WILL AND GUIDANCE
(_Partially read to the Synthetic Society in February 1903._)
The influence of the divine on the human, and on the material world,
has been variously conceived in different ages, and various forms of
difficulty have been at different times felt and suggested; but always
some sort of analogy between human action and divine action has had
perforce to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least
intelligible to our conception. The latest form of difficulty is
peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical
science. It consists in denying the possibility of any guidance or
control,—not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part of every one
of his creatures. It consists in pressing the laws of physics to what
may seem their logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the
conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as
some have fancied, the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of
the self-determined action of mind or living things upon matter,
altogether. The appearance of control has accordingly been considered
illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism,
enveloping living things as well as inorganic nature.
And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or unable to
acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical agencies, whether it be
by reason of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experience and
sensation to the contrary, have thought it necessary of late years to
seek to undermine the foundation of Physics, and to show that its
much-vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their exactitude is
illusory,—that the conservation of energy, for instance, has been too
rapid an induction, that there may be ways of eluding many physical
laws and of avoiding submission to their sovereign sway.
By this sacrifice it has been thought that the eliminated guidance and
control can philosophically be reintroduced.
This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of a critical
examination of the foundations of Physics by an American author, J.
B. Stallo, in a little book called the _Concepts of Physics_. But
the worst of that book was that Judge Stallo was not fully familiar
with the teachings of the great physicists; he appears to have
collected his information from popular writings, where the doctrines
were very imperfectly laid down; so that some of his book is
occupied in demolishing constructions of straw, unrecognisable by
professed physicists except as caricatures at which they also might
be willing to heave an occasional missile.
The armoury pressed into the service of Professor James Ward's not
wholly dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his
criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate
acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his
Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism between the
fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any intervention
whether human or divine.
If this antagonism is substantial it is serious; for Natural
Philosophers will not be willing to concede fundamental inaccuracy or
uncertainty about their recognised and long-established laws of motion,
when applied to ordinary matter; nor will they be prepared to tolerate
any the least departure from the law of the conservation of energy,
when all forms of energy are taken into account. Hence, if guidance
and control can be admitted into the scheme by no means short of
undermining and refuting those laws, there may be every expectation
that the attitude of scientific men will be perennially hostile to the
idea of guidance or control, and so to the efficacy of prayer, and to
many another practical outcome of religious belief. It becomes
therefore an important question to consider whether it is true that
life or mind is incompetent to disarrange or interfere with matter at
all, except as itself an automatic part of the machine,—whether in
fact it is merely an ornamental appendage or phantasmal accessory of
the working parts.
Now experience—the same kind of experience as gave us our scheme of
mechanics—shows us that to all appearance live animals certainly can
direct and control mechanical energies to bring about desired and
preconceived results; and that man can definitely will that those
results shall occur. The way the energy is provided is understood, and
its mode of application is fairly understood; what is not understood is
the way its activity is _determined_. Undoubtedly our body is material
and can act on other matter; and the energy of its operations is
derived from food, like any other self-propelled and fuel-fed
mechanism; but mechanism is usually controlled by an attendant. The
question is whether our will or mind or life can direct our body's
energy along certain channels to attain desired ends, or whether—as in
a motor-car with an automaton driver—the end and aim of all activity
is wholly determined by mechanical causes. And a further question
concerns the mode whereby vital control, if any, is achieved.
Answers that might be hazarded are:
(_a_) That life is itself a latent store of energy, and achieves
its results by imparting to matter energy that would not otherwise
be in evidence: in which case life would be a part of the machine,
and as truly mechanical as all the rest.
Experiment lends no support to this view of the relation between life
and energy, and I hold that it is false; because the essential property
of energy is that it can transform itself into other forms, remaining
constant in quantity, whereas life does not add to the stock of any
known form of energy, nor does death affect the sum of energy in any
known way.
(_b_) That life is something outside the scheme of mechanics—outside
the categories of matter and energy; though it can nevertheless
control or direct material forces—timing them and determining
their place of application,—subject always to the laws of energy
and all other mechanical laws; supplementing or accompanying these
laws, therefore, but contradicting or traversing them no whit.
This second answer I hold to be true; but in order to admit its truth
we must recognise that force can be exerted and energy directed, by
suitable adjustment of existing energy, without any introduction of
energy from without; in other words, that the energy of operations
automatically going on in any active region of the universe—any region
where transformation and transference of energy are continuously
occurring whether life be present or not—can be guided along paths
that it would not automatically have taken, and can be directed so as
to produce effects that would not otherwise have occurred; and this
without any breakage or suspension of the laws of dynamics, and in full
correspondence with both the conservation of energy and the
conservation of momentum.
