3. This unified self-consciousness is consciousness of the ego. It is only by means of an artificial abstraction that we can leave out of account in the consideration of processes of thought the peculiar factor of personal relationship that absolutely attaches to every thought within us. There are no thoughts in general that play their part of themselves alone. “It” never “thinks” in me. On the contrary, all sensation, thought, and will has in every human being a peculiar central relationship to which we refer when we say “my idea,”“my sensation.” What the “I” is cannot be defined. It is that through which the relation of all [pg 316] experiences and actions is referred to a point, and through which the treasuring of them for good or ill, the appreciation, the valuation of them is accomplished. And it plays its part even in the case of cold and indifferent items of knowledge. For instance, that twice two are four is not simply a perception, it is my perception. Of the ego itself nothing more can be said than that it is the thought of me as the subject of all experience, willing, and action, and if we try to take hold of it nothing more than this formula remains. Yet the fact that the ego is the subject of all this, gives conduct, will, and experience that peculiar character which distinguishes them from mere action and reaction. For it is directly certain that all the psychical contents are not only co-existences in one consciousness but that they are possessed by it.
Thus in summing up we have to say, that it is through the ego that all psychical activities and experiences are centred and related, that the ego is itself the point of relation, that it is the reason of the unity of consciousness and of the possibility of self-consciousness, and that in all this it is the most certain reality, without which the simplest psychical life would be impossible. At the same time, it is difficult to state what the “ego” is in itself, apart from the effects in which it reveals itself.
[pg 317]
The consciousness of the ego leads us naturally to the consciousness of freedom. Freedom of the mind is no simple idea; it embraces various contents which bear the relation of stages to one another, and each higher stage presupposes the one below it. Freedom is, first of all, the word which expresses that we are really agents, not mere points of transit for phenomena foreign to ourselves, but starting-points of phenomena peculiar to us, actual causes, beings who are able to initiate activity, to control things and set them in motion. Here the whole question of freedom becomes simply the question of the reality and causality of the will. Is the will something really factual, or is it only the strange illusion to which Spinoza, for instance, referred in his illustration of the flying stone? It would be purely an illusion of that kind if materialism were the true interpretation of things, and the psychical were nothing more than an accompaniment of other “true” realities, and even if the doctrine of psychical atoms we have already mentioned were correct.
This idea of freedom speedily rises to a higher plane. [pg 318] Freedom is always freedom from something, in this case from a compulsion coming from outside, and from things and circumstances foreign to us. In maintaining freedom of the mind it is asserted that it can preserve its own nature and laws in face of external compulsion or laws, and in face of the merely psychological compulsion of the “lower courses of thought,” even from the “half-natural” laws of the association of ideas. Thus “freedom” is pre-eminently freedom of thought. And in speaking thus we are presupposing that the mind has a nature of its own, distinguished even from the purely psychological nature, and has a code of laws of its own, lying beyond the scope of all natural laws, which psychical motives and physical conditions may prevent it following, but which they can never suspend or pull down to their own level.
“Der Mensch ist frei, und wÄr' er in Ketten geboren.”
Here at last we arrive at what is so often exclusively, but erroneously, included under the name of freedom, or “freedom of the will,” that is practical freedom, the freedom to recognise moral laws and ideals, and to form moral judgments against all psychological compulsion, and to will to allow ourselves to be determined by these. From this question of moral freedom we might finally pass to that with which it is usual over-hastily to begin: the problem of so-called freedom of choice, of the “equilibrium” of the will, a problem in which are centred all the purely theoretical interests of the doctrine of the will in general, and ethical [pg 319] interests in particular. The whole domain is so enormous that we cannot even attempt to sketch it here. The general bearing of the whole can be made clearest at the second stage, but we cannot entirely pass over the first.
In this inquiry into the problem of the will it is not necessary to discuss whether we are able by it to bring about external effects, movements, and changes in our bodies. We may postpone this question once more. The most important part of the problem lies in the domain of the psychical. To move an arm or a leg is a relatively unimportant function of the will as compared with the deliberate adoption of a rule of conduct, with inward self-discipline, self-culture, and the development of character.
That we “will,” and what it is to will, cannot really be demonstrated at all, or defended against attacks. It simply is so. It is a fundamental psychical fact which can only be proved by being experienced. If there were anywhere a will-less being, I could not prove to him that there is such a thing as will, because I could never make clear to him what will is. And the theories opposed to freedom of the will cannot be refuted in any way except by simply saying that they are false. They do not describe what really takes place in us. We do not find within ourselves either the cloud-shadows or the play of psychical, minima already referred to, with their crowding up of images, bringing some into prominence and displacing them [pg 320] again while we remain passive—we find ourselves willing. These theories should at least be able to explain whence came this marvellous hallucination, this appearance of will in us, which must have its cause, and they should also be able to say whence came the idea of the will. Spinoza's example of the stone, which seemed to itself to fly when it was simply thrown, does not meet the facts of the case. If the thrown stone had self-consciousness, it would certainly not say, “I am flying,” but would merely wonder, “What has happened to me suddenly?”
