BOOKS.
MR. J. S. MILL ON FREE-WILL AND NECESSITY.*
[THIRD NOTICE.] BEFORE taking leave of Mr. John Stuart Mill's book we must briefly discuss what is perhaps his most interesting chapter, the chapter on necessity and free-will. Mr. Mill complains much in it of an unprecise mole of speech, awl is himself, as it seems to us, never so far froin precise as he is in this discussion. Take, for instance, the following passage, and note Mr. Mill's use of the word " preferred :"— " But this conviction, whether termed consciousness or only belief, that our will is free—what is it? Of what are we convinced ? I am told, that whether I decide to do or to abstain, I feel that I could have decided the other way. I ask my consciousness what I do feel, and I find, indeed, that I feel (or am convinced) that I could have chosen the other course if I had prefeived it ; but not that I could have chosen one course while I preferred the other. When I say preferred, I of course include with the thing itself all that accompanies it. I know that I can, because I know that I often do, elect to do one thing, when I should have preferred another in itself, apart from its consequences, or from a moral law which it violates. And this preference for a thing in itself, abstractedly from its accompaniments, is often loosely described as pre- ference for the thing. It is this unprecise mode of speech which makes it not seem absurd to say that I act in opposition to my preference ; that I do one thing when I would rather do another; that my conscience prevails over my desires—as if conscience itself were not a desire—the • An Examination of Sir WilUTIn Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the Principal Philosophical Questions H.sctissed in his IVrlings. By John Stuart Mill. Lonloo Louisiana
desire to do right. Take any alternative : say, to murder or not to
murder. I am told, that if I elect to murder, I am conscious that I could have elected to abstain : but am I conscious that I could have ab- stained if my aversion to the crime, and my dread of its consequences, had been weaker than the temptation ? If I elect to abstain : in what sense am I conscious that! could have elected to commit the crime ? Only if I had desired to commit it with a desire stronger than my horror of murder ; not with one less stroll.'% When we think of ourselves hypothe- tically as having acted otherwise than we did, we always suppose a differ- ence in the antecedents : we picture ourselves as having known some- thing that we did not know, or not known something that we did know' - which is a difference in the external motives ; or as having deaired some- thing, or disliked something, more or less than we did ; which is a difference in the internal motives."
Now what does " prefer " mean ? Does it mean having the stronger desire, or the stronger set of desires, for " the other coarse," apart from volitios? If it does, we assert that the state- ment here is contrary to all moral experience, which habitually presents the will as fighting against the drift of desires as a strong swimmer swims against the tide. Or does it only mean, "I could have chosen the other course if I had chosen it,"—in which case it is perhaps rather a truism than a truth ? Or does it mean, "I could have beaten my other desires by means of my moral desires, if my moral desires had happened to be stronger than all the others ?" If that is what Mr. Mill means, we wholly deny the applicability of the language. Moral desires are strong no doubt in proportion to the beauty and perfection of the character, but they are not the equivalents, as Mr. Mill supposes, of conscience, which only perceives the right, without inspiring U3 with desire for it. This cool assumption of Mr. Mars, "as if conscience were not itself a desire," really begs the whole question. It ignores all moral obligation except that which has grown from a bare duty into a warm affection. He might just as well assume that a compass is wind or steam, as assume that the insight which shows us the right course is the desire which helps U3 to take it. It is utterly false that "when we think of ourselves hypothetically as having acted otherwise than we did, we always suppose a difference in the antecedents ; we picture ourselves as having known something that we did not know, not known something which we did know, or as having desired something or disliked something more or less than we did." This no doubt weak men do in self-excuse, but- they know all the while it is mere weak self-excuse, and when they face the situation truthfully they say out at once, "but all this is trifling with myself,—the truth is that without knowing anything more or less, and without being anything that I was not, or ceasing to be anything that I was, I might have willed it otherwise, and would not." That is the language of every morally courageous man, we do not say in every moral failure of his life (for of course men often do ill without being guilty in that particular case, without having in that particular case any real freedom to do otherwise), but in every moral failure in which he sincerely believes himself guilty and worthy of self-reproach. When Mr. Mill asks triumphantly, "Does Mr. Dlausel or any other of the free-will philosophers think that we can will the means [for our moral improvement] if we do not desire the end, or if our desire of the end is weaker than our aversion to the means?" we answer, that is precisely what all philosophers, or clear thinkers not philosophers who have the slightest insight into the meaning of free-will and moral obligation, do think,—that the will can create force enough to neutralize even vehement desires without the help of stronger desires, or any but much feebler desires, on its own side. If Mr. Mill does not see that that is what all true free-willists maintain, he has not yet grasped even the meaning of that doctrine.
