Body and will : being an essay concerning will in its metaphysical, physiological, and pathological aspects

Front matter

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Part I. Will In Its Metaphysical Aspect

SECTION PAGB

I. The Theory op Freewill and its Difficulties ... 1

II. What Consciousness tells us concerning Will nr. Concerning the Authority of Consciousness IV. The Positive Assurance of Consciousness

V. The Physical Basis of Conscious Identity . VI. Concluding Reflections

36 56

71 87

Part II. Will In Its Physiological, Social, Axd Evolutional Relations

I. Its Physiological Basis 09

IT. Concerning the Notion of Necessity 128

III. Involution and Evolution 128

IV. Mental Evolution and the Social Medium . . . . 149 V. The Social Fusion of Egoisms 163

VI. The Coercing Forces of Social Union 17.-,

VII. Certain Mental Products of Evolution ....

Vlll CONTENTS.

Part III. Will In Its Pathological Relations

BBCnON PAGE

L Concerning Degeneration . . . . . . . . 237

II. Congenital Deficience or Absence of Moral Feeling

and Will 243

III. Degeneration of Moral Feeling and Will in Disease . 257

IV. The Moral Sense and Will in Criminals . . . . 276 V. Disorders of Will in Mental Derangement . . . 283

VI. The Disintegrations of the 'Ego' 301

VII. What will be the End thereof? 317

CONCEKNING WILL

PAET I.

Section I. The Theory Op Feeewill And Its Difficulties

In certain rural districts it is the custom to speak of a child that has been born out of wedlock as a ' chance- child/ and of its mother as having had a ' misfortune ; ' not that any one really believes the living event to have come by chance, in violation of ordinary law, without conceivable cause, but it is an indirect way of intimating that it ought not rightly to have come, and that it is not certain who has been concerned in the begetting of it. One may compare this way of speaking of a natural event to that used by many of the advocates of the freedom of the will, who are accustomed to speak of an act of will as if it were a chance-event; thereby meaning, or persuading themselves they mean, not that some part of the will, its inmost essence, is outside the reach of present explanation, but that it is actually outside the order of natural causation : that will is essentially a self-procreating, selfsustaining spiritual entity, which owns no natural cause, obeys not law, and has no sort of affinity with matter. An immaterial entity in a material world, the events of which it largely determines — such the signal and singular position claimed for it.

For the most part those who uphold a power of this kind, self-determined and self -determining, free not merely to act but to he, do not go so far as to say that motives are not at work continually in the mind, or that the will takes no account of them ; what they do earnestly protest is, that in the motivation of will there is not the uniform, inseparable connection between motive and will which there is between cause and effect in physical nature. In the internal world of mind there is the self-consciousness of a freedom that is not perceivable nor conceivable in the external world of matter : the particular will is not the unconditionally necessary consequent of antecedent motives. It, or some allied entity in the individual, which, having abstracted it virtually from the concrete self, they call his non-bodily self, has a spontaneous, independent, arbitrary power to make this or that motive preponderate as it pleases, to choose this or that one among motives and to make it the motive ; in doing which the self-determining principle is held by some to act without motive, of its own internal motion, without other cause or reason than pure self-evolution ; by others, however, who think it not self-sufficing enough to dispense entirely with motives, to take remote account only of motives of so high and superlatively refined a nature that they do not weigh at all upon its freedom, insinuating themselves into its essence without actuating it, permeating and inspiring it without in the least constraining it.

It would seem a small matter whether such exceedingly subtile and highly sublimed motives are admitted or not ; since, so far as there is the assumption of a kind of power, little or much, fine or coarse, which is above the reach of actuating motives and able nevertheless to work as it likes upon motives, absolutely free and independent in that function, we are no whit better off than if we assumed off-hand an arbitrary, self-determining power which could do entirely without motives. The initial difficulty is the capital one — namely, the conception, in any degree, of a power in nature so extraordinary, coming from an unknown without, having no genesis but an auto-genesis, deriving its subsequent energy from nothing but itself, subject to no laws of growth, though manifestly growing in the individual with his mental growth ; a power which, notwithstanding that it works as a part of nature, is not of the same kind nor has anything in common with anything else there — is without sympathy, affinity, or relationship with the things which it works in and upon. It is not entirely right to describe it as supernatural since it thus works naturally and constantly in the events of the world : supernatural it is in the primal source and perpetual renewal of its energy, inscrutably unnatural in the mode of its union with the natural.

