rden of it be put on him? To
tell a man that he is to answer for it if he does something which he is
tempted to do, is unmeaning, if he has no power to prevent himself from
doing it.
But this is not all. For besides the sense of responsibility we have a
direct consciousness of being free, a consciousness which no reasoning
appears to extinguish. We sharply distinguish between that which goes on
within us in regard to which we are free and that in regard to which we
are not free. We cannot help being angry, but we can control our anger.
We cannot help our wishes, but we can restrain our indulgence or our
pursuit of them. We cannot directly determine our affections, but we can
cherish or discourage them. There are extreme cases in which our wills
seem powerless, but even here we are conscious of our power to struggle
for self-assertion and self-control. There is very much in us which is
not free; nay, there is much in us which impels us to action which is
not free. But we never confound this with our wills, and when our wills
are overpowered by passion or appetite, we call the act no longer a
perfectly free act, and do not consider the responsibility for it to be
quite the same.
This question of the freedom of the will was considered by Bishop
Butler in the Analogy. He contented himself with proving that, make what
theory we would concerning the necessity of human action, all men in
practice acted on the theory of human freedom. We promise; we accept
promises; we punish; we reward; we estimate character; we admire; we
shun; we deal with ourselves; we deal with others; as if we and all
others were free. And this was enough for his purpose. For he had to
reconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense of
justice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishments
were plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealings
with one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with that
sense of justice in God's dealings with us.
But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that for
two reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was most
often in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divine
foreknowledge arranging everything by supreme Will, not from the
conception of a blind mechanical rule holding all in its unrelaxing
grasp. And though to the cold reason it may make no difference how the
will is bound, yet to the mora
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