ARISTOTLE ON FREE-WILL.-1I.

WE have endeavoured, in a previous article, to set before our readers the first dawn of this controversy, as it appears in the pages of one whose writings .hold, in germ, the thoughts of many following centuries. We .would now

inquire into the intrinsic value of the views there brought forward, and disentangle from whatever was merely temporary in their expression their value in the eyes of the seeker after truth.

The advance of the Aristotelian beyond the Platonic point of view consists, we have seen, in the discernment —difficult for a modern to accept as a discovery—that it is possible to act against conviction. Everywhere throughout the Platonic Dialogues we find it assumed that the one barrier to rightness is ignorance. To see the good, is to pursue it. He who does not pursue it, therefore, cannot see it. This is a doctrine which leaves no room for human responsibility, and as such it appears to us to embody important error. Yet surely all must feel its powerful attraction. To see truly is so great an advance towards acting rightly, that from the distance at which many of us regard these moral stations they are in- distinguishable. And deep in every heart must be the suspicion which we find in the works of Aristotle, though he is not its author,—" Perhaps, after all, men really yearn after the same pleasure, and not that which they think and say they are pursuing," a sentence which appears to us far more Platonic than Aristotelian, and, indeed, to sum up a large part of the Platonic teaching. But it embodies also all that makes it difficult to believe in Free-will.

We have already put before our readers the striking sentence in which (if we have understood it) "the master of those who know" hints at a view which would identify Free-will with this moral blindness ; we would now bring home its mean- ing to their minds by presenting it in a modern dress. There is an essay in the posthumous fragments of that suggestive thinker, James Hinton, in which, after his wont, he explains the supposed power of Free-will as in reality an absence of power, and finds the explanation of all confusion on the subject in the fact that we have mistaken a minus for a plus quantity. Free-will in thought, he says, we should at once discern to be a weakness, not a strength. Yet a person with a notion "that two and two might make five when convenient, and that if it suited him best to-morrow would obligingly come before to-day," may be con- ceived of as "proud of his power of thinking as he liked, and supposing it the true intellectual prerogative of manhood ;" although all the while it would be "simply the absence of the rational power in man." And free-will in acting, we suppose Mr. Hinton to mean, is simply the absence of the moral power in man. Were our conformity to the moral law as perfect as our conformity to the intellectual law (the intellectual law, we mean, as it affects, for instance, the simpler questions of time and space), we should be as unable to do wrong as to believe that two and two make five. Now this, we presume, is exactly the meaning implied in the quotation from the " Metaphysics " which we set before our readers last week. Freedom is there represented as a negative thing, just as it is here. The master of the household is too important to spend a moment according to his fancy. Merely to know his circumstances is, to a right judgment, to know how he will spend his time. The slave must do his work, of course (and the passage seems to us an important testimony to the lenient character of Athenian slavery) ; but when that is done, he may follow his own vagaries, and trifle away his time according to the impulse of the moment. The free man is never free in this sense ; the slave, in this sense, is sufficiently insignificant to be free for a large proportion of his time. It is interesting to watch the emergence of the same idea, at the interval of two thousand years. It seems to us unques- tionable also that some important truth must be contained in any idea which we can state in extracts from two thinkers separated by such an interval, and from this we would derive a warning against the belief, very common among the defenders of Free-will, that evil must necessarily share the eternity of good. That hatred and falsehood must remain possible to give truth and love their value is an assumption constantly made, but it is one which seems to us incompatible with a belief in Divine goodness, and finely refuted by the suggestion, if we have rightly interpreted it, of the Greek thinker and his unconscious English follower. Their truth, therefore, we should call a transcendental truth. To the condition of things in which we find ourselves, to the teaching of experience, and the expectations founded thereon, it is inapplicable. That there may be a morally certain good- ness is what we could not bring ourselves to deny. What we deny is, that there can be a necessary guilt. And since in this world unquestionably there is guilt, man must here and now be free.