That is where I part company with Professor James Ward in the second
volume of _Naturalism and Agnosticism_; with whom nevertheless on many
broad issues I find myself in fair agreement. Those who find a real
antinomy between "mechanism and morals" must either throw overboard the
possibility of interference or guidance or willed action altogether,
which is one alternative, or must assume that the laws of Physics are
only approximate and untrustworthy, which is the other alternative—the
alternative apparently favoured by Professor James Ward. I wish to
argue that neither of these alternatives is necessary, and that there
is a third or middle course of proverbial safety: all that is necessary
is to realise and admit that the laws of Physical Science are
_incomplete_, when regarded as a formulation and philosophical summary
of the universe in general. No Laplacian calculator can be supplied
with all the data.
On a stagnant and inactive world life would admittedly be powerless: it
could only make dry bones stir in such a world if itself were a form of
energy; I do not suppose for a moment that it could be incarnated on
such a world; it is only potent where inorganic energy is mechanically
"available"—to use Lord Kelvin's term,—that is to say, is either
potentially or actually in process of transfer and transformation. In
other words, life can generate no trace of energy, it can only guide
its transmutations.
It has gradually dawned upon me that the reason why Philosophers who
are well acquainted with Physical or Dynamical Science are apt to fall
into the error of supposing that mental and vital interference with the
material world is impossible, in spite of their clamorous experience to
the contrary (or else, on the strength of that experience, to conceive
that there is something the matter with the formulation of physical and
dynamical laws), is because all such interference is naturally and
necessarily excluded from scientific methods and treatises.
In pure Mechanics, "force" is treated as a function of configuration
and momentum: the positions, the velocities, and the accelerations of a
conservative system depend solely on each other, on initial conditions,
and on mass; or, if we choose so to express it, the co-ordinates, the
momenta, and the kinetic energies, of the parts of any dynamical system
whatever, are all functions of time and of each other, and of nothing
else. In other words, we have to deal, in this mode of regarding
things, with a definite and completely determinate world, to which
prediction may confidently be applied.
But this determinateness is got by refusing to contemplate anything
outside a certain scheme: it is an internal truth within the assigned
boundaries, and is quite consistent with psychical interference
and indeterminateness, as soon as those boundaries are ignored;
determinateness is not part of the _essence_ of dynamical doctrine,
it is arrived at by the tacit assumption that no undynamical or
hyperdynamical agencies exist: in short, by that process of abstraction
which is invariably necessary for simplicity, and indeed for
possibility, of methodical human treatment. Everyone engaged in
scientific research is aware that if exuberant charwomen, or
intelligent but mischievous students (who for the moment may be taken
to represent life and mind respectively) are admitted into a laboratory
and given full scope for their activities, the subsequent scientific
results—though still, no doubt, in some strained sense, concordant
with law and order—are apt to be too complicated for investigation;
wherefore there is usually an endeavour to exclude these incalculable
influences, and to make a tacit assumption that they have not been let
in.
There is a similar tacit assumption in treatises on Physics and
Chemistry; viz., that the laws of automatic nature shall be allowed
unrestricted and unaided play, that nothing shall intervene in any
operation from start to finish save mechanical sequent and
antecedent,—that it is permissible in fact to exercise abstraction, as
usual, to the exclusion of agents not necessarily connected with the
problem, and not contemplated by the equations.
In text-books of Dynamics and in treatises of Natural Philosophy that
is a perfectly legitimate procedure;[4] but when later on we come to
philosophise, and to deal with the universe as a whole, we must forgo
the ingrained habit of abstraction, and must remember that for a
_complete_ treatment _nothing_ must permanently be ignored. So if
life and mind and will, and curiosity and mischief and folly, and greed
and fraud and malice, and a whole catalogue of attributes and things
not contemplated in Natural Philosophy—if these are known to have any
real existence in the larger world of total experience, and if there is
any reason to believe that any one of them may have had some influence
in determining an observed result, then it is foolish to exclude these
things from philosophic consideration, on the ground that they are out
of place in the realm of Natural Philosophy, that they are not allowed
for in its scheme, and therefore cannot possibly be supposed capable of
exerting any effective interference, any real guidance or control.