If there be a power of this kind in the universe, the obvious and instant reflection is that causation is not universal, as all the world is in the habit of thinking and saying ; that there is a large region of human events which lies outside the otherwise uniform law of cause and effect. It is a conclusion which cannot be evaded ; for to say that events depend upon the will, and in their capacity of events are natural, and not to ask at all upon what their cause depends when it is will, may be lawful and right in pure metaphysics, but would be disastrous folly in physics. . Were the conclusion rigorously admitted it would be necessary to repudiate all attempts to foresee, formulate, or reckon upon human events in so far as they are effects of will ; for how reduce to laws phenomena which are the workings of a power that is itself above the reach of natural law? Unawares we find ourselves drifted by the theory into the startling necessity of supposing that the sum of energy in the universe is not a constant quantity ; that the law of conservation of energy, though a most useful work-a-day theory, is at bottom an illusive hypothesis even within the limits of human experience ; that there are now, and have been since creation's dawn, countless myriads of sources of self-creating energy which have poured their multitudinous streams into it continually. Creation of energy without end, infinite effect without cause! The great natural argument for the existence of God has always been that everything within human cognisance must have a cause, such being the necessity of human thought, and that for final cause of all things, except itself, there must be a cause of causes, a great First Cause. What then of the will ? We are brought at the outset to a perplexing dilemma — to the obligation of confessing either that the will, like every other mode of natural energy, must have a cause, or that a great First Cause is not a necessity of human thought.

In truth, we are tacitly to understand that it has a cause — namely, the will of God, inciting or restraining. Although not governed by motives and without any touch of earthly affinity, the upholders of a free will acknowledge willingly that it is wrought upon continually and effectively by that supernatural energy. A Divine grace is always at hand to give it help in time of need, inspiring and strengthening it to do well, dissuading or withholding it from doing ill.J It is God's good purpose, says that learned divine, Dr. Isaac Barrow, l to master our will, and to make us surrender and resign it to His just, wise, and gracious will ; ' and to make good His right ' God bendeth all His forces and applieth all His means, both of sweetness and severity, persuading us by arguments, soliciting us by entreaties, alluring us by fair promises, scaring us by fierce menaces, indulging ample benefits to us, working in and upon us by secret influences of grace, by visible dispensations of providence.' A stupendous array of motives, which it is a standing wonder any one ever withstands, seeing that they are wielded by the power of Omnipotence and guided by the insight of Omniscience. The odd and perplexing thing is that we are required to believe that the operation of these mighty agencies is nowise incompatible with the perfect freedom of the will, which indeed is supposed to be most free when it has surrendered itself to entire obedience. No doubt when it has thus made an entire surrender of itself, and become, so to speak, the pure channel of the Divine will, it is of the same holy kind, one with it, truly God in man ; and without doubt, too, it is then at its best estate, most free, since it has reached in the completest discharge of its possible functions the fullest perfection of which its individual nature is capable ; but with all that it is not easy to understand how it can be said to be free in the sense of not being determined. The freedom of the fullest expression of energy belonging to the highest nature of a thing is intelligible ; the freedom of an energy from any mode of determination is not intelligible to human apprehension, which apprehends only under the category of causation. Instinctively urged by this difficulty the theologians have found it necessary to call in the will of God as supreme determinant. Perhaps, however, they might maintain, if challenged directly and pressed to answer, that the high intuitions of consciousness are not fettered to apprehend under the category of causation.

So it has come to pass that, accepting the doctrine of invariable law in the physical world, they hold that the spirit of man stands above such, physical laws and i can co-operate with God Himself.' They believe that they can by such Divine co-operation fetter and so ennoble their wills, until they are finally delivered from the melancholy liberty of doing evil, and placed under the happy necessity of doing well. So believing, their consistent prayer is the prayer of Malebranche to be delivered from the fatal liberty of doing wrong, 1 and to feel themselves in the grasp of the hand of God, which will never let them go. 2 The highest evolution of freewill is freely to lose its freedom. Nor is this to be deemed, as to vulgar apprehension it might seem, a contradiction in terms, or the use of one term to negate the definite meaning of another, and so to leave both with the appearance of life in them but with all meaning taken out of them; rather it is to have the deep metaphysical sense of a mystical union of gaping inconsistencies or of actual contradictories which reaches its climax in the identification of opposites. In this relation, however, it will not be amiss to remember, by way of caution, that many persons do not thoroughly consider whether they distinctly know their own meaning, but deceive themselves in imagining that they have any distinct meaning at all ; and that of the two issues

a ' The devout man,' says Foster, in his essay on Habit in Religion* Character, 'feels this confirmed habit as the grasp of the band of God. which will never let him go.'

