And this, no doubt, is what lies at the bottom of the objection entertained against ordinary determinism. The vulgar are convinced that a gulf divides them from the material world; they believe their being to lie beyond the sphere of mere physical laws; their character, or their will, is to them their thinking and rational self; and they feel quite sure that it is not a thing in space, to be pushed here and there by other things outside of it. And so, when you treat their will as a something physical and interpret its action by mechanical metaphors, they believe that you do not treat it or interpret it at all, but rather something quite other than it. It is not that you say about it what you should not say, but that you never say anything about it at all; that you ignore the centre of their moral being, that which for them means freedom, and is freedom; and this is what is signified, when it is said of determinism, that ‘it holds by a will which wills nothing’, just as we saw that indeterminism did indeed hold by a will, but ‘a will that willed nothing.’
But we must not allow our client, or ourselves, too great a liberty in what may be considered the assertion of a theory; for we have not to assert, but to understand and criticize. We must see for ourselves, in what the consistent determinist can not endorse the plain man’s notion of moral accountability.
We saw above that responsibility and liability to punishment might be taken as convertible, and that, hence, the theory, which would justify punishment, would account for responsibility; and that, where the former (in its ordinary sense) was meaningless, there the latter must also be wanting.
Let us see, then, what punishment means first for the vulgar, and, next, for the believer in Necessity. Let us see for ourselves,[1] if the two ideas are compatible; and then enquire wherein they are incompatible, in case they are so.
If there is any opinion to which the man of uncultivated morals is attached, it is the belief in the necessary connection of punishment and guilt. Punishment is punishment, only where it is deserved.
- ↑ The reader must not consider me anxious to prove against a theory what it is ready to admit; but if we do not see the facts for ourselves, we shall not find the reasons.