[Footnote 4: It is on a similar basis that there is a science of
rigid dynamics, with elasticity and fluidity excluded; and thus
also can there be a hydrodynamics in which the consequences of
viscosity are ignored.]
My contention then is—and in this contention I am practically speaking
for my brother physicists—that whereas life or mind can neither
generate energy nor directly exert force, yet it can cause matter to
exert force on matter, and so can exercise guidance and control: it can
so prepare any scene of activity, by arranging the position of existing
material, and timing the liberation of existing energy, as to produce
results concordant with an idea or scheme or intention: it can, in
short, "aim" and "fire."
Guidance of _matter_ can be affected by a passive exertion of force
without doing work; as a quiescent rail can guide a train to its
destination, provided an active engine propels it. But the analogy of
the rail must not be pressed: the rail "guides" by exerting force
perpendicular to the direction of motion, it does no work but it
sustains an equal opposite reaction.[5] The guidance exercised by life
or mind is managed in an unknown but certainly different fashion:
"determination" can sustain no reaction—if it could it would be a
straightforward mechanical agent—but it can utilise the mechanical
properties both of rail and of engine; it arranged for the rail to be
placed in position so that the lateral force thereby exerted should
guide all future trains to a desired destination, and it further took
steps to design and compose locomotives of sufficient power, and to
start them at a prearranged time. It "employs" mechanical stress, as a
capitalist employs a labourer, not doing anything itself, but directing
the operations. It is impossible to explain all this fully by the laws
of mechanics alone, that is to say, no mechanical analysis can be
complete and all-embracing, though the whole procedure is fully subject
to those laws.
[Footnote 5: It is well to bear in mind the distinction between
"force" and "energy." These terms have been so popularly confused
that it may be difficult always to discriminate them, but in
Physics they are absolutely discriminated. We have a direct sense
of "force," in our muscles, whether they be moving or at rest. A
force in motion is a "power," it "does work" and transfers energy
from one body to another, which is commonly though incorrectly
spoken of as "generating" energy. But a force at rest—a mere
statical stress, like that exerted by a pillar or a watershed—does
no work, and "generates" or transfers no energy; yet the one
sustains a roof which would otherwise fall, thereby screening a
portion of ground from vegetation; while the other deflects a
rain-drop into the Danube or the Rhine. This latter is the kind
of force which constrains a stone to revolve in a circle instead
of a straight line; a force like that of a groove or slot or
channel or "guide."]
To every force there is an equal opposite force or reaction, and a
reaction may be against a live body, but it is never suspected of being
against the abstraction life or mind—that would indeed be enlarging
the scope of mechanics!—the reaction is always against some other
body. All stresses as a matter of fact occur in the ether; and they all
have a material terminus at each end (or in exceptional cases a
wave-front or some other recondite ethereal equivalent), that is to say
something possessing inertia; but the timed or _opportune_ existence of
a particular stress may be the result of organisation and control.
Mechanical operations can be thus dominated by intelligence and
purpose. When a stone is rolling over a cliff, it is all the same to
"energy" whether it fall on point A or point B of the beach. But at A
it shall merely dent the sand, whereas at B it shall strike a detonator
and explode a mine. Scribbling on a piece of paper results in a certain
distribution of fluid and production of a modicum of heat: so far as
energy is concerned it is the same whether we sign Andrew Carnegie or
Alexander Coppersmith, yet the one effort may land us in twelve months'
imprisonment or may build a library, according to circumstances, while
the other achieves no result at all. John Stuart Mill used to say that
our sole power over Nature was to _move_ things; but strictly speaking
we cannot do even that: we can only arrange that things shall move each
other, and can determine by suitably preconceived plans the kind and
direction of the motion that shall ensue at a given time and place.
Provided always that we include in this category of "things" our
undoubtedly material bodies, muscles and nerves.
But here is just the puzzle: at what point does will or determination
enter into the scheme? Contemplate a brain cell, whence originates a
certain nerve-process whereby energy is liberated with some resultant
effect; what pulled the detent in that cell which started the impulse?
No doubt some chemical process: combination or dissociation, something
atomic, occurred; but what made it occur just then and in that way?
I answer, not anything that we as yet understand, but apparently the
same sort of pre-arrangement that determined whether the stone from the
cliff should fall on point A or point B—the same sort of process that
guided the pen to make legible and effective writing instead of
illegible and ineffective scrawls—the same kind of control that
determines when and where a trigger shall be pulled so as to secure the
anticipated slaughter of a bird. So far as energy is concerned, the
explosion and the trigger-pulling are the same identical operations
whether the aim be exact or random. It is intelligence which directs;
it is physical energy which is directed and controlled and produces the
result in time and space.