— first, that opposites are identical ; secondly, that meaningless propositions are made — the latter is the more probable.

The consistent advocates of the Divine inspiration of the truly free will nsed at one time to make large appeal to the will of the Devil, who worked through the evil desires and passions with which he inspired human breasts. Presumably there was a perfect construction of the brain in the first man, and for that reason there was no let or hindrance to an entire obedience of the perfect will in him to the perfect will of God ; but unhappily injury was done to this excellent structure by the fall in Eden, and so the arch-enemy of mankind gained admission and made his congenial home there. They recognised justly, as moralists have always done, the existence of a double nature in fallen man — the higher and the lower nature, the spirit and the flesh, the good and the bad angel in him, the old Adam and the new creature — in like manner as they recognised two principles, a good and an evil one, warring always against one another in the outer world ; and the Devil they acknowledged to be the lord of the part of man's nature the inclinations of which were evilwards. ' Doth Job serve God for naught ? ' cynically asks Satan, deeply sensible of the influence of motives upon the will to make it do well; and in the operation of the successive motives, each weighing more heavily, which he brings to bear upon Job in order to make him curse God, he affords us an illustration of the way in which he works upon the will to make it do ill. But it was plainly necessary, on the theory of a Devil always at work to beleaguer and besiege the citadel of human virtue, to limit his power, as God limited it in the interesting psychological experiment which in a caprice of freewill he suffered him to make upon Job ; otherwise what would have become of human freedom ? Had man been left under the melancholy necessity of doing evil, where would have been the happy liberty of loving God and of doing that which was right in His sight ?

It was necessary that the Devil should have not unlimited power, but full power only to work his worst within fixed bounds; first, because he was in the ultimate event controlled by Divine power, who hath put all things under

Hiui, and without whom was nothing made that is made— not excepting the Devil and his deeds — and who (according to the Westminster Confession of Faith) has for ' the manifestation of His glory predestinated some men and angels unto everlasting life and preordained others to everlasting death, to the praise of His glorious justice ; ' and, secondly, because He wrought through the passions and other low impulses of the human heart, which, by the antecedent postulate as to the will's nature, could not cross the intervening gulf to touch its inmost self-determining essence. It would be well could we have it plainly expounded somewhere why this inmost spiritual essence, being untouched by earthly affection or hindrance, unswayed by motive, accessible only to Divine influence, absolutely free to do as it likes, at any rate in the way of well-doing, does not like to rule as it might ; but it is a problem which is suffered to remain as obscure as the question why the pure essence can habitually and easily cross the gulf between itself and the physical organism, when the gulf is quite impassable in the opposite direction. However that may be, it is plain that we have no means by which we can measure and register the quantity and kind of energy which the Devil exerts upon the will within the bounds set to his operations — no workable Diabolometer or Satanometer so to speak — and that we have here again a large region of human events which is outside the natural law of causation, and therefore outside the range of scientific knowledge ; a region, moreover, of quite unknown extent, seeing that it is impossible to define its limits or to get them defined. Apart, then, from the disturbing and undefinable operations of an undetermined will in human events, we have the disturbing and undefinable operations of will determined by diabolic power. Meanwhile, if we are really to think of freedom as absolute and perfect in man — a perfect freedom from the necessity of any antecedence — we ought logically to think of it as free from all influence of God or Devil, as will, that is, in which the Omnipresent is not present and the Omnipotent has no power.

Notwithstanding these theories of a will that is itself an inexhaustible source of self -procreating energy and of acts of will instigated by supernatural agency, men have always conducted practical life on an implicit theory of a quite opposite nature ; they have lived and acted in all places and at all times and on all occasions as if the will were governed by natural motives, and as if its operations could be reckoned upon with some assurance. The dogma of freewill has been a cherished dogma of the study, but it has not imbued the regulations made for the conduct of life ; exalted and esteemed as a theoretical article of faith, it has not been used as a working belief in human affairs ; an ideal of the imagination inspired by the heart, it has had no place in the work of the practical understanding. When it has been necessary so to train men as to be able to rely upon their conduct with certitude in the most arduous circumstances, they have been subjected to stern discipline by the rigid enforcement of uniform motives ; and accordingly the military organisation affords the best example of a case in which, the exact nature and number of the motives being known, their operation on will is plainly shown and confidently counted on. Were the motives as definite and as exactly known in every other case, and their secret operations through their manifold indirect, subtile and circuitous paths traced with equal plainness, is it not likely that a similar uniformity would be made known ?

