erience.
His bodily sensations, his mental acts, his desires and motives are not
detached and extraneous forces acting on him from without, but elements
which constitute his whole being. The person, in other words, is the
visible or tangible phenomenon of something inward--the phase or function
by which an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human
intercourse and interaction, and plays his peculiar and definite part in
life.[4] But this totality of consciousness, so far from reducing man to
a 'mere manufactured article,' gives to personality its unique
distinction. By personality all things are dominated. 'Other things
exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind and for the sake of other
things: a person is never a mere means to something beyond, but always at
the same time an end in himself. He has the royal and divine right of
creating law, of starting by his exception a new law which shall
henceforth be a canon and a standard.'[5]
{88}
The objection to the freedom of the will which we are now considering may
be best appreciated if we examine briefly the two extreme theories which
have been maintained on the subject. On the one hand, _determinism_ or,
as it is sometimes called, necessitarianism, holds that all our actions
are conditioned by law--the so-called motive that influences a man's
conduct is simply a link in a chain of occurrences of which his act is
the last. The future has no possibilities hidden in its womb. I am
simply what the past has made me. My circumstances are given, and my
character is simply the necessary resultant of the natural forces that
act upon me. On the other hand, _indeterminism_, or libertarianism,
insists upon absolute liberty of choice of the individual, and denies
that necessity or continuity determines conduct. Of two alternatives
both may now be really possible. You can never predict what will be, nor
lay down absolutely what a man will do. The world is not a finished and
fixed whole. It admits of infinite possibilities, and instead of the
volition I have actually made, I could just as easily have made a
different one.
Without entering upon a detailed criticism of these two positions, it may
be said that both contain an element of truth and are not so
contradictory as they seem. On the one hand, all the various factors of
the complex will may seem to be determined by something that lies beyond
our control, and thus our will itself be reall
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