but to attend to one set of motives
to the neglect of others, and even to create motives in order to become
able to make a difficult decision.

Let us, however, guard against a possible misconstruction by saying that
there is all the difference between this conception of _freedom_ {158}
and the mere _spontaneity_ which is recognised by the followers both of
Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by
Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton
points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its
antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in
this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because he wants it; he is
_not_ free in the sense that he _could_ have wanted something
different.[12] Nothing could be more frank than Mr. Picton's statements
on this point--as when he speaks of the "_free_ man's" sense that "all
things are of God, and _could not have been otherwise_:"

Of course the obvious retort occurs, (he continues,) that if indeed
everything . . . occurs by invariable sequence, all this intellectual
gospel of freedom is vain, and exhortations to its acceptance thrown
away. And to those who are not satisfied with the freedom of conscious
spontaneity, a condition in which we do just as we want to do, though our
will is a link in an endless series of untraceable sequences, I suppose
this objection must still be final.[13]

The objection is undoubtedly final, because it is absolutely valid; for
by freedom we mean the ability to do or leave undone, to act thus or
thus, and apart from such an ability moral judgments are quite
unthinkable. Where we pronounce praise or blame, the tacit {159}
presupposition is always that the object of the pronouncement could have
acted differently; and this Spinozism denies.

The same remark applies to the teaching of that modern Absolute Idealism
which declares, with Green, that man is his motives, and that he is
"free" inasmuch as it is by his own motives that he is governed. It
would be as accurate to call an automatic machine "free" on the ground
that it is by its own works that it is moved. This is only, as Professor
William James aptly calls it, "soft Determinism." If the automaton could
decide to slacken or increase its rate of speed, to go or to stop as it
liked and where it liked--above all, if it could aim at and devise
improvements in its own mechanism so as to make itself a be