Laws have been made from the earliest times and punishments inflicted systematically upon lawbreakers under the tacit implication that will is not an undetermined power, but that it may be influenced by motive to act in this way or that. The execution of a murderer would be of no use as a warning to likeminded evildoers had they the freedom of will not to be moved by the example ; the aim and use of punishment are to determine the ill-disposed will from the direction of wrong-doing and to constrain it to take the path of a higher and freer development in well-doing. And that has plainly been the slow effect of the administration of laws upon the conscience of mankind through the ages ; necessary in the first instance to constrain moral action, and by repetition so in the course of generations to ingrain the habit of it as a moral feeling, they become unnecessary as determinants in well-constituted beings, once the sense of right and wrong has become instinct in their natures. In such case the reasoned object fades out of sight, and the operation becomes immediate and instinctive ; it is an instance of use-made nature such as is seen everywhere in the transformation of laborious conscious into easy automatic function. Moral development of the individual is a growth of will in the line of good motive, moral deterioration a growth of will in the line of bad motive. The progress of mankind from lower to higher planes of thought, feeling and doing is the record of better action founded on and guided by wiser insight, and of the development of better feeling in consequence : higher feeling has followed improved thinking and acting, and so the quality of the will has been raised.

No one disputes that a knowledge of the past actions of men in different situations and circumstances of life is the foundation of a knowledge of the springs of human action on which we rely in our present and count in our future dealings with them. The study of history would be a barren labour if the operations of a self-determining entity left no room for dependence upon the determining effects of motives, nor would the most sagacious statesman in that case be any better off in the functions of government, notwithstanding a lifelong experience, than a fool. In every department of human activity the person who has had experience is esteemed a wiser guide than the new comer, because of the certitude that the thoughts and acts of men are not in any respect chance-events, but that what they have done before they will do again when actuated by similar motives in similar circumstances. The systematic provisions made for the education and training of the young — which are really means to manufacture them to an approved pattern by implanting in them the customary habits of thinking, feeling and willing of the community — social institutions and usages, forethought and skill in the conduct of affairs, all the operations of daily life in the intercourse of sane men are based upon the tacit implication that acts of will are not motiveless and haphazard, but conform to law and may be counted upon. Do T submit a dispute to an impartial judge in the full assurance of having justice done to me, I do it because I believe that he will decide according to well-weighed reasons of law, and because I do not believe in the hazard of his freewill. If a person of acknowledged probity and of known purity of life were suddenly to do something grossly immoral, and it were impossible to discover any motive for his strange and aberrant deed, we should ascribe it to an alienation of nature, and say that he must be mad. Let the will be free in the full metaphysical sense of the word, and it would be impossible to run an express train from London to York or to cross the Atlantic in a steamboat with the least assurance of safety. Did not men in some measure foresee the acts of their fellows from a knowledge of the operations of motives in their minds, they would have to await them in helpless uncertainty, as they await the decrees of the will of God.

The person who answers best, who alone answers near, to the metaphysical definition of freewill is the madman, since he exults in the most vivid sense of freedom and power, heeds not any counsels of reason, and does things which he does not himself foresee or meditate a moment beforehand, and which certainly no one can foretell ; if it be not that he acts without motives, he acts from motives of which he is not conscious, and which no other person can penetrate. Consciousness plays him an ill trick ; for while he is really the least free of men, irresponsible, his disease not he instigating his deeds, it inspires an intense and exulting conviction of the highest freedom. Is it not obvious that if sane men possessed free wills, they, like the madman, would be free from responsibility, since their wills would act independently of their characters, just as they listed — not otherwise than as a wayward wind was once supposed to blow capriciously c where it listeth ' — and that no one would have much, if any, motive left to try to better his character ? For why take diligent thought and pains to build up good motives into the structure of a character, and to reject bad motives, if he be subject to the chance of a freewill which need take no account of them ? Consider this difficulty : if there be complete equilibrium, a perfect indifference, there will be no decision ; if a decision in equilibrium, the fact is inconsistent with any essential connection between character and action.

