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would happen in any conceivable circumstances. lie
thus knows what the free will of any creature would
choose, if supplied with the power of volition or choice
and placed in any given circumstances. He now de-
crees to supply the needed conditions, including His
contursus, or to abstain from so doing. He thus holds
complete dominion and control over our future free
actions, as well as over those of a necessarj' character.
The Molinist then claims to safeguard better man's
freedom by substituting for the decree of an inflexible
premotion one of conciu'rence dependent on God's
prior knowledge of what the free being would choose,
if given the power to exert the choice. He argues that
lie exempts God more clearly from all responsibility
for man's sins. The claim seems to the present writer
well founded ; at the same time it is only fair to record
on the other side that the Thomist urges with con-
sideralile force that God's prescience is not so under-
standable in this, as in his theory. He maintains, too,
that God's exercise of His absolute dominion over all
man's acts and man's entire dependence on God's
goodwill are more impressively antl more worthily ex-
hibited in the premotion hT,-pothesis. The reader will
find an exhaustive treatment of the question in any of
the Scholastic textbooks on the subject.
Free Will and the Protestant Reformers. — A leading feature in the teaching of the Reformers of the six- teenth century, esptcially in the case of Luther and Calvin, was the denial of free will. Picking out from the Scriptures, and particularly from St. Paul, the texts W'hich emphasized the importance and efhcacy of grace, the all-ruling providence of God, His decrees of election or predestination, and the feebleness of man, they drew the conclusion that the human will, instead of being master of its own acts, is rigidly pre- determined in all its choices throughout life. As a consequence, man is predestined before his birth to eternal punishment or reward in such fashion that he never can have had any real free-power over his own fate. In his controversy with Erasmus, who defended free will, Luther frankly stated that free will is a fiction, a name which covers no reality, for it is not in man's power to think well or ill, since all events occur by necessity. In reply to Erasmus's " De Libero Arbi- trio", he published his own work, " De Servo Arbi- trio", glorj'ing in emphasizing man's helplessness and slaverj'. 'The predestination of all future human acts by God is so interpreted as to shut out any possibility of freedom. An inflexible internal necessity turns man's will whithersoever God preordains. With Cal- vin, God's preortlination is, if possible, even more fatal to free will. JIan can perform no sort of good act unless necessitated to it by God's grace, which it is impossible for him to resist. It is absurd to speak of the human will "co-operating" with God's grace, for this would imply that man could resist the grace of God. The will of God is the very necessity of things. It is objected that in this case God sometimes imposes impossible commands. Both Calvin and Luther reply that the commands of God show us not what we can tlo but what we ought to do. In condemnation of these views, the Council of Trent declared that the free will of man, moved and excited by God, can by its consent co-operate with Ciod, Who excites and invites its action ; and that it can thereby dispose and prepare itself to obtain the grace of justification. The will can resist grace if it chooses. It is not like a lifeless thing, which remains purely passive. Weakened and dimin- ished by .\dam's fall, free will is yet not destroyed in the race (Scss. \T, cap. i and v).
Free Will in Modern Philosophij. — Although from Descartes onward, philosophy became more and more separated from theology, still the theological signifi- cance of this particular question has always been felt to be of the highest moment. Descartes himself at times clearly maintains the freedom of the will (Medi- tations, III and IV). At times, however, he atten-
uates this view and leans towards a species of provi-
dential determinism, which is, indeed, the logical con-
sequence of the doctrines of occasionalism and the
ineflicacy of secondary causes latent in his system.
Malebranche developed this feature of Descartes's teaching. Soul and body cannot really act on each other. The changes in the one are directly caused by God on the occasion of the corresponding change in the other. So-called secondary causes are not really efficacious. Only the First Cause truly acts. If this view be consistently thought out, the soul, since it pos- sesses no genuine causality, cannot be justly .said to be free in its volitions. Still, as a Catholic theologian, Malebranche could not accept this fatalistic determin- ism. Accordingly he defended freedom as essential to religion and morahty. Human liberty being denied, God should be deemed cruel and unjust , whilst duty and responsibility for man cease to exist. We must there- fore be free. Spinoza was more logical. Starting from certain principles of Descartes, he deiluced in mathe- matical fashion an iron-bound pantheistic fatalism, which left no room for contingency in the universe and still less for free will. In Leibniz, the prominence given to the principle of sufficient reason, the doctrine that man must choose that which the intellect judges as the better, and the optimistic theory that God Him- self has inevitably chosen the present as being the best of all possible worlds, these views, when logically reasoned out, leave very little reality to free will, though Leibniz set himself in marked opposition to the monistic geometrical necessarianism of Spinoza.
In England, the mechanical materialism of Hobbes was incompatible with moral liberty, and he accepted with cjTiical frankness all the logical consequences of his theory. Our actions either follow tlie first appetite that arises in the mind, or there is a series of alternate appetites and fears, which we call deliberation. The last appetite or fear, that which triumphs, we call will. The onh' intelligible freedom is the power to do what one desires. Here Llobbes is practically at one with Locke. God is the author of all causes and effects, but is not the author of sin, because an action ceases to be sin if God wills it to happen. Still God is the cause of sin. Praise and blame, rewards and punishments can- not be called useless, because they strengthen motives, which are the causes of action. This, however, does not meet the objection to the justiee of such blame or praise, if the person has not the power to abstain from or perform the actions thus punished or rewarded. Hume reinforced the determinist attack on free will by his suggested psychological analysis of the notion or feeling of necessity ". The controversy, according to him, has been due to misconception of the meaning of words and the error that the alternative to free will is necessitif. This necessity, he says, is erroneously ascribed to some kind of internal nexus supposed to bind all causes to their effects, whereas there is really nothing more in causality than constant succession. The imagined necessity is merely a product of custom or association of ideas. Not feeling in our acts of choice this necessity, which we attribute to the causa- tion of material agents, we mistakenly imagine that our volitions have no causes and so are free, whereas they are as strictly determined by the feelings or motives which have gone before, as any material ef- fects are determined bj' their material antecedents. In all our reasonings respecting other persons, we infer their future conduct from their wonted action under particular motives with the same sort of certainty as in the case of physical causation.
The same hue of argument was adopted by the Associationist School down to Bain and J. S. Mill. For the necessity of Hobbes or Spinoza is slibstituted by their descendants what Professor James calls a "soft determinism", affirming solely the invariable succession of volition upon motive. J. S. Mill merely developed with greater clearness and fuller detail the
