ordains. We must have either God or Satan to rule. And if God has a providence He must be able to render the free acts of his creatures certain; and therefore certainty must be consistent with liberty. Was it not certain that Christ should, according to the Scriptures, be by wicked hands crucified and slain, and yet were not his murderers free in all they did? Let it be remembered that in all these doctrines of providence, foreordination, and foreknowledge nothing is assumed beyond what Reid, one of the most able opponents of Leibnitz and Edwards, readily admits. He grants the prescience of future events; he grants that prescience supposes certainty, and that is all that either foreordination or providence secures. If an act may be free, although certainly foreknown, it may be free although foreordained and secured by the great scheme of providence. 4. The whole Christian world believes that God can convert men. They believe that He can effectually lead them to repentance and faith; and that He can secure them in heaven from ever falling into sin. That is, they believe that He can render their free acts absolutely certain. When we say that this is the faith of the whole Christian world we do not mean that no individual Christian or Christian theologian has ever denied this doctrine of grace; but we do mean that the doctrine, to the extent above stated, is included in the Confessions of all the great historical churches of Christendom in all ages. It is just as much a part of the established faith of Christians as the divinity of our Redeemer. This being the fact, the doctrine that contingency is necessary to liberty cannot be reconciled with Christian doctrine. It has, indeed, been extensively held by Christians; but our object is to show that it is in conflict with doctrines which they themselves as Christians must admit. If God can fulfil his promise to give men a new heart; if He can translate them from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of his dear Son; if He can give them repentance unto life; if there be no impropriety in praying that He would preserve them from falling, and give them the secure possession of eternal life, then He can control their free acts. He can, by his grace, without violating their freedom, make it absolutely certain that they will repent and believe, and persevere in holiness. If these things are so, then it is evident that any theory which makes contingency or uncertainty essential to liberty must be irreconcilable with some of the plainest and most precious doctrines of the Scriptures. The Argument from Consciousness. A third argument on this subject is derived from consciousness. It is conceded that every man is conscious of liberty in his voluntary acts. It is conceded further that this consciousness proves the fact of free agency. The validity of this argument urged by the advocates of contingency against the doctrine of necessity in any such form as involves a denial of this fact of consciousness, we fully admit. The doctrine opposed by Reid and Stewart, as well as by many continental writers, was really a doctrine which denied both the liberty and responsibility of man. This is not the Augustinian or Edwardean doctrine, although unhappily both are expressed by the same terms. The one is the doctrine of physical or mechanical necessity; the other that of certainty. As between the advocates of the latter theory and the defenders of contingency, it is agreed that man is a free agent; it is further agreed that it is included in the consciousness of free agency, that we are efficient and responsible authors of our own acts, that we had the power to perform or not to perform any voluntary act of which we were the authors. But we maintain that we are none the less conscious that this intimate conviction that we had power not to perform an act, is conditional. That is, we are conscious that the act might have been otherwise had other views or feelings been present to our minds, or been allowed their due weight. No man is conscious of a power to will against his will; that is, the will, in the narrow sense of the word, cannot be against the will in the wide sense of the term. This is only saying, that a man cannot prefer against his preference or choose against his choice. A volition is a preference resulting in a decision. A man may have one preference at one time and another at another. He may have various conflicting feelings or principles in action at the same time; but he cannot have coëxisting opposite preferences. What consciousness teaches on this subject seems to be simply this: that in every voluntary act we had some reason for acting as we did; that in the absence of that reason, or in the presence of others, which others we may feel ought to have been present, we should or could have acted differently. Under the reasons for an act are included all that is meant by the word motives, in the subjective sense of the term; i. e., principles, inclinations, feelings, etc. We cannot conceive that a man can be conscious that, with his principles, feelings, and inclinations being one way, his will may be another way. A man filled with the fear of God, or with the love of Christ, cannot will to blaspheme his God or Saviour. That fear or love constitutes for the time being the man. He is a man existing in that state, and if his acts do not express that state they are not his. Argument from the Moral Character of Volitions. This suggests a fourth argument on this subject. Unless the will be determined by the previous state of the mind, in opposition to being self-determined, there can be no morality in our acts. man is responsible for his external acts, because they are decided by his will; he is responsible for his volitions, because they are determined by his principles and feelings; he is responsible for his principles and feelings, because of their inherent nature as good or bad, and because they are his own, and constitute his character. If you detach the outward act from the will it ceases to have any moral character. If I kill a man, unless the act was intentional, i. e., the result of a volition to kill or injure, there is no morality in the act. If I willed to kill, then the character of the act depends on the motives which determined the volition. If those motives were a regard to the authority of God, or of the demands of justice legally expressed, the volition was right. If the motive was malice or cupidity, the volition and consequent act were wrong. It is obvious that if the will be