The doctrine that our will can be forced to voluntary acts should not, I think, alarm or distress us. It seems to me by no means an immoral doctrine; and that charge holds good far more against the teaching that there is always a possibility of resistance to evil and performance of good at any moment, and under any previous and present conditions. Possibility of compulsion should make us see more clearly the need of so strengthening our will for good, as to make that compulsion impossible for us, except in theory. It should also make us afraid of circumstances, of which most people seem to me not enough afraid, being encouraged in some cases by the doctrine of libertas arbitrii. But what we, who reject that doctrine, should encourage ourselves with, is the clear fact that again and again, and by the weak, what we should have said beforehand it was impossible to resist has been resisted, and simply because they had made their will one with the good.
This is all we have to say on compulsion in relation to responsibility, and we know we have not done justice to it. The compulsion which makes irresponsible is absolute compulsion.[1] Relative compulsion, no one would say, relieves us from responsibility; for this means not an unconditional ‘must,’ but a ‘must,’ only in case I make up my mind to have this, or decide that I can not face that. Here we can collect ourselves to take which course we choose.
And at this point we should stop; but I should like to wander beyond the subject so far as to call attention to a matter on which there seems to be a great want of light. Everybody sees that any and every sort of influence does not amount to compulsion; but if I may judge from Mr. Stephen’s interesting book on Liberty, &c., and the few reviews of it which I saw, there is a general inability to draw the line between them. This is somewhat surprising, and as, from wrong views on this point, wrong
- ↑ The above doctrine, I think, will cover all maniacal phenomena. In connection with these let me remark against Dr. Maudsley that not all metaphysicians have denied, or ignored, insane irresistible impulses, coexisting with knowledge of the moral quality of the act. See, for instance, Hegel, vii. (2), 222. Dr. Maudsley’s book on ‘Responsibility in mental disease,’ which I read with much interest and I hope some profit, seems to me to proceed in a somewhat unscientific fashion. How in the world is it possible to say what relieves a madman of responsibility, until you know what makes a sane man responsible? But that Dr. M. does not tell us. And until we know whether a writer is one with us in our main beliefs as to a sane man’s responsibility, how can we (unless we are most foolish) receive his evidence as to any one’s non-responsibility, when, so far as we can see, on his showing no one (sane or mad) would be what we call responsible?
