequalities of moral endowment, nor do we leave out of sight that a
temptation which for one man scarcely so much as exists may prove
well-nigh irresistible to another; but the judgment upon each is in the
wise and Fatherly hands of Him who knoweth our frame, and remembereth
that we are dust.
We have seen that Determinism, in spite of its humanitarian and even
optimistic pretensions, when it is consistently applied falsifies every
one of its promises; it is worth while to ask ourselves yet once more
what is likely to be the effect of this doctrine upon the characters of
those who seriously entertain it. Mill, in his frigid and precise, yet
scrupulously just manner, expressed the opinion that
The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the
truth which the word necessity puts {165} out of sight, namely the power
of the mind to co-operate in the formation of its own character, has
given to its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than
has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of necessarians. The
latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human
beings can do as to shape the characters of one another; but the
free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much
stronger spirit of self-culture.[16]
If for "self-culture" we substituted self-reliance, buoyancy, a sense of
responsibility, we should scarcely go too far; for, indeed, it would be
difficult to say from what sources the consistent determinist is to
derive these qualities. He regards himself as the inevitable product of
forces which have moulded him into that particular shape and no other; he
cannot help himself or change his character by one hair's-breadth; he
views his own life, as has been well said, not in the light of a story
which he can carry on as he may choose, but as a sum which must finish in
a given way; and his one dismal consolation is that he is not responsible
for his shortcomings. He can but say with his favourite sage:--
The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that toss'd you down into the Field,
He knows about it all--_He_ knows--HE knows!
But to believe that no effort can avail will certainly not inspire anyone
to make such an effort; on the contrary, the likelihood is only {166} too
great that such a belief will upon occasion serve as a welcome excuse for
not making it. It has been said that Determinism, if not a very heroic
creed, will at any rate make for tolerance and charity towards human
failings; but nothing is more certain than that this kind of charity
will, in practice, begin--while its tendency will be also to end--at home.
This estimate, it is true, is often warmly challenged; in actual life, we
are told, many of those who profess determinist principles are notorious
for their strenuous moral calibre, and certainly not open to the charge
of laxity. Let that statement be ungrudgingly accepted; what it proves
is no more than that prussic acid is entirely harmless--provided it is
not taken. We are quite willing to admit that Determinism, provided it
is not put into practice, is nothing more than a mistaken theory. So
long as men are content to be determinists in their studies and
libertarians everywhere else, no particular mischief is likely to ensue;
and it is matter of common experience, and for much congratulation, that
our theoretical determinists should so far obey the instinct of moral
self-preservation as to be for the most part practical libertarians,
freely pronouncing praise and blame on human conduct, and feeling praise-
and blameworthy themselves. But if they were logical and consistent
determinists, they would do and feel no such thing; for the praise we
give to a {167} well-poised spring-cart is one thing, and the praise we
give to a well-poised character is another. And again, given a man who
really believed, or whom it suited to believe, that he was quite
irresponsible for his actions, and that no morally valid censure could
attach to him for gratifying some appetite or passion, one cannot help
suspecting that the result would be something much worse than mere
laxity. That most persons who argue in favour of Determinism do not act
up to its principles, is surely nothing in the doctrine's recommendation;
on the other hand there is always the unpleasant possibility that some
day they may begin to take their philosophy seriously. And just as one
would not like prussic acid to lie about promiscuously where all and
sundry could have access to it, lest there should be a great deal of
accidental poisoning, so we are justified in viewing the broadcast
dissemination of determinist theory not merely with the antipathy one may
feel towards intellectual error, but with the apprehension excited by a
moral danger. Every system or movement which involves the denial of evil
or of freedom--the denial or under-emphasis of sin--menaces not only
religion in the narrower sense, but the structure of civilisation itself.
The rock upon which all these theories make shipwreck is the fact that we
cannot abolish the reality of sin and leave the reality of {168} goodness
intact. Saint and sinner, hero and coward, martyr and traitor, all, as
we have seen, are reduced by Determinism to a common level where there is
neither admiration nor censure, but at most a vague wonder at all the
unnecessary suffering--for _that_ at any rate remains real--involved in
this profoundly futile procession of phenomena; and that is a conclusion
to which humanity has always refused, and will always refuse, to
reconcile itself. If we wish to see how utterly a deterministic
conception empties morality of meaning, we need only turn to the earthly
career of our Lord, and ask ourselves what it is that gives to that life
and death their poignant significance but the voluntariness with which
the Saviour took each successive step on the road from His native
Nazareth to the place called Calvary. Think of Him simply as the product
of a compelling Force, unable to act otherwise than He did, and at one
stroke all that moved us to gratitude, to admiration, all that appealed
to us most deeply, is gone. There can be no such thing as compulsory
heroism or non-voluntary self-sacrifice; moral judgments upon
"inevitable" conduct are merely absurd--we do not bestow moral approval
upon this kind of higher automatism.
Sometimes, indeed, in a connection like this, an attempt is made at some
sort of compromise: granted, it is said, that each separate action of
Christ's was voluntary, yet His life-purpose {169} as a whole was surely
pre-determined, and not left to Him to adopt or refuse. Yet how
impossible, upon closer reflection, is this species of semi-Determinism!