Mr. Mill fails perhaps most conspicuously in this chapter in his attempt to prove, in answer to Mr. Memel, that necessi- tarians in asserting that the will must follow the strongest motive or group of motives, have any test of "strongest motive" other than the winning or conqueri»g motive. His attempt to answer this reasoning is contained in the following paragraph :—
"But the argument on which Mr. Mansel lays most stress (it is also one of Reid's) is the following :—Necessitarians say that the will is governed by the strongest motive : but I only know the strength of motives in relation to the will by the test of ultimate prevalence ; so that this means no more than that the prevailing motive prevails.' -I have heretofore complimented Mr. Manse' on seeing farther, in some things, than his master. In the present instance I am compelled to re- mark that he has not seen so far. Sir W. Hamilton was not the man to neglect an argument like this, had there been no flaw in it. The fact is that there are two. First, those who say that the will follows the strongest motive, do not mean the motive which is strongest in relation to the will, or in other words, that the will follows what it does follow. They mean the motive which is strongest in relation to pain and plea- sure ; since a motive, being a desire or aversion, is iiroportional to the pleasantness, as conceived by us, of the thing desired, or the painfulness of the thing shunned. And when what was am first a direct impulse to- wards pleasure, or recoil from pain, has passed into a habit or a fixed pur- pose, then the strength of the motive moans the completeness and promp- titude of the association which has been formed between an idea and an outward act. This is the first answer to Mr. Memel. The second is, that even supposing there were no test of the strength of motives but their effect on the will, the proposition that the will follows the strong- est motive would not, as Mr. Mansel supposes, be identical and unmean- ing. We say without absurdity, that if two weights are placed in oppo- site scales, the heavier will lift the other tip; yet we mean nothing by the heavier, except the weight which will lift up the other. The pro- position, nevertheless, is not unmeaning, for it signifies that in many or most cases there is a heavier, and that this is always the same ono not one or the other, as it may happen. In like manner, even if the strong- est motive meant only the motive which prevails, yet if thorn is a pre- vailing motive—if, all other antecedents being the same, the motive which prevails to-day will prevail to-morrow and every subsequent day— Sir W. Hamilton was acute enough to see that the free-will theory is not saved. I regret that I cannot, in this instance, credit Mr. Mansel with the same acuteness."
HOW I am to tell the strongest motive from the amount of pleasure or pain to which it leads, is about as mysterious as it would be how to tell the strongest army from the amount of pleasure and pain to which it leads. A conqueror may, we suppose, be gloomy and not enjoy himself at all, whereas a vanquished foe may ha light-hearted even in defeat. It is absurd to talk of pleasureableness as a test of the strength of a motive. The wildest and most powerful motives known in history have been fierce and gloomy fanaticisms. Mr. Mill will say, Yes, but the suppression of these fanatical impulses would have been a terrible pain.' Perhaps so, but is such pain in any sense as measureable as the force of the motive? If Mr. Mill wants to define 'strongest motive' OS that which gives the greatest pleasure in gratification or the greatest pain in denial, we say he is defining an ignotum per ignotius. I have some direct notion
of the strength of a present impulse in me, but far less, if any at all, of the pleasure it will give me to gratify or the pain it will give me to suppress it. Mr. Mill's own principle comes into play here. The mind, he says, is not prophetic,—I can only tell that I could act otherwise than I do by acting otherwise than I do,—and as that is impossible, no man can be certain he could have acted otherwise than he did. If that is good reasoning,—and it is good only so far as he has no memory of former cases in which with less pressure upon his will he did act otherwise than he has done now,—it is far more true that we cannot prophecy how much pleasure it will give us to yield to a motive, or how much pain to suppress it, till we have yielded to it or suppressed it. And therefore Mr. Mill's barometer for the strength of motives by gauging their pleasure and pain falls utterly to the ground. As a matter of fact, whenever people unaccustomed to do right have a great struggle for it and succeed, they will emphatically deny that the motive to which they gave the preference had any attraction for them to compare with that which they overcame.
Mr. Mill's second answer is even more unfortunate than his first. It is quite false that we mean nothing by "the heavier of two weights" but the one which will lift up the other in the scales. We mean by saying that the heavier of two weights will always over- balance the other in a true balance, that the one which causes us the greater effort to lift, will do so. Although our own muscular powers, which give us the primary test of weight, are not capable of such fine graduations as the secondary and artificial test, itis to them we appeal in stating such an elementary truth as this. And similarly, when we say that the strongest motive is that which de- termines the will, we ought to mean by it that the motive which it causes us the greatest difficulty to resist when it is in opposition to our will, always determines the will; and this is precisely what our moral experience contradicts. Again, the proposition that the same weight which is heavier one time will be heavier the second time, is true usually, because metallic weights do not dwindle or increase much from day to day. But applied to motives the proposition is altogether uncertain and often false, as Mr. Mill cares more even than we do to maintain. For if a motive which wins the day on one occasion loses it on the next against the same antagonists, he will assert as a self-evident truth that it has lost vital energy in the meantime,—while we should only say that either this is so,—or, if it is not, the will has exerted itself less or more than on the former occasion. On the whole, if Mr. Mill has any better test of the strength of a motive than its carrying the will with it, why does he not give it, and teach us to apply it?. If he has no better test, it is certainly true that the necessitarian is guilty of assuming what he professes to prove in asserting that the will must obey the strongest desire or group of desires.
