George Stuart Fullerton - An Introduction to Philosophy

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But this makes the physical world a closed system, a something complete
in itself. Where is there room in such a system for minds?

It does indeed seem hard to find in such a system a place for minds, if
one conceives of minds as does the interactionist. We have seen (section
36) that the interactionist makes the mind act upon matter very much as
one particle of matter is supposed to act upon another. Between the
physical and the mental he assumes that there are _causal_ relations;
_i.e._ physical changes must be referred to mental causes sometimes, and
mental changes to physical. This means that he finds a place for mental
facts by inserting them as links in the one chain of causes and effects
with physical facts. If he is not allowed to break the chain and insert
them, he does not know what to do with them.

The parallelist has not the same difficulty to face. He who holds that
mental phenomena must not be built into the one series of causes and
effects with physical phenomena may freely admit that physical phenomena
form a closed series, an orderly system of their own, and he may yet find
a place in the world for minds. He refuses to regard them as a part of
the world-mechanism, but he _relates_ them to physical things, conceiving
them as _parallel to_ the physical in the sense described (sections
37-39). He insists that, even if we hold that there are gaps in the
physical order of causes and effects, we cannot conceive these gaps to be
filled by mental phenomena, simply because they are mental phenomena.
They belong to an order of their own. Hence, the assumption that the
physical series is unbroken does not seem to him to crowd mental
phenomena out of their place in the world at all. They must, in any
case, occupy the place that is appropriate to them (section 38).

It will be noticed that this doctrine that the chain of physical causes
and effects is nowhere broken, and that mental phenomena are related to
it as the parallelist conceives them to be, makes the world-system a very
orderly one. Every phenomenon has its place in it, and can be accounted
for, whether it be physical or mental. To some, the thought that the
world is such an orderly thing is in the highest degree repugnant. They
object that, in such a world, there is no room for _free-will_; and they
object, further, that there is no room for the _activity of minds_. Both
of these objections I shall consider in this chapter.

But first, I must say a few words about a type of doctrine lately
insisted upon,[1] which bears some resemblance to interactionism as we
usually meet with it, and, nevertheless, tries to hold on to the doctrine
of the conservation of energy. It is this:--

The concept of energy is stretched in such a way as to make it cover
mental phenomena as well as physical. It is claimed that mental
phenomena and physical phenomena are alike "manifestations of energy,"
and that the coming into being of a consciousness is a mere
"transformation," a something to be accounted for by the disappearance
from the physical world of a certain equivalent--perhaps of some motion.
It will be noticed that this is one rather subtle way of obliterating the
distinction between mental phenomena and physical. In so far it
resembles the interactionist's doctrine.

In criticism of it we may say that he who accepts it has wandered away
from a rather widely recognized scientific hypothesis, and has
substituted for it a very doubtful speculation for which there seems to
be no whit of evidence. It is, moreover, a speculation repugnant to the
scientific mind, when its significance is grasped. Shall we assume
without evidence that, when a man wakes in the morning and enjoys a
mental life suspended or diminished during the night, his thoughts and
feelings have come into being at the expense of his body? Shall we
assume that the mass of his body has been slightly diminished, or that
motions have disappeared in a way that cannot be accounted for by a
reference to the laws of matter in motion? This seems an extraordinary
assumption, and one little in harmony with the doctrine of the eternity
of mass and the conservation of energy as commonly understood. We need
not take it seriously so long as it is quite unsupported by evidence.

46. THE ORDER OF NATURE AND "FREE-WILL."--In a world as orderly as, in
the previous section, this world is conceived to be, is there any room
for freedom? What if the man of science is right in suspecting that the
series of physical causes and effects is nowhere broken? Must we then
conclude that we are never free?