Every single act of Jesus was voluntary; but His whole life and character
and purpose--which is just the sum-total of these single, voluntary
acts--these, we are to believe, were strictly necessitated. He could
choose every step of a way which was yet absolutely chosen for Him, so
that He could tread no other! A tremendous decision like His going to
Jerusalem lay within His power; but the aim and meaning of His life,
viewed as a whole, He had no power of voluntarily determining. That, to
our mind, is a wholly irrational position; one might as reasonably say,
"Every link of this chain is golden; but the chain itself is iron."
Simple consistency requires the admission that if the chain is iron, so
must the links be, and if the links are golden, so must be the chain.
We say again--all that enshrines Jesus in our hearts, all that gives its
redemptive power to His love-prompted death, and its significance to
Calvary, rests upon the fact of His moral freedom. He had _power_ to lay
down His life; therein lay the glory of His self-surrender. He was,
indeed, God's instrument in effecting the reconciliation of sinners to
the Divine Love, but it rested with Him to decide whether He would be
that instrument or no, and the course He chose was not that of {170}
mechanical necessity, nor was the decision to which He came a following
in the line of least resistance. In accepting the pain and shame of the
Cross, Jesus worked His Father's will; but that will was not imposed upon
Him from without, but freely responded to from within. As the author of
the _Theologia Germanica_ has it, a man should strive "to be to the
Eternal Goodness what his hand is to a man": but all the ultimate
splendour of the achievement is bound up with the initial possibility of
the striving. Not only the yearning love of God, but the conquering
freedom of Man is finally attested by that blood-red seal which bears the
impressure of a Cross.
[1] So _e.g._, _In The Theology of Civilisation_, by Charles F. Dole, p.
49.
[2] _The Coming People_, by the same author, p. 49.
[3] _The Over-Emphasis of Sin_, by the Rev. Alexander Brown, in the
_Hibbert Journal_, April, 1909, p. 616.
[4] _The Theology of Civilisation_, p. 61. It would, of course, have
been easy to give references from other authors; but there is an
extraordinary family-likeness between the writers of this School,
extending down to the very phrasing of their ideas.
[5] _A Study of Religion_, vol. ii., pp. 166, 179.
[6] _Theology of Civilisation_, p. 129.
[7] The Rev. Alexander Brown, _loc. cit._, p. 619; italics ours.
[8] Dole, _op. cit._, p. 101.
[9] The analogy of the tyro and the expert chess-player--the tyro "free,"
yet the expert foreseeing and holding the issue of the game in his own
hands--is only superficially plausible. There seems, however, one other
possible explanatory hypothesis, though it is here advanced only in the
most tentative manner: may it not be possible for the Most High to impose
a limitation upon His infinite knowledge corresponding to that
self-limitation of His infinite power which we regard as a necessary
assumption? It would be difficult on _a priori_ grounds to declare such
a thing to be inconceivable. When Paul spoke of himself as "determined
not to know anything save Jesus Christ," he signified his intention of
shutting out from his knowledge whole ranges of facts, for reasons
dictated by the purpose he had in hand; and as a matter of every-day
experience, we all practise something like this habitually, voluntarily
narrowing the range of our consciousness and our immediate interests for
one cause and another. Might not God, if the reality of our freedom
could not be guaranteed in any other way, and if that freedom was
necessary for the attainment of His purpose with man, forbear in some
measure, however slight, to exercise His omniscience? We are well aware
that the subject admits of nothing more than reverent surmise; and having
stated our suggestion, we simply leave it with the reader as one of those
possibilities which will appeal differently to different minds.
[10] _Types of Ethical Theory_, vol. ii., pp. 31 ff.
[11] _Spinoza_, p. 195.
[12] Cp. _Pantheism_, p. 74.
[13] _Spinoza_, p. 196.
[14] In _Mind_, October, 1893; quoted in Professor Upton's invaluable
Hibbert Lectures on _The Bases of Religious Belief_, p. 293, n.
[15] It may be interesting to quote a recent popular statement of the
neo-Hegelian position in regard to this question: "The feeling that we
are free is true in this sense, that the cause of a moral deed is a
motive within us, and not some power outside us. But this motive moves
us because of what we are, because of our characters, and the character
is the product of inherited instincts, appetites and passions, modified
by controlling ideas which have been acquired since our birth. Mr.
Blatchford is so far right in his book, _Not Guilty_. The inward and
outward conditions of a man's life, of course, _make him what he is
inevitably_. We choose, but our choice is governed by all our past, and
by present circumstances. . . We have our ancestors rolled up in us. A
man is the last result of the universe. All is law. All is inevitable
by the laws of life:" (The Rev. G. T. Sadler, B.A., LL.B., in the
_Clarion_, June 11th, 1909). That, of course, is not liberty at all; and
the logical honours appear to rest with Mr. Blatchford, who, arguing on
the same assumptions, declares sin to be a meaningless term, seeing that
"man is not responsible for his nature, nor for the acts prompted by that
nature."
[16] _System of Logic_, vol. ii., p. 412 (third edition).
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