But when I know what I am doing, and also know the quality of it, know the relation in which it stands to the rest of my life, and know that it is wrong, can I then be forced to do it? It is with some diffidence that I express an opinion, but I think we must say, yes.
Whenever I can not collect myself, so as by conscious volition to decide one way or the other, there (provided that it is not my fault that I am unable), it seems to me, we must say I am not accountable, I did not do the act; there was force put upon me; whether proceeding simply from an uncontrollable element of my nature, or, in addition, from a will outside me, makes no difference. Where volition is a psychical impossibility, and where it is not my fault that it is so impossible, there I am not responsible.
Do such cases exist in fact? I believe they do. There seems no doubt that insanity supplies them; and apart from that, and with regard only to sane persons, such cases are possible. Violent physical pain, with great weakness, may destroy the conditions of volition, by destroying energy; or, further, violent emotion may make it impossible for the person to keep two courses before him and decide—impossible to separate himself from the strain put on him, so as either to resist it or to identify himself with it. In such cases the agents can not collect themselves so as to will, and though with knowledge, yet with pain and feeling of guiltiness, as in a dream, they perform some act which is abhorrent to them, and which they impute to themselves as guilt, but which (provided always their fault has not led to it) the sober onlooker may be unable to impute to them, in their character of a moral agent. I can not doubt, for instance, that in some cases a woman is seduced really against her will; and though morally accountable for what has preceded, is not so for anything else. With the practical bearing of this we are not concerned; but I must be allowed to remark that there are dangers beside those of moral laxity. There is a false self-condemnation, which takes on the will more than belongs to it, and hopelessness and self-desertion, which lets itself become really what it is not yet, because it thinks it is so already. In morality the past is real because it is present in the will; and conversely, what is not present in the will is only past.
Where the act was only voluntary, where there was no conscious volition, and where volition was psychically impossible, there we are responsible only so far as we ourselves have made the impossibility. If this is not so, we can plead compulsion.
But we foresee the objection that will at once be made. ‘This doctrine,’ it will be said, ‘excuses well-nigh everything. For when we go wrong, we do not always say, “I will,” and so act. We
