BOOKS.

Tills is the most able and remarkable contribution to ethical science which has appeared in our country since the publication

of Professor Sidgwick's 3fethods of Ethics. And when we have said this, it seems paradoxical to add, what we must add, that we have read three times the author's treatment of so important a question in ethics as the freedom of the will, without being able to make quite certain whether he does or does not believe that human action is, in any intelligible sense of the word, freely performed. He emphatically declares that such "action is as necessarily related to the character and circumstances as any event to the sum of its conditions," and so far appears to deny

human freedom. But when he proceeds to explain what character, according to his acceptation of the term, involves, it comes to mean the self, and &termination by the character

is called self-determination. If this were all, we should con- clude that Mr. Green was an advocate, as he professes to be in his work, of free-will, but that he uses the word " character" not in the sense of natural bent or habitual disposition, but in a new sense, which denies to it a fixed meaning or a permanent value, and identities it with the disposition of a particular moment, as expressed in the act performed at that moment.

A more careful study of his language, however, makes us waver in this opinion, and inclines us to think that, amid a

certain vacillation both of language and of thought, he does not distinctly contemplate any power of self-determination, as dis- tinct from the action of habit or a tendency in this or that man to resist immediate inclination, brought about by the natural adherence of his will to distant ends, rather than to immediate pleasure. In such action he appears to consider the will self- determining in this sense, that it is the action of a man conscious of the end at which he aims ; but that end is, nevertheless, marked out for him by the interaction of his character (in the sense of natural bent) and the circumstances of his life. This is the conclusion which we are inclined finally to draw as to Professor Green's meaning, and the question is so vital, and its truly critical issues so frequently and easily evaded, that we shall not, we think, waste our space, if we devote our first notice of his work to a careful examination of his remarks on the subject.

-We select for quotation two pages which seem to us to express most clearly Mr. Green's view as to the operation of the will in a deliberate action, and its connection with the motive on which it acts. Here is the first :—

" The motive which the act of the will expresses is the desire for self-satisfaction. It is not one of the motives, the desires, or aversions, of which the man was conscious previously to the act, as disposing hint to it ; at any rate, not one of these or a combina- tion of them, as they were before the determination of the will, before the man made up his mind.' It is only as they become through the reaction of the self-seeking self upon them, only through its formation to itself of an object out of them—only as they merge in an effort after a self.satisfaction to be found in this object—that they yield the motive of the act of will, properly so called. This motive does, indeed, necessarily determine the act ; it is the act on its inner side. But it is misleading to call it the strongest motive, for this implies a certain parity between it and the impulses which have been previously soliciting the will. The distinction of greater or less strength properly applies only to motives,' in that sense in which they do not determine tho will,—to desires and aversions, as they are without that reaction of the self upon them which yields the final motive expressed by the action. It may very well happen that the des;re which affects a man most strongly is one which he decides on resisting. In spite of its strength, he cannot make its object his object, the object with which ho seeks to satisfy himself. His character prevents this. In other words, it is incompatible with his steady direction of himself towards certain objects in which he habitually seeks satisfaction."

We will only, for the moment, draw attention to the con- cluding sentences which we have italicised. " Character" seems here to imply what it generally implies,—that bent and disposition of mind which is the outcome of the past, that past including what nature originally implanted, and what circum- stances as affecting and affected by the original character have superadded. There is no hint here of the additional factor, expressed in the action, of a power of proceeding in a direction different from the habitual one, although there is abundant in- dication of the power of habit to overcome the desire for • Prolegomena to Ethic,. By the late Thomas Hill Grows, M.A., LL.D., Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford. and Whyte& Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford. Edited by £0. Bradley, WA-, Fellow of Balllol Collage. Orford. Clarendon Press. 1883.

pleasurable feeling. This will become plainer, and the questions -which it raises will be more satisfactorily discussed after we have presented to our readers another passage, in which the meaning of " character" is enlarged upon :—

"A character is only formed through a man's conscious presenta- tion to himself of objects as his good, as that in which his self- satisfaction is to be found. Just so far as an action is determined by character, it is determined by an object which the agent has thus consciously made his own, and has come to make his own in con- sequence of actions similarly determined."

Again :— "What we call a strong character we also call a strong

This is not to be regarded as a particular endowment or faculty, like a retentive memory, or a lively imagination, or an even temper, or a great passion for society. A. strong will means a strong man. It expresses a certain quality of the man himself, as distinguishable from all his faculties and tendencies, a quality which he has in relation to all of them alike. It means that it is the man's habit to set clearly before himself certain objects in which he seeks self-satisfaction, and that he does not allow himself to be drawn aside from these by the suggestions of chance desires. He need not; therefore, be a good man ; for the objects on which he concentrates himself may be morally bad, according to the criteria of badness which we have yet to consider. But on the other hand, the weak man, taking his object at any time from the desire which happens to affect him most strongly, cannot be a good man. Concentration of will does not necessarily mean goodness, but it is a necessary condition of goodness."