self-determined, independent of the previous state of the mind, it has no more character than the outward act detached from the volition, it does not reveal or express anything in the mind. If a man when filled with pious feeling can will the most impious acts; or, when filled with enmity to God, have the volitions of a saint, then his volitions and acts have nothing to do with the man himself. They do not express his character, and he cannot be responsible for them. Argument from the Rational Nature of Man. The doctrine that the will is determined and not self-determined, is moreover involved in the rational character of our acts. A rational act is not merely an act performed by a rational being, but one performed for a reason, whether good or bad. An act performed without a reason, without intention or object, for which no reason can be assigned beyond the mere power of acting, is as irrational as the actions of a brute or of an idiot. If the will therefore ever acts independently of the understanding and of the feelings, its volitions are not the acts of a rational being any further than they would be if reason were entirely dethroned. The only true idea of liberty is that of a being acting in accordance with the laws of its nature. So long as an animal is allowed to act under the control of its own nature, determined in all it does by what is within itself, it has all the liberty of which it is capable. And so long as a man is determined in his volitions and acts by his own reason and feelings he has all the liberty of which he is capable. But if you detach the acts of an animal from its inward state its liberty is gone. It becomes possessed. And if the acts of a man are not determined by his reason and feelings he is a puppet or a maniac. The doctrine that the will acts independently of the previous state of the mind supposes that our volitions are isolated atoms, springing up from the abyss of the capricious self-determination of the will, from a source beyond the control or ken of reason. They are purely casual, arbitrary, or capricious. They have no connection with the past, and give no promise of the future. On this hypothesis there can be no such thing as character. It is, however, a fact of experience universally admitted, that there are such things as principles or dispositions which control the will. We feel assured that an honest man will act honestly, and that a benevolent man will act benevolently. We are moreover assured that these principles may be so strong and fixed as to render the volitions absolutely certain. "Rational beings," says Reid, "in proportion as they are wise and good, will act according to the best motives; and every rational being who does otherwise, abuses his liberty. The most perfect being, in everything where there is a right and a wrong, a better and a worse, always infallibly acts according to the best motives. This, indeed, is little else than an identical proposition; for it is a contradiction to say, that a perfect being does what is wrong or unreasonable. But to say that he does not act freely, because he always does what is best, is to say, that the proper use of liberty destroys liberty, and that liberty consists only in its abuse." That is, the character determines the act; and to say that the infallible certainty of acts destroys their freedom is to make "liberty destroy liberty." Though Reid and Stewart wrote against Leibnitz and Edwards as well as against Hobbes and Belsham, the sentences above quoted contain the whole doctrine of the two former distinguished men, and of their innumerable predecessors, associates, and followers. It is the doctrine that infallible certainty is consistent with liberty. This conviction is so wrought into the minds of men that they uniformly, unconsciously as well as consciously, act upon it. They assume that a man's volitions are determined by motives. They take for granted that VOL. II. 1 Active Powers, Essay iv. ch. 4; Works, p. 609. there is such a thing as character; and therefore they endeavour to mould the character of those under their influence, assured that if they make the tree good the fruit will be good. They do not act on the principle that the acts of men are capricious, that the will is self-determined, acting without or against motives as well as with them; so that it must always and forever remain uncertain how it will decide. Argument from the Doctrine of a Sufficient Cause. Yet The axiom that every effect must have a cause, or the doctrine of a sufficient reason, applies to the internal as well as to the external world. It governs the whole sphere of our experience, inward and outward. Every volition is an effect, and therefore must have had a cause. There must have been some sufficient reason why it was so, rather than otherwise. That reason was not the mere power of the agent to act; for that only accounts for his acting, not for his acting one way rather than another. The force of gravity accounts for a stone falling to the earth, but not for its falling here instead of there. The power to walk accounts for a man's walking, but not for his walking east rather than west. we are told even by the most distinguished writers, that the efficiency of the agent is all that is required to satisfy the instinctive demand which we make for a sufficient reason, in the case of our volitions. Reid, as quoted above, asks, "Was there a cause of the action? Undoubtedly there was. Of every event there must be a cause that had power sufficient to produce it, and that exerted that power for the purpose. In the present case, either the man was the cause of the action, and then it was a free action, and is justly imputed to him; or it must have had another cause, and cannot justly be imputed to the man. In this sense, therefore, it is granted that there was a sufficient reason for the action; but the question about liberty, is not in the least affected by this concession." Again, he asks, "Why may not an efficient cause be defined to be a being that had power and will to produce the effect? The production of an effect requires active power, and active power, being a quality, must be in a being endowed with that power. Power without will produces no effect; but, where these are conjoined, the effect must be produced."2 Sir William Hamilton's annotation on the former of these passages is, "that of a hyper-physical as well as of a physical event, we must, by a necessary mental law, always suppose 1 Active Powers, Essay iv. ch. 9; Works, edit. Edinburgh, 1849, p. 625. |