The Will to Doubt. Alfred H. Lloyd
there's a "free will" there is always a will taken for some unperformed or imperfectly performed deed.
So the double origin of conduct offers a very serious difficulty, which, when it is understood, is not unlike that of the two powers or selves or classes, but even more is to be said in exposure of our moral judgments. Thus we have the confident conceit of freedom, of our own freedom in good or our neighbour's freedom in evil, or in general of man's freedom to act without regard to the determinations from environment, but we have also a strange though possibly a fortunate way of qualifying the very freedom that we claim. We claim freedom only to avow, almost in the same breath, duties and responsibilities. We have the freedom, but only the duties make it worth anything. A startling paradox this, so familiar to us all: "I am free to do all that I ought to do," or, "I am free to carry out certain necessities of my true life." A startling paradox; and, above all, a strange way of escaping the necessities of environment, unless, forsooth, it really opens the door, or supplies a secret door, by which the necessities of environment and the necessities of one's true life can come together? If freedom demands law, why should it hold aloof from the natural law, the law of environment so definitely present? Possibly, then, as once before suggested, one contradiction in experience may be the corrective of another, the paradox of freedom and duty only correcting the contradiction of two sources of conduct, personal will and environment. In the case, for example, of the disposition to distinguish between one's own acts and another's, with respect to their initiation by will or by environment, to mingle duty and necessity with one's own supposed freedom is equivalent in effect to denying one's neighbour's freedom because of the restraints of his environment. But such considerations, however promising for future reflection upon the conflicts in our moral consciousness, are not of immediate interest. Our doubts may once more find hope in the reflection that the faults of experience may balance themselves, but we have no occasion to abandon our doubting as idle or meaningless. Contradictions that balance each other, errors that are mutually corrective, are still contradictions, are still errors.
So, to reduce our moral judgments, confusion and all, to small compass, we are free, others are not; they are free, we are not; and our freedom is bound by duty, by duty to the moral law, while their freedom, unless a hopeless lawlessness, is bound by the environment and its law. Again, good and evil are each unmixed, and moral acts serve two masters—that is to say, spring from two sources. We may, therefore, still believe in morality—yet how can this be? And freedom—yet how is freedom possible?
But finally, as last to be examined, there is the idea of law, just now brought to attention. This idea is a focus for a good many conflicting views. Witness the familiar argument from the knowledge of law in nature to fatalism, an argument as absurd as it is widespread, for the bare fact that we know the laws of nature really emancipates us from the blind fate to which the argument points. Can knowledge ever mean anything but freedom? Certainly no law can ever be known unless the sphere of its operation accords with the nature of those who have the knowledge. Simply to know is to share in and be at one with whatsoever is known, and the clearer and more cogent or rational the knowledge, the truer and realer is this participation or union. The law we know, then, must have all the meaning and the natural authority of a law of our own enactment, and so must actually have the sanction of our will. Will, I say, cannot help sanctioning knowledge, for knowledge is always true to, because conditioned by, the natural action of the knower. But no such message of freedom, or say of human opportunity in natural necessity, is commonly received by men at large from the evidences of law in nature. Superstitiously they see only fate. Clear knowledge and blind fate!
Nor are we commonly satisfied with only so much superstition. We go still further and make the case as bad as possible by treating the law we know as if in its spirit, if not in its letter, it were final. In other words, we view nature, with some of whose ways we have become conversant, not merely as a source of blind fate, or external necessity, for our lives, but also as essentially and ultimately a sphere of strictly mechanical routine. Yet here again we are surely reasoning beyond our premises—the very essence of superstition—for the routine we know can never answer substantially, or even formally, to nature as she really is. Our positive knowledge, our knowledge that arrives at specific formulæ, even though these formulæ reach the noble dignity of mathematics, is bound to be in terms of some particular experience, personal or national or racial; it is relative and special; it is partial knowledge; and he is superstitious, and does, indeed, argue beyond his premises, who takes the whole, whose law he does not know, to be literally analogous to the part, whose law he thinks he knows, but can in fact know only partially. No whole ever is one of its parts, or merely analogous to one of its parts; a law never is the law, or even in its lawfulness literally analogous thereto; and mechanicalism, whether as a popular or a philosophical "ism," has no justification save just this false analogy.
And the prevalent confusion in the notions of law or lawfulness is of course reflected in the corresponding notions of lawlessness. Here, as with other negative terms, men forget that negatives necessarily are quite relative to their positives. All specific, definitely manifest, known and positive lawlessness simply must have some place in the law of things; it can no more be an absolute lawlessness than any human routine can be supposed final; and, on the other hand, there can be no positive law whose breaking has not some sanction; there can be no lawfulness which does not warrant some lawlessness. This truth, perhaps as nothing else could, must show the error in the notion of mechanical routine as affording an adequate description of the ultimate nature of things. Where the whole always gives point to the negation of any of its parts, where the law always sanctions some breaking of any law, to think of the whole in terms of its parts may be human, but it is of the human which is prone to err. Those who would still insist upon seeing only routine in law, and upon judging lawlessness as only relative to such seeing, might do well, rising above their ordinary views, to remember with some real appreciation that once upon a time the law-breakers and the reformer were very closely associated; they were associated in life, and at the end they were crucified together. Whatever may be one's theology, there is a deal of food for thought in those deaths on Calvary and in the several lives which they closed.
Lawlessness suggests the supernatural. So many have promptly concluded that just as with the knowledge of law in nature human freedom must be resigned, blind fate taking its place, so anything or anybody at all supernatural, Satan—for example—as well as God, must once for all withdraw. If law reigns, God can will whatever he wills only because the law is so; the law is not so because he wills it; and this in common opinion only makes him decrepit, without real initiative, dead. Yet, once more, what superstition! The knowledge of law has never robbed man of his freedom, nor even slain his God; or this at least: the loss of freedom or the death of God, for which any law that man has had knowledge of has been responsible, has always been only the forerunner of a larger and fuller freedom and of his God's resurrection and glorification. This or that law may rob and may kill, but this or that law, let me reiterate, never is the law, and why common opinion has to judge all things in heaven and earth, as if it were, is hard to comprehend. Neither nature nor God, if these two need to be thought of as two, is law-bound; each rather, with a meaning which I must hope now to have made clear, is law-free. The law in which nature is free is as infinite, as transcendent of any particular human experience as the ever-developing freedom of man or as the will of God. And God, or the Supernatural, is not confined to the narrow sphere of what man knows, as man knows it; this stands only for what man calls nature. God is the all-inclusive sphere or source of the absolute law, for which knowledge can be only a constant striving, or which is itself even a party to the constant striving. Somehow the law must be a living thing, not a routine: the supernatural must be not nature as she is known, but nature's fullest and deepest life.
Very emphatically what has just been said about nature or God being law-free, or about the law being infinite, or not analogous in form or substance, in spirit or letter, to any thing in positive knowledge, is no argument for the Jonah story or even for the miracle of the wine at Cana's wedding feast; and yet time and again people who apparently should have done enough thinking to know better, to the great satisfaction of thousands have used the infinity of nature's or God's lawfulness, which is to say the only partial and tentative character of all human knowledge of law, as a clinching proof of all the miracles in the Bible. Can they not see that like what is lawless in general, the miraculous