No deep attention to their writings is needed to discover that the moral and religious authors who nurse the most fervent conviction of freewill, and reject passionately the notion of necessity in human actions, do nevertheless use language habitually which is imbued with the implication of determination, containing it, as it were, b} r silent involution. 1 Indeed, it is impossible for them to help it : the fact is embodied in all the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, even the modes of sensibility, of mankind, and in the inmost texture of the language by which expression is given to them ; for such thoughts, feelings, and words are possible to any individual now by virtue only of the law-governed acquisitions, the experience-built mental structure, of an infinite succession of generations of men. The exquisitely nice and fine movements which we perform in each act of seeing or hearing, without being in the least aware of them, represent the sum of an incalculable multitude of slowly elaborated experiences that have been organised as faculties or functions : they are virtually unconscious reasonings. Our intuition of space may well be in like manner the consolidations of an infinite succession of human experiences that definite movements on our part have always definite and uniform results which, when making them, we can definitely reckon on.

Be that so or not, however, there is not a word we utter, not a movement we make, not a sensation we experience, not a tool we make use of, not an article of clothing we wear, that has not the same far-reaching significance. Our forefathers, by intending their minds to realities, have established a harmony of thought with external nature which is a pre-established harmony in our nature. ' Oblige me with a light ' is a trivial favour which one man begs and obtains of another, hardly deeming that he is asking a favour

1 To say that the will chooses which motives to reject, and which to accept, what is that but to imply that it cannot act from the motives that it rejects, and must act in accordance with the motives that it accepts ?

at all ; and yet if we consider the matter closely, and unfold the constitutional history of the event, so to speak, the request has stupendous contents ; for what a long succession of toils and troubles, ingenuities and endeavours, trials and failures, accidental hits and misses of experiment, tedious steps of improvement it implies from the time when fire had not yet eeen discovered to the time — only some fifty years ago — when the lucifer match was invented ! Before the person who asks the little favour exerts his freewill to ask it he ought to make a sort of silent recognition of the successive ages of human culture to the fruits of whose labours he is a joyful heir. Happy for him that they did not content themselves with capricious freaks of freewill, beginning nowhere and ending nowhere, but with many halting experiments, with slowly gained insight and tedious labour, patiently making each toilsome step gained the basis of new efforts to reach a higher step, multiplied their relations with nature, and brought themselves into ever-widening and closer harmony with the order thereof ; so endowing him with a large capital of silent wisdom to start with, with the capacities of definite desires to urge him in the directions of progress, and with built up faculties of will to execute his desires.

To set forth explicitly in formal knowledge what is implicit in the whole course and conduct of human life would unquestionably be the exposition of a system of philosophy in which a self-determining principle had no place — in which a free, in the sense of an undetermined, will would be a meaningless superfluity. But is it not the fact that knowledge has its foundation in experience, and is the conscious exposition of what is unconsciously implied in human progress ; that it exists in fact before it is self-conscious in thought? Implicit in action before it is explicit in formal thought, it grows out of the twilight of instinct into the daylight of clear consciousness ; nay, perhaps we must go deeper than instinct, into the complete darkness of vital relations, in order to reach the foundations of that which we know self-consciously as reason. It is proposed nowadays to get a sound and substantial knowledge of the laws

THE THEORY OF FREEWILL AKD ITS DIFFICULTIES. 13

of thought by a careful study of its genesis ; the purpose is good, but it cannot plainly be accomplished by a method of introspection, which will never take us back to the beginnings, since the faculty of it comes to maturity only ten thought has reached a high development. Is it then a sympathetic study of the mental phenomena of animals and infants that we shall succeed better ? It is a method of much fruitful promise, but at the same time inadequate and apt to be misleading, since we are unable to enter into the comparative simplicity of their minds with a corresponding simplicity of mind, and so are apt to misread and misinterpret the signs that we observe ; and in the best event it is not sufficing, since it starts a long way from the actual genesis. ( Only by a close objective study of the unconscious operations of thought-generating organic matter shall we ever attend at the birth of thought. Find out the laws of adaptive interaction, in their simplest expression, of that organic matter which, when its energies rise above the horizon of consciousness, we call reason, and you will arrive at the foundation-facts of the highest thoughtv So far as the Amoeba reasons — and reason unconsciously it does in so far as it makes vital adaptations to its surroundings — it exhibits the principle of that which in its more complex evolution in the brains of the higher animals and of man is reason.