It was, we believe, an original thought in the mind of Aristotle, that a necessity for doing wrong was impossible Underlying his desultory and sometimes vague argument, we shall always find the assumption that nothing wrong can be inevitable,—an assumption the originality of which we can only estimate by comparing it with the view of evil, in some respects

so much deeper, of Plato, according to which it is a deadly disease. When Aristotle has given his definition of freedom—

that those actions are free of which the cause lies wholly within the agent (an interesting sentence, as attaching this metaphysi- cal problem to the conditions of freedom in a self-governed Greek state), he seems to remember that even the actions

which are chosen most decidedly by the actor may be said in some sense to be caused by something without him, i.e., the

pleasure they will produce. "But you could not say this," he protests ("Eth." iii., 1, 11), "for if you did, you would make everything necessary." The idea that it might be replied, "And

in this sense everything is necessary," does not seem to occur

to him as possible. Evidently the thing that makes it impos- sible is for him the existence of guilt. He seems to find (and herein he reminds us of Butler) the great practical truth, that man deals with man as if wrong conduct were unnecessary, a sufficient refutation of all perplexing arguments on the opposite side. And when he quits this moral point of view, and deals with the question as one of logic merely (as he does elsewhere), his argument seems to us to lose all force, and to become confused and full of fallacies.

We believe, for our own part, that the distinction between knowledge, as the region of necessity, and action, of freedom, important and true as it is, may yet be exaggerated into a denial of all freedom. That man has a choice whether he shall do what is right, in a sense in which he has not a choice whether he shall believe what is true, is conceded by every one, whether he believes or disbelieves in Free-will; the only differ- ence made by this alternative is as to the meaning of the word "choice." And yet, wherever a strong personal interest comes in, every one recognises a voluntary element in belief. No one who has had a loan of a thousand pounds and repaid one hundred can persuade himself that he is not still a debtor to the amount of nine hundred ; but experience shows us that it is possible for a debtor, not only to spend his money otherwise than in paying his debts, but also to persuade himself again and again that a debt had better be paid to-morrow, instead of to-day. No course of life will continue to seem wrong to him who pursues it, and we doubt if the worst crime is often recognised as criminal in the moment of commission. And if this voluntary element in belief is present in cases on which all unprejudiced person think alike, much more must we expect to find it in matters on which there are two opinions. When we come to any period of religious controversy, we shall find numerous cases of conversion which are at once interested and sincere ; it would be a great mistake, for instance, to suppose that all the devout ex-Huguenots in the service of Louis XIV. were hypocrites.

A belief that shall move mountains, that shall become an influence in the history of a nation,—this is not a thing that any man can choose ; but he who denies that a belief may be perfectly sincere in the sense that a man is always ready to act upon it, and yet that it may be the result of choice, that it may have been taken up from reasons that have no relation to truth, knows little of the history of belief, or of his own heart.

We hold, then, that if we would retain a belief in free action, we must go further, and accuse or acquit a man according to that not only which he does, but which he believes it right to do. Of course, there are certain inexorable facts against the belief of which will is powerless. I may think, as Wilkes said, that the money subscribed for my creditors had better be spent in ministering to my present necessities ; there are plenty of moral devices for adjusting the facts to snit that theory, and it is often held quite sincerely, no doubt; but the laws of arithmetic are inexorable ; no sophistry can change my view of the amount of my debt. When I come to these laws, I

am merely passive; I have passed under the domain of Necessity. But it is not true that I enter on this domain when I quit the region of action for that of thought. It is not entirely true even of the region of suffering. Even that part of man's being which is least voluntary is not wholly involuntary. We choose to a certain small extent even what we shall feel. Many a mourner is weighed down beneath a sorrow unquestionably real, which

would yet depart at the exertion of one resolute volition. It is unjust in such a case to say, as is sometimes said, that what is embraced is the appearance of grief when the reality is departed. The grief does not cease to be real when it becomes voluntary.