To many persons it has seemed that we are forced to draw this conclusion,
and it is not surprising that they view the doctrine with dismay. They
argue: Mental phenomena are made parallel with physical, and the order of
physical phenomena seems to be determined throughout, for nothing can
happen in the world of matter unless there is some adequate cause of its
happening. If, then, I choose to raise my finger, that movement must be
admitted to have physical causes, and those causes other causes, and so
on without end. If such a movement must always have its place in a
causal series of this kind, how can it be regarded as a free movement?
It is determined, and not free.

Now, it is far from a pleasant thing to watch the man of science busily
at work trying to prove that the physical world is an orderly system, and
all the while to feel in one's heart that the success of his efforts
condemns one to slavery. It can hardly fail to make one's attitude
towards science that of alarm and antagonism. From this I shall try to
free the reader by showing that our freedom is not in the least danger,
and that we may look on unconcerned.

When we approach that venerable dispute touching the freedom of the will,
which has inspired men to such endless discussions, and upon which they
have written with such warmth and even acrimony, the very first thing to
do is to discover what we have a right to mean when we call a man _free_.
As long as the meaning of the word is in doubt, the very subject of the
dispute is in doubt. When may we, then, properly call a man free? What
is the normal application of the term?

I raise my finger. Every man of sense must admit that, under normal
conditions, I can raise my finger or keep it down, _as I please_. There
is no ground for a difference of opinion so far. But there is a further
point upon which men differ. One holds that my "pleasing" and the
brain-change that corresponds to it have their place in the world-order;
that is, he maintains that every volition can be _accounted for_.
Another holds that, under precisely the same circumstances, one may
"please" or not "please"; which means that the "pleasing" cannot be
wholly accounted for by anything that has preceded. The first man is a
_determinist_, and the second a "_free-willist_." I beg the reader to
observe that the word "free-willist" is in quotation marks, and not to
suppose that it means simply a believer in the freedom of the will.

When in common life we speak of a man as free, what do we understand by
the word? Usually we mean that he is free from external compulsion. If
my finger is held by another, I am not free to raise it. But I may be
free in this sense, and yet one may demur to the statement that I am a
free man. If a pistol be held to my head with the remark, "Hands up!" my
finger will mount very quickly, and the bystanders will maintain that I
had no choice.

We speak in somewhat the same way of men under the influence of
intoxicants, of men crazed by some passion and unable to take into
consideration the consequences of their acts, and of men bound by the
spell of hypnotic suggestion. Indeed, whenever a man is in such a
condition that he is glaringly incapable of leading a normal human life
and of being influenced by the motives that commonly move men, we are
inclined to say that he is not free.

But does it ever occur to us to maintain that, in general, the possession
of a character and the capacity of being influenced by considerations
make it impossible for a man to be free? Surely not. If I am a prudent
man, I will invest my money in good securities. Is it sensible to say
that I cannot have been free in refusing a twenty per cent investment,
_because I am by nature prudent_? Am I a slave _because I eat when I am
hungry_, and can I partake of a meal freely, only when there is no reason
why I should eat at all?

He who calls me free only when my acts do violence to my nature or cannot
be justified by a reference to anything whatever has strange notions of
freedom. Patriots, poets, moralists, have had much to say of freedom;
men have lived for it, and have died for it; men love it as they love
their own souls. Is the object of all this adoration the metaphysical
absurdity indicated above?

To insist that a man is free only in so far as his actions are
unaccountable is to do violence to the meaning of a word in very common
use, and to mislead men by perverting it to strange and unwholesome uses.
Yet this is done by the "free-willist." He keeps insisting that man is
free, and then goes on to maintain that he cannot be free unless he is
"free." He does not, unfortunately, supply the quotation marks, and he
profits by the natural mistake in identity. As he defines freedom it
becomes "freedom," which is a very different thing.

What is this "freedom"? It is not freedom from external constraint. It
is not freedom from overpowering passion. It is freedom from all the
motives, good as well as bad, that we can conceive of as influencing man,
and freedom also from oneself.

