Freedom of the Will (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: elective action, is essential to self-government and rational conduct. It is this self-energy called will, the controller of the movements of mind and body, which the Necessitarian theory in reality sets aside in its false definition of the nature of its acts. That theory, in one form or another, as we shall see immediately, confounds acts of will with emotions of desire or aversion in the sensibility, and so renders these acts determinated by the objects present in thought. But this brings us to the great question?what determines the will? CHAPTER IV. THE DETEBMINATION-OF THE WILL IN ITS CHOICES. Is the will, or the mind itself exerting its energy called will, free to act, or not to act, or, in some respects, to act otherwise than it does'! Or is the .will, in common with material causes, always determinated to act as it does and not otherwise? That is the great question in this celebrated controversy. But mark well the real terms of the question. The question is not, is the will free to act as it chooses, or as it pleases? This is to make the will acting something different from the will choosing, so that the choosing or pleasing becomes the rule of the acting. That is not the question, however. Our question is the direct one, is the will free in its acts of choosing, or is it determinated in its acts of choice by something antecedent in the organism and its environments, or in the mind itself? There is, of course, a determination of the will in all its acts of choosing; but whence is it? Is it from the will itself, or from something external to it? In everything which can be regarded as a cause at all, there is some one determinated act producing some one particular effect. But whence is this particular limiting, fixing of the causal energy in that one direction, ra...