here means any consideration that will lead to action, and
no one can object to its use in this sense.

A second meaning of force is that of compulsion from without, as when a
strong man gets hold of a weak one and by exertion of physical strength
compels him to do something that he is disinclined to do, or when one
forces another by threat of punishment. In this latter sense no one
dreams of harmonising force with moral action. Neither law nor common
sense does so. But compulsion in the sense of one's actions being forced
by a mental or moral disposition no one outside an asylum would dispute.
And what Canon Green does is to ask us to reject the idea of a moral
action being forced, in the sense of external compulsion, and then uses
it in the sense of an absence of dispositions that will lead to certain
courses of conduct.

It is probable that the Canon would reject this interpretation of his
statement, but if it does not mean this, then his argument is
unintelligible. For if it is admitted that what man does is the product
of his mental or moral dispositions, in other words, of his nature, and
if, as is undeniable, the nature with which he fronts the world is the
product of heredity and environment, he would no more be "forced" to do
good had God given him impulses strong enough to overcome all tendency
to evil than he is now when his impulses come to him from his ancestors
and his general social heredity.

All that is implied in a moral act is free choice. But choice is free,
not when it is independent of organic promptings; that is absurd; but
when those organic promptings are allowed to find expression. There is
no other rational meaning to "choice" than this. Choice does not tell us
how it is determined, on that point it can say nothing, any more than a
child can say why it chooses sugar in preference to cayenne pepper. Its
choice, we say, is determined by its taste. And its taste is determined
by--? To answer that question we must call in the chemist and the
physiologist, and they probably will tell us why our choice moves in one
direction rather than in another.

When men like Canon Green talk of the morality of an action being
dependent upon our _choice_ between right and wrong, what they probably
have in their minds is the perception of right and wrong. For we may
perceive the possibility of one course while we are performing another.
But the power of choice is clearly limited. A man cannot choose to be a