We cannot demonstrate what will is, we can only make it clear to ourselves by performing an act of will and observing ourselves in the doing of it. Let us compare, for instance, a psychical state which we call “attention” with another which we call “distraction.” In this last there is a stage where the will rests. There is actually an uninhibited activity of “the lower course of thought,” a disconnected “dreaming,” a confused automatic movement of thoughts and feelings according to purely associative laws. Then suddenly we pull ourselves together, rouse ourselves out of this state of distraction. Something new comes into the course of our thoughts. It is the will. Now there is control and definite guidance of our thoughts and rejection of subsidiary association—ideas that thrust themselves upon us. Particular thoughts can be selected, particular feelings or mental contents kept in focus as long as we desire. In thus selecting and guiding ideas, in [pg 321] keeping them in mind or letting them go, we see the will in action.
This brings us to freedom of thought. This lies in the fact, not merely that we can think, but that we can and desire to think rightly, and that we are able to measure our thoughts by the standard of “true” or “false.” Naturalism is proud of the fact that it desires nothing more than to search after truth. To this it is ready to sacrifice all expressions of feeling or sentiment, and all prejudices. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is its ideal, even if all pet ideas have to give way before it. It usually saddles itself with the idea of the good and the beautiful along with this “idea of truth,” but is resolved, since it must soon see for itself that it is able to secure only a very doubtful basis for these, to sacrifice them to truth if need be. This is worthy of honour,107 but it implies a curious self-deception. For if naturalism be in the right, thought is not free, and if thought be not free there can be no such thing as truth, for there can be no establishing of what truth is.
Let us attempt to make this plain in the following manner: According to the naturalistic-psychological theory, the play of our thoughts, our impressions of things and properties, their combination in judgments or in “perceptions,” are dependent on physiological [pg 322] processes of the brain, and therefore upon natural laws, or, according to some, on peculiar attractions and repulsions among the impressions themselves, regulated by the laws of association. If that and that only were the case, I should be able to say that such a conception was present in my mind, or that this or that thought had arisen in me, and I might perhaps be able to trace the connection which made it necessary that it should arise at that particular time. But every thought would be equally right. Or rather there could be no question of right or wrong in the matter at all. I could not forbid any thought to be there, could not compel it to make way for another, perhaps exactly its opposite. Yet I do this continually. I never merely observe what thoughts are in my own mind or in another's. For I have a constant ideal, a plumb-line according to which I measure, or can measure, every train of thought. And I can compel others to apply this same plumb-line to their thoughts. This plumb-line is logic. It is the unique law of the mind itself which concerns itself about no law of nature or of association whatsoever. And however mighty a flood of conceptions and associations may at times pour through me in consequence of various confused physiological states of excitement affecting the brain, or in consequence of the fantastic dance of the associations of ideas, the ego is always able in free thought to intervene in its own psychical experiences, and to test which combinations of ideas have been logically thought out and are therefore right, and [pg 323] which are wrong. It often enough refrains from exercising this control, leaving the lower courses of thought free play. Hence the mistakes in our thinking, the errors in judgment, the thousand inconsistencies and self-deceptions. But the mind can do otherwise, can defend itself from interruptions and extraneous influences by making use of its freedom and of its power to follow its own laws and no others. It is thus possible for us to have not only psychical experiences but knowledge; only in this way can truth be reached, and error rejected. Thus science can follow a sure course. Thus alone, for instance, could the great edifice of geometry and arithmetic have been built up in its indestructible certainty. The progress from axiom to theorem and to all that follows is due to free thought, obeying the laws of inference and demonstration, and entirely unconcerned about the laws of association or the natural laws of the nervous agitations, the electric currents, and other plays of energy which may go on in the brain at the same time. What have the laws of the syllogism to do with the temporary states of tension in the brain, which, if they had free course, would probably follow lines very different from those of Euclid, and if they chanced once in a way to follow the right lines from among the millions of possibilities, would certainly soon turn to different ones, and could never examine them to see whether they were right or not. Thus it is not any highly aspiring emotional desire or any premature prejudice, but the solid old science [pg 324] of logic that first and most determinedly shuts the door in face of the claims of naturalism. If we combine this with what has already been said on page 154, we shall see how dangerous it would be for naturalism to be proved right in the dispute; for then it would be wholly wrong.
For, as it is only through the free, thinking mind that true and false can be distinguished and brought into relation with things, so only through it can we have an ideal of truth to be recognised and striven after, and that spontaneous, pertinacious, searching, following, and discovering which constitutes science as a whole and in detail. And in so far as naturalism itself claims to be nothing more than an attempt towards this goal, it is itself only possible on the basis of something which it denies.
Freedom of thought is also the most obvious example of that freedom of the spirit in morally “willing,” which it is the business of ethical science to teach and defend. As in the one case thought shows itself superior to the physiologically or psychologically conditioned sequence of its concepts, so the free spirit, in the uniqueness of its moral laws, reveals itself as lord over all the motives, the lower feelings of pleasure and pain that have their play within us. As in the one case it is free to measure according to the criteria of true or false, and thus is able to intervene in the sequence of its own conceptions, correcting and confirming, so in the other it is able to estimate by the criteria of good or bad. As in [pg 325] the one case it carries within it its own fundamental laws as logic, so in the other the moral ideals and fundamental judgments which arise out of its own being. And in both cases it is free from nature and natural law, and capable of subordinating nature to its own rules, in so far as it “wills,” and of becoming subordinate to nature—in erroneous thinking and non-moral acting—in so far as it does not will.
