Chapter VII: Religion and Liberty

WE say, and say truly, that we are fighting for the liberties of Europe. The brave Belgian people chose rather to see their country overrun and its fairest cities destroyed than be deprived of their freedom. But the enemy also asserts that he is fighting for freedom. He wants room to expand, to grow to the full stature that nature intended him to reach. He asserts that he is fighting for the freedom of the seas which are held in bondage by the naval predominance of England. The country seems to have made up its mind to abandon its long-cherished idol of free trade. Even freedom may be bought at too dear a rate. If we are determined to conquer and to crush militarism we see the necessity of greater organisation. But organisation means restraint of individual initiative, it means some curtailment of freedom. Everybody, except the anarchist, sees that some sort of government is absolutely necessary, that people cannot be allowed to act and to speak just as they like, that some restriction of liberty is necessary to prevent society from lapsing into barbarism. On the other hand the philosophers who are most in vogue tell us that freedom is a dream, a shadow without substance. According to them, everything that happens in the universe is the necessary outcome of antecedent necessary causes. It is almost beyond dispute, says Mr. Bertrand Russell, that Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to a tyranny of outside forces. It is only in imagination that we can indulge in dreams of freedom. In thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even while we live from the tyranny of death.* Some time ago I attended a lecture given by a man of science on a subject connected with eugenics. After the lecture I remarked to him that he seemed to me to have treated the matter from too mechanical a point of view and had not allowed for free will. He answered that the question of free will was undoubtedly at the root of the whole subject, that at one time he had studied the question and had tried to write something about it. But he honestly confessed that as he thought and wrote free will seemed to vanish into thin air, there was simply no room for it in his materialistic conception of the universe. It will be worth while to try to make two or three points as clear as possible in so important and intricate a question. And first of all we must recognise that the freedom of the individual will is ultimately the question at issue. Poets may indulge their fancy and write beautiful things about political and civil liberty, but if man's individual will is not free political and civil liberty is a mere pretence. Political and civil action whether called free or unfree is simply what it must be given the antecedent circumstances. Patriots who thought they were dying for their country's freedom simply could not do otherwise. It is as far from the truth to call their actions heroic and celebrate them in song as it would be to talk of the heroism of the moon and her bold flights through the realms of space. If the individual human will is not free then there is no such thing as freedom in the visible universe. Every slightest event is the necessary result of blind and necessary antecedent conditions. Mr. Bertrand Russell seems to claim exemption of thought from this iron law of necessity. Thought is indeed, as he says, free from our fellow-men, in the sense that our fellow-men cannot put fetters on our thoughts. They can fetter our limbs, they can cast the whole body into prison, but the mind can still wander unfettered abroad. Our minds are free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, in the sense that we can in thought travel to Mars and bear its inhabitants company. But if the individual will is not free it is clear that thought is not free either. Like everything else it is but the resultant of antecedent and necessary conditions. It is but the flash which accompanies some change in the substance of the brain, and we might as well talk of the liberty of the flame that rises from heated coal, as of the freedom of thought. In discussing questions of freedom we must focus our attention on the freedom of the human will, which lies at the root of all other liberties. In the question of free will every person of sound mind has within himself the main factors required for a solution of the problem. What a man of sound mind is directly conscious of must be true if the human mind is really capable of attaining to truth. Let us then examine the working of our own minds. At the very outset we are struck with a phenomenon which is quite different from the phenomena exhibited by the world of matter and force. Material forces may be reduced to those of attraction and repulsion. Water falling under the action of gravitation is an instance of the one, steam expanding under the application of heat is an instance of the other. In both cases one particle of matter acts on another, it influences something outside itself, either drawing it towards itself or repelling it from itself. The action of mind is altogether different. Thought turns back upon itself, the mind reflects upon itself, and becomes self-conscious. Mind, then, is not made up of material particles which mutually attract or repel each other. It is not extended in space. It is a simple, unextended substance, a spiritual substance, which is indeed intimately connected and united with matter, but which for all that is quite different from it. My thought can represent to me something which I apprehend as good and desirable. I have a friend who lives twenty miles off and I always derive pleasure and advantage from visiting him. The thought of paying him a visit comes into my mind this morning. The presence of the thought at once calls into action that other faculty of my spiritual nature which I call my will. The will is a faculty which is always more or less attracted by what is presented to it as something good. It cannot initiate an action of itself. Thought must always go before, and the thought must be of something apprehended as good if the will is to be attracted by it. The will shrinks from what is apprehended as evil. But as the sense of sight is necessarily attracted by what is pleasant to look upon, as the sense of taste is necessarily gratified by what is agreeable to it, so the will is necessarily attracted more or less by what is apprehended in thought as good. If the object is represented as so exceedingly good that there is no admixture of evil in it, and its possession would give unlimited and unadulterated happiness, the will is necessarily and overwhelmingly attracted by it. The human will is not free when such an object is presented to it. The human will necessarily desires complete happiness. But out of Heaven there is no object whose possession can render man completely and perfectly happy. All created goods are limited, they all have some imperfection or evil mixed with them, and when they are presented to the mind in thought, the mind can turn away from the contemplation of the good which they contain to the contemplation of the evil which is mingled with them. That power is the rational foundation of the freedom of the will. Man is endowed with the power of stopping and deliberating about the pursuit of a finite good which has been presented to the will by thought. Although probably there is always some indeliberate movement of the will towards an object which thought presents to it as good and desirable, yet when that object is finite and mingled with imperfection, thought can step in and keep the will in suspense by presenting to it the disadvantages which its pursuit and possession would entail. And so when the thought of visiting my friend who lives twenty miles off occurs to me, although at first I feel my will attracted by the prospect I do not necessarily set off on my visit. If my will was a material force the whole mechanism of my being would at once be set in motion towards my friend when the attraction was felt. But being a spiritual substance I can say to my will—Stay, let us consider the proposal. If I visit my friend to-day, I shall lose a day's work; I shall not be able to keep the appointment I made with another friend who is coming to visit me this afternoon. No, I cannot go to-day, and so the first movement of the will is checked, it does not put the rest of the machinery, which I call myself, in motion. If, on the contrary, on deliberation, I find no great obstacle in the way of paying a visit to my friend, I have nothing to do but to allow the movement of the will, which was started by the thought of my friend, free play. I simply allow it free scope for execution. Mind and will work in harmony, together they quickly settle to go by motor not by train, and to take my child Mary with me, because my friend always likes to see his godchild. And in all this I feel and know that I could have determined otherwise if I had chosen to do so. Not all the learned treatises of all the mechanical philosophers who ever lived could ever persuade me to the contrary. I am convinced that I chose freely to visit my friend, nothing without or within constrained me to it. I am certain that I chose freely to go by car, and that I could have taken the train by preference if I had chosen. I am certain, too, that I was not under compulsion when I elected to take little Mary with me. If I acted freely here, my will is free in large spheres of human life. Nor am I acquainted with anything in the theory of causation, or in that of the conservation of energy, which gainsays my brief exposition of an important doctrine of the Church.

* Philosophical Essays, p. 63.