he, instead of having been decided at the foundation of the world, were decided afresh at every passing moment in which fact seems livingly to grow, and possibility to turn itself towards fact.
He who takes things at their face-value here may indeed be deceived. He may far too often mistake his private ignorance of what is predetermined for a real indetermination of what is to be. Yet, however imaginary it may be, his picture of the situation offers no appearance of breach between the past and future. A train is the same train, its passengers are the same passengers, its momentum is the same momentum, no matter which way the switch which fixes its direction is placed. For the indeterminist there is at all times enough past for all the different futures in sight, and more besides, to find their reasons in it, and whichever future comes will slide out of that past as easily as the train slides by the switch. The world, in short, is just as continuous with itself for the believers in free will as for the rigorous determinists, only the latter are unable to believe in points of bifurcation as spots of really indifferent equilibrium or as containing shunts which there—and there only, not before—direct existing motions without altering their amount.
Were there such spots of indifference, the rigorous determinists think, the future and the past would be separated absolutely, for, abstractly taken, the word "indifferent" suggests disconnection solely. Whatever is indifferent is in so far forth unrelated and detached. Take the term thus strictly, and you see, they tell us, that if any spot of indifference is found upon the broad highway between the past and the future, then no connection of any sort whatever, no continuous momentum, no common aim or agent, can be found on both sides of the gaping wound which it makes.
Mr. Fullerton writes—the italics are mine—as follows:
In so far as my action is free, what I have been, what I am, what I have always done or striven to do, what I most earnestly wish or resolve to do at the present moment—these things can have no more to do with its future realization than if they had no existence. . . . The possibility is a hideous one; and surely even the most ardent free-willist will, when he contemplates it frankly, excuse me for hoping that if I am free I am at least not very free, and that I may reasonably expect to find some degree of consistency in my life and actions. . . . Suppose that I have given a dollar to a blind beggar. Can I, if it is really an act of free will, be properly said to have given the money? Was it given because I was a man of tender heart, etc., etc.?. . . What has all this to do with acts of free-will? If they are free, they must not be conditioned by antecedent circumstances of any sort, by the misery of the beggar, by the pity in the heart of the passer-by. They must be causeless, not determined. They must drop from a clear sky out of the void, for just in 80 far as they can be accounted for, they are not free.[1]
Heaven forbid that I should get entangled here in a controversy about the rights and wrongs of the free-will question at large, for I
- ↑ Loc. cit., Vol. 58, pp. 189, 188.
