supposition that self-conscious moral action could be explained by the use of the same categories and upon the same hypotheses usually considered sufficient to explain the causal sequences observable in the physical world. Conduct was regarded as the result of interaction between character and environment; or it was asserted to be the resultant effect of a struggle between motives in which the strongest prevailed. And the libertarian critic had before him a comparatively easy task when he exhibited the complete interdependence of character and environment, or rather the impossibility of treating either as definite and fixed factors in a process explicable by the use of ordinary scientific categories.
It was not difficult to show that motives have meaning only with reference to a self, and that it is the self which alone has power to erect a desire into a motive, or that the attraction of an object of appetite derives much of its power from the character of the self to which it makes its appeal. What is possibly not so obvious is the extent to which libertarians have themselves been guilty of a similar fallacy. It is comparatively unimportant to the determinism whether the cause to which he attributes conduct be the self, or the will, or character, or the strongest motive, provided that each of these causes be regarded as definitely ascertainable and that its effects in sufficiently known circumstances be calculable. It is possible to treat will as a permanent cause manifesting itself through a series of sequent changes, and obedient to the laws which govern the development of the personality of the single individual.
And the libertarian, by his arguments showing that appeal must be made to an act of will or of the self in the explanation Objections to libertarianism. of the phenomena of choice, does nothing directly to disprove the truth of such a contention. If, however, it be argued by libertarians that no explanation is possible of the manner in which the self or the will makes its decisions and inclines to this motive or to that, while they still assert the independent existence of the self or will, then they are undoubtedly open to the retort of their opponents that upon such a theory no rational explanation of conduct will be possible. For to regard a particular decision as the effect of the “fiat” of a self or will unmotived and uninfluenced by the idea of a future object of attainment seems to be equivalent to the simple statement that the choice was made or the decision taken. Such a theory can prove nothing either for or against the possibility of freedom.
Moreover, many of the arguments by which the position of rigid libertarians of the older school has been proved untenable Idealism. have been advanced by moral philosophers, and by thinkers not always inclined to regard psychology with complete sympathy. The doctrine of self-determination, advocated by T. H. Green and idealist writers of his school, has little or nothing in common with the doctrine that the self manifests its freedom in unmotived acts of will. The advocates of self-determination maintain that conduct is never determined, in the sense in which, e.g. movements in the physical world are determined, because man in virtue of his self-consciousness has a power of distinguishing himself from, even while he identifies himself with, a purely natural object of desire; and this must always make it impossible to regard him as an object governed by purely natural forces. Consciousness and especially self-consciousness, can never be explained upon hypotheses adequate only to explain the blind working of the unconscious world. But the insistence of idealist writers upon the relation of the world of nature to conscious intelligence, and especially to a universal consciousness realizing itself throughout the history of individuals, rendered it alike impossible to deny altogether some influence of environment upon character, and to regard the history of individual willing selves as consisting in isolated and unconnected acts of choice. Self-consciousness, if it be conceived as distinguishing itself from its past history or from the natural world, must be conceived also as in some sense related to the empirical self which has a history in time and to the natural organism in which it finds a home. It is the precise mode of this relation which idealist philosophers leave obscure.
Nor is that obscurity to any appreciable degree illuminated by the tendency also noticeable in idealist writers to find the true possession of freedom only in a self emancipated from the influence of irrational passion, and liberated by knowledge from the dominion of chance or the despotism of unknown natural forces. Here also psychology, by its elucidation of the important part which instinctive appetites and animal impulses play in the development of intelligence, still more perhaps by arguments (based largely upon the examination of hypnotic subjects or the phenomena of fixed ideas) which show the permanent influence of irrational or semi-rational suggestions or habits upon human conduct, has done much to aid and abet idealists in their contentions. It cannot in fact be denied that from one point of view human freedom is strictly relative, a possession to be won only after painful effort, exhibiting itself in its entirety only in supreme moments when the self is unswayed by habit, and out of full knowledge makes an individual and personal choice. Ideal freedom will be the supreme achievement of a self completely moralized. But the process by which such freedom is eventually to be gained must, if the prize is to be worth the having, itself exhibit the gradual development of a self which, under whatever limitations, possesses the same liberty of choice in its early stages as in its latest. And no theory which limits the exercise of freedom to the choice only of what is strictly good or rational can avoid the imputation of destroying man's responsibility for the choice of evil.
But the most important point at issue between the opposing theories has remained throughout the history of the controversy, The ethical problem. the morality or immorality of their respective solutions of the problem. The advocates of either theory must in the last resort appeal to the direct evidence of the moral consciousness. It remains to give a brief sketch of the arguments advanced on either side.
It has always been maintained by convinced libertarians that without a belief in the freedom of the will morality becomes, unmeaning (see Determinism). Moreover, without a belief in the freedom of the will the conception of moral obligation upon which the existence of morality depends and from which all other moral terms derive their meaning loses its chief significance. What is opposed to obligation, or at least always distinguished from it, is that very domain of necessity within which determinists would bring the will. For even when the felt obligation is absolute, where the will is completely moralized, where it is inconceivable in the case of a good man that the act which he performs should be other than it is, there the obligation which he recognizes is an obligation to choose autonomously, and as such is distinguished from desire or appetite or any of the other alleged determinants of action. If the question be asked “Where is the evidence for this alleged freedom to choose between alternatives?” the appeal is always made to the witness of the moral consciousness itself. No one, it is said, who ever feels remorse for the committal of a wrong act can honestly avoid the admission that at the moment when the act was committed he could have acted otherwise. No one at the moment of action is ever aware that his will is being necessitated. What he is clearly conscious of is the power to choose. Any proof, in the scientific sense, that a man's acts are due to his power of free initiative would be from the nature of the case impossible. For, inasmuch as scientific proof depends upon the evidence of causality, such efforts after scientific demonstration would end only by bringing either the man's whole personality or some element in it within the sequence of the chain of natural causes and effects, under the domination of that natural necessity from which as a conscious being he is free. The science of morality must be content in its search for causes to recognize the rationality of choice as a real determining agent in human affairs. And no account of the psychology of human action which regards conduct as due to self-determination, but leaves open the question whether the self is free to choose is, so it is argued, capable of providing an adequate theory of the admitted facts of moral consciousness.
We must now consider the arguments by which determinists