It will be said _some_ energy is needed to pull a hair-trigger, to open
the throttle-valve of an engine, to press the button which shall
shatter a rock. Granted: but the work-concomitants of that energy are
all familiar, and equally present whether it be arranged so as to
produce any predetermined effect or not. The opening of the
throttle-valve for instance demands just the same exertion, and results
in just the same imperceptible transformation of fully-accounted-for
energy, whether it be used to start a train in accordance with a
time-table and the guard's whistle, or whether it be pushed over, as if
by the wind, at random. The shouting of an order to a troop demands
vocal energy and produces its due equivalent of sound; but the
intelligibility of the order is something superadded, and its result
may be to make not sound or heat alone, but History.
Energy must be _available_ for the performance of any physical
operation, but the energy is independent of the determination or
arrangement. Guidance and control are not forms of energy, nor need
they be themselves phantom modes of force: their superposition upon the
scheme of Physics need perturb physical and mechanical _laws_ no whit,
and yet it may profoundly affect the consequences resulting from those
same laws. The whole effort of civilisation would be futile if we could
not guide the powers of nature. The powers are there, else we should be
helpless; but life and mind are outside those powers, and, by
pre-arranging their field of action, can direct them along an organised
course.
* * * * *
And this same life or mind, as we know it, is accessible to petition,
to affection, to pity, to a multitude of non-physical influences; and
hence, indirectly, the little plot of physical universe which is now
our temporary home has become amenable to truly spiritual control.
I lay stress upon a study of the nature and mode of human action of the
interfering or guiding kind, because by that study we must be led if we
are to form any intelligent conception of divine action. True, it might
be feasible to admit divine agency and yet to deny the possibility of
any human power of the same kind,—though that would be a nebulous and
at least inconclusive procedure; but if once we are constrained to
admit the existence and reality of human guidance and control,
superposed upon the physical scheme, we cannot deny the possibility of
such power and action to any higher being, nor even to any totality of
Mind of which ours is a part.
I do not see how the function claimed can be resented, except by those
who deny "life" to be anything at all. If it exists, if it is not mere
illusion, it appears to me to be something whose full significance lies
in another scheme of things, but which touches and interacts with this
material universe in a certain way, building its particles into notable
configurations for a time—without confounding any physical laws,—and
then evaporating whence it came. This language is vague and figurative
undoubtedly, but, I contend, appropriately so, for we have not yet a
theory of life—we have not even a theory of the essential nature of
gravitation; discoveries are waiting to be made in this region, and it
is absurd to suppose that we are already in possession of all the data.
We can wait; but meanwhile we need not pretend that because we do not
understand them, therefore life and will can accomplish nothing; we
need not imagine that "life"—with its higher developments and still
latent powers—is an impotent nonentity. The philosophic attitude,
surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, both what it can and
what it cannot achieve, and to realise that our present knowledge of it
is extremely partial and incomplete.
* * * * *
NOTE ON FREE WILL AND FOREKNOWLEDGE.
In the above chapter I must not be understood as pretending to settle
the thorny question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and
pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no
mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in
a limited region, can be used to contradict freedom of the will, under
generalised conditions, in the Universe as a whole.
Nevertheless there are things which may perhaps be usefully said, even
on the larger and much-worn topic of the present note. If we still
endeavour to learn as much as possible from human analogies, examples
are easy:—
An architect can draw in detail a building that is to be; the dwellers
in a valley can be warned to evacuate their homesteads because a city
has determined that a lake shall exist where none existed before.
Doubtless the city is free to change its mind, but it is not expected
to; and all predictions are understood to be made subject to the
absence of disturbing, _i.e._ unforeseen, causes. Even the prediction
of an eclipse is not free from a remote uncertainty, and in the case of
the return of meteoric showers and comets the element of contingency is
not even remote.
