An Examination of President Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will. Albert Taylor Bledsoe
doctrine. In speaking of this doctrine, he says: “There is scarcely a plainer and more universal dictate of the sense and experience of mankind, than that, when men act voluntarily, and do what they please, then they do what suits them best, or what is most agreeable to them. To say, that they do what pleases them, but yet not what is agreeable to them, is the same thing as to say, they do what they please, but do not act their pleasure; and that is to say, that they do what they please, and yet do not what they please.” Most assuredly, if to deny the leading proposition of the Inquiry, is to deny that men do what they please when they do what they please; then to affirm it, is only to advance the insignificant truism, that men do what they please when they do what they please. It seems to me, that after President Edwards had reduced his fundamental proposition to such a truism, he might very well have spared himself the three hundred pages that follow.
Again, he says: “It is manifest that no acts of the will are contingent, in such sense as to be without all necessity, or so as not to be necessary with a necessity of consequence and connection; because every act of the will is some way connected with the understanding, and is as the greatest apparent good is, in the manner which has already been explained; namely, that the soul always wills or chooses that, which in the present view of the mind, considered in the whole of that view, and all that belongs to it, appears most agreeable. Because, as we observed before, nothing is more evident than that, when men act voluntarily, and do what they please, then they do what appears most agreeable to them; and to say otherwise would be as much as to affirm, that men do not choose what appears to suit them best, or what seems most pleasing to them; or that they do not choose what they prefer, which brings the matter to a contradiction.”
Thus, the great fundamental doctrine of the Inquiry is reduced by Edwards himself to the barren truism, that men do actually choose what they choose; a proposition which the boldest advocate of free-agency would hardly dare to call in question. After labouring through a whole section to establish this position, the author concludes by saying, “These things may serve, I hope, in some measure to illustrate and confirm the position laid down in the beginning of this section: viz. That the will is always determined by the strongest motive, or by the view of the mind which has the greatest previous tendency to excite volition. But whether I have been so happy as rightly to explain the thing wherein consists the strength of motives, or not, yet my failing in this will not overthrow the position itself; which carries much of its own evidence along with it, and is a point of chief importance to the purpose of the ensuing discourse: and the truth of it I hope will appear with great clearness, before I have finished what I have to say on the subject of human liberty.” Truly the position in question, as it is explained by the author himself, carries not only much, but all, of its own evidence along with it. Who can deny that a man always does what he pleases, when he does what he pleases? This truth appears with just as great clearness at the beginning, as it does at the conclusion, of the celebrated Inquiry of the author. It is invested in a flood of light, which can neither be increased by argument, nor obscured by sophistry.
From the foregoing remarks, it appears, I think, that the fundamental doctrine of the Inquiry is a barren truism, or a vicious circle. If Edwards understood the import of his own doctrine, when he reduced it to the form that a man does what he pleases when he does what he pleases, it is certainly a truism; and if this is all his famous doctrine amounts to, it can have no bearing whatever upon the question as to the cause of volition; for whether the mind be the cause of its own volitions, or whether the strongest motive always causes them, or whether they have no causes at all, it is equally and unalterably true, that every man does what he pleases when he does what he pleases. There is no possible form of the doctrine of free-agency or contingency, however wild, which is at all inconsistent with such a truism.
Edwards is not always consistent with himself. He sometimes represents the greatest apparent good, or sense of the most agreeable, as the cause of volition; and then his doctrine assumes the form, that the will is determined by the strongest motive, or the greatest apparent good. And yet he sometimes identifies a sense of the most agreeable with the choice itself; and then his doctrine assumes the form that the choice of the mind is always as the choice of the mind; and to deny it is a plain contradiction in terms.
From the fact that Edwards has gone round in a circle, it has been concluded that he has begged the question; but how, or wherein he has begged it, is a point which has not been sufficiently noticed. The very authors who have uttered this complaint, have granted him the very thing for which he has begged. If volition is an effect, if it has a cause, then most unquestionably the cause of volition is the cause of volition. Admit that volition is an effect, as so many libertarians have done, and then his definition of motive, which includes every cause of volition, places his doctrine upon an immutable foundation. We might as well heave at the everlasting mountains as to try to shake it.
Admit that volition is an effect, and what can we say? Can we say, that the strongest motive may exist, and yet no volition may follow from it? To this the necessitarian would instantly reply, that it any thing exists, and no volition follows thereupon, it is evidently not the cause of volition, and consequently is not the strongest motive; for this, according to the definition, includes every cause of volition: it is indeed absurd, to suppose that an effect should not proceed from its cause: This is the ground taken both by President Edwards and President Day. It is absurd, says the latter, to suppose that a weaker motive, or any thing else, can prevail over the stronger – and why? Because the strongest motive is that which prevails. “If it be said,” he continues, “that something else gives the weaker motive a superiority over the stronger; then this something else is itself a motive, and the united influence of the two is greater than that of the third,” p. 66. Thus, say what we will, we can never escape this admirable net of words, that the will is determined by that which determines it.
I do not intend, then, to engage in the hopeless task, of admitting volition to be an effect, and yet striving to extricate it from “the mechanism of cause and effect.” This ground has long since been occupied by much abler persons than myself; and if they have failed of success, falling into innumerable inconsistencies, it is because, on such ground, success is impossible; and that notwithstanding their transcendant abilities, they have been fated to contradict themselves.
SECTION IV.
VOLITION NOT AN EFFECT
The argument of the Inquiry, as I have shown, assumes that a volition is an effect in the proper sense of the word; that it is the correlative of an efficient cause. If it were necessary, this point might be established by a great variety of additional considerations; but, I presume that every candid reader of the Inquiry is fully satisfied in relation to it.
If we mean by an effect, every thing that comes to pass, of course a volition is an effect; for no one can deny that it comes to pass. Or, if we include in the definition of the term, every thing which has a sufficient reason and ground of its existence, we cannot deny that it embraces the idea of a volition. For, under certain circumstances, the free mind will furnish a sufficient reason and ground of the existence of a volition. All that I deny is, that a volition does proceed from the mind, or from motive, or from anything else, in the same manner that an effect, properly so called, proceeds from its efficient cause.
This is a point on which I desire to be distinctly understood. I put forth a volition to move my hand. The motion of the hand follows. Now, here I observe the action of the mind, and also the motion of the hand. The effect exists in the body, in that which is by nature passive; the cause in that which is active, in the mind. The effect produced in the body, in the hand, is the passive result of the prior direct action of the mind. It is in this restricted sense, that I use the term in question, when I deny that a volition is an effect. I do not deny that it depends for its production upon certain circumstances, as the conditions of action, and upon the powers of the mind, by which it is capable of acting in view of such circumstances. All that I deny is, that volition results from the prior action of mind, or of circumstances, or of any thing else, in the same manner that the motion of body results from the prior action of mind. Or, in other words, I contend that action is the invariable antecedent of bodily motion, but not of volition; that whatever may be its relations to other things, a volition does not sustain the same relation to any thing in the universe, that an effect sustains to its efficient cause,