It would seem, therefore, that if we are to keep Freedom for lane part of our nature, we must keep it, more or less, for all. But on the other hand, we cannot keep it for any, unless we keep it in an especial sense for one. Our actions have grown out of our feelings and our beliefs, but it would not be enough, though we think it would be partially true, to say that action is free because thought and feeling are to some extent free. In thought, and still more in feeling, we are often mere recipients of a foreign influence, which it does not lie with us to resist or to modify ; we exhibit in its completeness Aristotle's definition of necessity; the cause of our feeling or our belief is wholly external to us, and we, as individuals, contribute nothing to it. And do -we imply, it may be asked, that this is never the case with action ? 'That depends what is meant by action. So far as we are inhabi- tants of a visible, sensible world—so far as action means, as it must mean, for the most part, the result of our will on this 'world—we think it is true very often. Perhaps every man is blamed for actions for which he has no more responsibility than a tender-hearted soldier who has to lay waste the enemy's country. But the true question is, what does each of us mean when he says "I ?" If it is an illusion to suppose "that at each moment • the ego is something more than the aggregate of feelings actual and nascent, which then exist," as Mr. Herbert Spencer says it is, then freedom is impossible, for the being of which we pre- dicate freedom does not exist. That in each of us which remains the same, amid the strange whirl of thoughts and feel- ings which perhaps leaves amid them no common element,—that which connects the Rev. John Newton, curate of Olney, and friend of Cowper, with a profligate and blaspheming sailor ; that which connects Strafford dying on the scaffold as a martyr of loyalty to his King with the imprisoned Wentworth, martyr -of a cause which his King was endeavouring to crush ; that which perhaps each one of us finds difficult to associate with a hopeful and arrogant youth of whose history he has a wonde: fully intimate knowledge,—the true question is, is this a mysterious and inexplicable reality behind all phenomena, or is it merely the outward form, and the power of recollection P 'The one alternative excludes the idea of Necessity, and the .other of Freedom.

One of the chief points of interest in this discussion in the pages of Aristotle—its strong political tinge—seems to us an important indication of the actual scope of the con-

troversy. It is often said that the question has no practical importance. That a change in the opinion of ordinary people would not immediately produce any change in their actions, we readily allow. The shallow fallacy that a belief in Destiny opposes vigorous exertion might well be refuted by logic, if we had not the stronger refutation of history., teaching us, as it does, that perhaps the most strenuous actions which it is called upon to record were, in the belief of the actors, inspired by the will of God, the will of man in no respect co-operating therewith. Nevertheless, we are convinced that the belief in Determinism would, in the long-run, modify some of the most important of human actions. It would be vain to make the constantly-repeated protest that if the criminal could not help csm mitting murder, we could not help banging him for it. Though it would still be true that by hang- ing him we should enable other people not to be criminals, we should find that practically we could help our action, and he could not help his. We do not see that the rational justification for punishment is greatly impaired, even in the case of criminal lunatics ; in nine cases out of ten, their punishment would have about as much deterrent force as any .other criminal's would. The power to punish, which is sub- tracted in their case, would be subtracted, on the theory of Determinism, in every case. We should find that without the force of indignation, our penal legislation would be like artillery without gunpowder.

We are misled in this respect because, as Determinism has been exhibited in history it has been allied with a profound belief in the will of God. Human will has been obliterated to make way for Divine will, but will itself (in the full sense of the word) was never denied till now. No great thinker of the Christian past believed that man's will was a link in the chain of fate, who did not believe also that fate was simply a divine decision. Man was not subjected to things, but to a personal ruler,—'a

ruler, it is true, who, while the world remains what it is, could not be called good in our sense, but still who had determined that man should be good in our sense, and who enforced that determination upon his creature by the most stringent and awful penalties. The moral effect of such a belief would be quite different from what is now called Deter- minism. If God punishes, man may punish, so long as it is to uphold God's law. But this divine pattern re- moved from us, and also that sense of indignation which is but the moral side of a belief that the deed reprobated was evitable, man would lack all strength to inflict pain. Perhaps, to some extent, we see this loss already telling on our legislation. If ever Determinism becomes the creed of the Legislature, we are certain that we shall see its effect exhibited much more positively.

"No man prefers a crime, or spurns a bliss," is quoted by Aristotle 5.4.) as a well-known saying with reference to the Will; and in dissolving the fallacious bond of antithesis, and dis- entangling the true from the false half of the saying, he seems to us to hint at all that has been truly said in this great contro- versy for two thousand years. "No man spurns a bliss, but crime is voluntary." That short sentence sums up the truth of both these great parties. It is, we fear, the last half of the truth with which we have most to do in this world. But while owning that the criminal and the profligate must be dealt with as beings who have chosen evil, it is not forbidden to us to remember that "no man spurns a bliss,"—that in ways inconceivable to us the blessedness of love, and purity, and truth may be brought home to those who, as far as we can see, are least capable of discerning them. All the legislator can do in this direction, perhaps, is to enforce on those who fail to per- ceive it the evil and wretchedness of wrong. But he will lack courage for this course unless he is able to deal with the most degraded of mankind as beings who can afford to suffer, since suffering may invert their path, and Bet them in the direction of that human aim which truly to recognise is to accept for ever.