But it will be said that to higher and superhuman knowledge all
possible contingencies would be known and recognised as part of the
data. That is quite possibly, though not quite certainly, true: and
there comes the real difficulty of reconciling absolute prediction of
events with real freedom of the actors in the drama. I anticipate that
a complete solution of the problem must involve a treatment of the
subject of _time_, and a recognition that "time," as it appears to us,
is really part of our human limitations. We all realise that "the past"
is in some sense not non-existent but only past; we may readily surmise
that "the future" is similarly in some sense existent, only that we
have not yet arrived at it; and our links with the future are less
understood. That a seer in a moment of clairvoyance may catch a glimpse
of futurity—some partial picture of what perhaps exists even now in
the forethought of some higher mind—is not inconceivable. It may be
after all only an unconscious and inspired inference from the present,
on an enlarged and exceptional scale; and it is a matter for
straightforward investigation whether such prevision ever occurs.
The following article, on the general subject of "Free Will and
Determinism," reprinted from the _Contemporary Review_ for March 1904,
may conveniently be here reproduced:—
The conflict between Free Will and Determinism depends on a
question of boundaries. We occasionally ignore the fact that there
must be a subjective partition in the Universe separating the
region of which we have some inkling of knowledge from the region
of which we have absolutely none; we are apt to regard the portion
on our side as if it were the whole, and to debate whether it must
or must not be regarded as self-determined. As a matter of fact any
partitioned-off region is in general not completely
self-determined, since it is liable to be acted upon by influences
from the other side of the partition. If the far side of the
boundary is ignored, then an observer on the near side will
conclude that things really initiate their own motion and act
without stimulation or motive, in some cases, whereas the fact is
that no act is performed without stimulus or motive; even
irrational acts are caused by something, and so also are rational
acts. Madness and delirium are natural phenomena amenable to law.
But in actual life we are living on one side of a boundary, and are
aware of things on one side only; the things on this side appear to
us to constitute the whole universe, since they are all of which we
have any knowledge, either through our senses or in other ways.
Hence we are subject to certain illusions, and feel certain
difficulties,—the illusion of unstimulated and unmotived freedom
of action, and the difficulty of reconciling this with the felt
necessity for general determinism and causation.
If we speak in terms of the part of the universe that we know and
have to do with, we find free agencies rampant among organic life;
so that "freedom of action" is a definite and real experience, and
for practical convenience is so expressed. But if we could seize
the entirety of things and perceive what was occurring beyond the
range of our limited conceptions we should realise that the whole
was welded together, and that influences were coming through which
produced the effects that we observe.
Those philosophers, if there are any, who assert that we are wholly
chained bound and controlled by the circumstances of that part of
the Universe of which we are directly aware—that we are the slaves
of our environment and must act as we are compelled by forces
emanating from things on our side of the boundary alone,—those
philosophers err.
This kind of determinism is false; and the reaction against it has
led other philosophers to assert that we are _lawlessly_ free, and
able to initiate any action without motive or cause,—that each
individual is a capricious and chaotic entity, not part of a Cosmos
at all!
It may be doubted whether anyone has clearly and actually
maintained either of these theses in all its crudity; but there are
many who vigorously and cheaply deny one or other of them, and in
so denying the one conceive that they are maintaining the other.
Both the above theses are false; yet Free Will and Determinism are
both true, and in a completely known universe would cease to be
contradictories.
The reconciliation between opposing views lies in realising that
the Universe of which we have a kind of knowledge is but a portion
or an aspect of the whole.
We are free, and we are controlled. We are free, in so far as our
sensible surroundings and immediate environment are concerned; that
is, we are free for all practical purposes, and can choose between
alternatives as they present themselves. We are controlled, as
being intrinsic parts of an entire cosmos suffused with law and
order.
No scheme of science based on knowledge of our environment can
confidently predict our actions, nor the actions of any
sufficiently intelligent live creature. For "mind" and "will" have
their roots on the other side of the partition, and that which we
perceive of them is but a fraction of the whole. Nevertheless, the
more developed and consistent and harmonious our character becomes,
the less liable is it to random outbreaks, and the more certainly
can we be depended on. We thus, even now, can exhibit some
approximation to the highest state—that conscious unison with the
entire scheme of existence which is identical with perfect freedom.
If we could grasp the totality of things we should realise that
everything was ordered and definite, linked up with everything else
in a chain of causation, and that nothing was capricious and
uncertain and uncontrolled. The totality of things is, however, and
must remain, beyond our grasp; hence the actual working of the
process, the nature of the links, the causes which create our
determinations, are frequently unknown. And since it is necessary
for practical purposes to treat what is utterly beyond our ken as
if it were non-existent, it becomes easily possible to fall into
the erroneous habit of conceiving the transcendental region to be
completely inoperative.