Our criticism on this account of the will is that, full though it is of true and thoughtful analysis, it fails to bring intorelief thosecases in which freedom is most plainly exemplified. We have indeed

clearly contrasted the man who is led by the desire which affects his feelings most strongly at the moment, and the man who is " tenax propositi," and unswervingly pursues some end. But the effort of the self which modifies the character, which turns, not from habit or from nature, but by free choice, to the pursuit of one end rather than another, is certainly not clearly contemplated, if, indeed, it is contemplated at all. Let us endeavour to make our meaning a little plainer. Tom Tulliver is undoubtedly an in- stance of what Mr. Green terms a strong character. He placed clearly before himself the end he would attain to—the restora- tion of his father's good name by his own success—and he worked for it, undeterred by the allurements of pleasure or im- mediate temptation of any kind. Here seems to us an instance entirely satisfying the conditions laid down by Mr. Green for the completest exhibition of free-will. Such a man's course of action differs from blind habit in that he places the end consciously before himself; and he acts habitually for that end, unmoved by chance desires. And yet we can see nothing in his actions, as thus explained, inconsistent with the absolute denial of free- will. We see, indeed, a character acting rather from the motive of a distant aim than from immediate attractions ; but if the

character is such in its nature that it is swayed rather by a fixed object than by its sensitiveness to present wants, although un-

doubtedly the "balance of pleasure" theory is denied by the admission, free-will is not proved or clearly exhibited. The mere fact that the end is "consciously made his own" does not make the agent free, supposing him to be determined in choosing the end by his natural bent, any more than the fact that a man is conscious of slipping down a steep mountain-side makes him slip by choice. The really critical cases in which man's freedom is put to the test are those in which he makes what the late Dr. Ward called anti-impulsive effort,—in which, that is, the net result of bent of character and circumstances being inclined in one direction, and some end proposed by the intellect in another, he adheres doggedly to the latter ; not, as Mr. Green contemptuously expresses it, by a power of" unmotived willing," but by a power of adhering to whichever of two motives is chosen by preference. No doubt, this power is limited, and becomes more and more so in propor- tion as it is little used. The man who habitually surrenders himself to the inclination of his natural character may in time almost lose this originating power ; and, on the other hand, the man who constantly uses it acquires a strength not merely of the kind which Mr. Green contemplates, which is only self- conscious habit, but of subordinating, to use the old-fashioned language, his passions to his reason ; of directing his will whithersoever his cool judgment advises.

The importance of the distinction which we have here drawn is, of course, that upon it turns the whole principle of moral probation. If it is once allowed that the same man would always act in the same way under similar circumstances, no juggle of words about its being the "self" which reacts on the circumstances and consciously chooses its end will avail to vindicate the will's freedom, or human responsibility.

If the " self " acts according to a fixed nature, and reacts upon circumstances according to that nature, and is consequently- modified in nature, and then reacts according to its modified nature, and so forth, free-will is as plainly denied as it would be by the crudest theory of the "balance of pleasure." The chain of necessary cause and effect is more varied in its links, but is quite as unbroken, and consequently the idea of probation falls. No doubt, Mr. Green's theory has this advantage, so far as its practical moral working goes, over any less subtle determinism, that, as he says, the belief that our action is necessarily deter- mined paralyses the "moral initiative," whereas a contrary belief stimulates to effort ; consequently, his retention of the term "free-will" greatly lessens the evil effect of his analysis of its nature. But Mr. Green's explanation of this very phe- nomenon is, to our mind, an absolute denial of what we mean by free-will. It amounts to this, that that particular circum- stance—the belief in our own power of originating effort— affects many characters, so as to bring about moral improve- ment; and its absence is the absence of a circumstance on which the character would react, and without such reaction the im- provement in question cannot take place.

We repeat once more what we have already said, that we do not think that the author quite clearly contemplated the issue to which we have drawn attention ; but we think it all the more im- portant, for this reason, to hold it up to the light. His analysis is, up to a certain point, so able and true, that we should fear that some of his readers might adopt the whole, without noticing its full bearing ; and it cannot be too often said that an error which is "half a truth" is always the most dangerous of errors. We should add, in conclusion, that although the meaning attached by Mr. Green to such "freedom of will" as he allows is not consistently or clearly expressed, there are incidental passages which seem, taken by themselves, plainly to indicate that our account of his opinion is the true one,—that he attaches no further meaning to the term "free action" than the idea ot an act due to the internal force of character, and not to the interaction of external forces. "Rightly understood," he writes, for example, "the ascription of an action to character as, in. respect to circumstances, its cause, is just that which effectually. distinguishes it as free or moral from any compulsory or merely natural action."