Mr. Mill of course takes the usual line of necessitarians with regard to moral responsibility. He considers that moral responsi- bility for a sin only means that its roots are in the character of the culprit, and that therefore society, or whoever has the right to
complain of its evil consequences, has also the right to administer such punishments as may have the effect of altering that cha- racter. The theory of punishment as respects the crirnin d is that "by counterbalancing the influence of present temptations or acquired bad habits it restores the mind to that normal pre- ponderance of the love of right, which the best moralists and theologians consider to constitute the true definition of our freer dom." We can only say that if the best moralists and theologians believe this to be freedom, they mean by freedom a necessity to act rightly, which may be a pious, but is rather an unmeaning use of language. But we wish to observe that here Mr. Mill identifies punishment absolutely with what we should call in the lower creatures mere training, teaching them by pains (or pleasures) to do what they are bid. In thus doing he ignores the limitation always put upon the right to train, by the conscience of mankind. No humane man would advocate the right to render one of the lower animals miserable for seven, ten, or fifteen years, simply in order to reduce it to subjection. We should say, 'The crea- ture has done no wrong, has not deserved this misery, and you can have no right to turn the happiness of its life into wretched- ness simply to teach it your preferences rather than its own.' Why do we think differently with criminals, and punish them far more severely than we have any right to do the lower animals ? Because we regard them as free,—as having incurred guilt,—an& as having had power to avoid the consequences which they have voluntarily incurred. Mr. Mill denies this power ; he believes that, all the antecedents in a man's life once given, he could not have been other than he is, and we maintain therefore that though he may think it right to inflict small punishments in order to rectify a falsely-balanced character, he has no right to inflict any punishment for a time so long that by the very nature of the case it cannot conduce to the criminal's own happiness. Again, Mr. Mill may protest against the identification of necessity with fatalism fairly enough historically, for no doubt they do stand for different modes of conceiving the same problem ; but then every ne- cessitarian has a right to be a fatalist if he choose. As he never believes he could act in more than one way, he may take for granted that if he does not trouble himself to choose rightly he could not have chosen rightly, and has at least, even in Mr. Mill's own conception, no right to blame himself for not having done what, as all the antecedents were fixed, and fixed antecedents imply a fixed consequent, he could not have done.
There is still one argument on which Mr. Mill lays great stress, and to which Sir William Hamilton unfortunately lent his sanction, though he did not assent to the conclusion. It is this : — "When Reid affirms that Motives are not causes—that they may in- fluence to action, but do not act, Sir W. Hamilton observes If Motives influence to action, they must co-operate in produoing a certain effect upon the agent; and the determination to act, and to act in a certain manner, is that effect. They are thus, on Reid's own view, in this relation, causes, and efficient causes. It is of no consequence in the argument whether motives be said to determine a man to act, or to. influence (that is, to determine) him to determine himself to act.' This is one of the neatest specimens in our author's writings of a fallacy cut clean through by a single stroke."
This means that every reason by which we guide our course is in fact a constraining force driving us to that course, and goes on the ground that if it does not determine our act it determines our will to determine our act. We need not say that if this were true the whole controversy is at an end, for there is no free- dom in acting without a reason, nothing but blind chance. But it is obviously the purest sophistry. It is a common and loose mode of speech no doubt to speak of the reason on which I determine to act, as determining me to act,—but if it be a pure reason (and not a motive suggesting pain or pleasure to me as a result) nothing can be more incorrect. If in riding at a hedge I select carefully the lowest and least difficult, or the highest and most difficult point, to take the leap, some one may say loosely, "It was the gap which determined him to the jump," or, "It was the peculiar difficulty of that spot which determined him to the jump,"—but nothing can be more absurd, for no power of any sort went forth from the gap or from the difficult part of the hedge. What is probably meant is, that the wish to escape a difficulty or to overcome a difficulty, determined me, but even that. is begging the question. A reason for action may be quite insufficient to impel to action, without a positive creation of force by the will in submitting itself to that reason or motive. But then, asks Mr. Mill, "what is the reason for such a creation of force?" And the answer the original reason, and nothing more.' It is as absurd to demand a second reason for concurring in a first reason, as it is to ask " why ought you to do your duty?" e., to expect a second ' ought ' for obeying the first ought.' What the necessita-
rian has to show is, that the reason selected by the will for action itself puts forth the power "determining" the will to select it, as the iron is supposed to put forth the attraction determining the magnetic needle to point to it ;—whereas, as we very well know, in all true cases of moral freedom, we put forth the power (or omit to put forth the power, being quite able to do it) which chooses the motive or reason,—the man selects the reason, not the reason the man. The misleading metaphor, for it is no more, which attributes to a mere passive intellectual or moral consideration the force to 'determine' us,—instead of the mere light by which we do deter- mine, or if we do not we ought to determine ourselves,—is the root of a whole host of fallacies. It is just the same error as that which is made when we say, "the light guides us on our way," whereas the light only enables us to find our way if we choose, and to neglect it if we choose. Mr. Mill's chapter on Free-Will is very able and very sophistical.
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