this sense. The question that divides them lies a little farther back; the determinist must hold that, if I please to raise my hand, there is some cause within me, or in my environment, or both, that brings about the result; and if I please not to raise it, he must believe that there is some cause or complex of causes that produces just that result. He does not deny that I can do as I please. He merely maintains that my 'pleasing' is never uncaused. On the other hand, the advocate of the 'liberty of indifference' maintains that under precisely the same circumstances, internal and external, I may raise my hand or keep it at rest. He holds, in other words, that, if I move, that action is not to be wholly accounted for by anything whatever that has preceded, for under precisely the same circumstances it might not have occurred. It is, hence, causeless.
Now it would be a horrid thing to feel that one were not free to move or not to move. Freedom is a pearl of great price. But there is nothing especially attractive in the thought of causeless actions, in themselves considered. They strike one, at first glance, as at least something of an anomaly. It seems reasonable to suspect that the great attraction which the doctrine of indeterminism exercises upon many minds must be due to a confusion between it and something else. That this is indeed the case I can best illustrate by citing a passage from Professor James' delightful 'Talks to Teachers.'[1] It reads as follows:
"It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes the appearance to be a reality; the determinist believes that it is an illusion. I myself hold with the free-willists—not because I cannot conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its plausibility, but simply because, if free-will were true, it would be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance. Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my freedom; I do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such psychological and pyschophysical theories as I hold do not necessarily force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist."
I have taken this extract because it may stand as the very type of a 'free-will' argument, and as an ideal illustration of the persuasive influence of the ways of expressing things natural to a gifted writer. The school-teacher who has no prejudice against fatalism and materialism, to whom the idea of being endowed with freedom is not attractive, who
- ↑ Chapter XV., pp. 191-192.