It is well to get this quite clear. The "free-willist" maintains that,
_in so far as a man is "free,"_ his actions cannot be accounted for by a
reference to the order of causes at all--not by a reference to his
character, hereditary or acquired; not by a reference to his
surroundings. "Free" actions, in so far as they are "free," have, so to
speak, sprung into being out of the void. What follows from such a
doctrine? Listen:--

(1) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," I am not the author of
what appear to be my acts; who can be the cause of causeless actions?

(2) It follows that no amount of effort on my part can prevent the
appearance of "free" acts of the most deplorable kind. If one can
condition their appearance or non-appearance, they are not "free" acts.

(3) It follows that there is no reason to believe that there will be any
congruity between my character and my "free" acts. I may be a saint by
nature, and "freely" act like a scoundrel.

(4) It follows that I can deserve no credit for "free" acts. I am not
their author.

(5) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," it is useless to praise
me, to blame me, to punish me, to endeavor to persuade me. I must be
given over to unaccountable sainthood or to a reprobate mind, as it
happens to happen. I am quite beyond the pale of society, for my
neighbor cannot influence my "free" acts any more than I can.

(6) It follows that, in so far as I am "free," I am in something very
like a state of slavery; and yet, curiously enough, it is a slavery
without a master. In the old stories of Fate, men were represented as
puppets in the hand of a power outside themselves. Here I am a puppet in
no hand; but I am a puppet just the same, for I am the passive spectator
of what appear to be my acts. I do not do the things I seem to do. They
are done for me or in me--or, rather, they are not done, but just happen.

Such "freedom" is a wretched thing to offer to a man who longs for
freedom; for the freedom to act out his own impulses, to guide his life
according to his own ideals. It is a mere travesty on freedom, a fiction
of the philosophers, which inspires respect only so long as one has not
pierced the disguise of its respectable name. True freedom is not a
thing to be sought in a disorderly and chaotic world, in a world in which
actions are inexplicable and character does not count. Let us rinse our
minds free of misleading verbal associations, and let us realize that a
"free-will" neighbor would certainly not be to us an object of respect.
He would be as offensive an object to have in our vicinity as a
"free-will" gun or a "free-will" pocketknife. He would not be a rational
creature.

Our only concern need be for freedom, and this is in no danger in an
orderly world. We all recognize this truth, in a way. We hold that a
man of good character freely chooses the good, and a man of evil
character freely chooses evil. Is not this a recognition of the fact
that the choice is a thing to be accounted for, and is, nevertheless, a
free choice?

I have been considering above the world as it is conceived to be by the
parallelist, but, to the reader who may not incline towards parallelism,
I wish to point out that these reasonings touching the freedom of the
will concern the interactionist just as closely. They have no necessary
connection with parallelism. The interactionist, as well as the
parallelist, may be a determinist, a believer in freedom, or he may be a
"free-willist."

He regards mental phenomena and physical phenomena as links in the one
chain of causes and effects. Shall he hold that certain mental links are
"free-will" links, that they are wholly unaccountable? If he does, all
that has been said above about the "free-willist" applies to him. He
believes in a disorderly world, and he should accept the consequences of
his doctrine.

47. THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND THE MORAL WORLD.--I have said a little way
back that, when we think of bodies as having minds, we are introduced to
a world of distinctions which have no place in the realm of the merely
physical. One of the objections made to the orderly world of the
parallelist was that in it there is no room for the activity of minds.
Before we pass judgment on this matter, we should try to get some clear
notion of what we may mean by the word "activity." The science of ethics
must go by the board, if we cannot think of men as _doing_ anything, as
acting rightly or acting wrongly.

Let us conceive a billiard ball in motion to come into collision with one
at rest. We commonly speak of the first ball as active, and of the
second as the passive subject upon which it exercises its activity. Are
we justified in thus speaking?

In one sense, of course, we are. As I have several times had occasion to
remark, we are, in common life, justified in using words rather loosely,
provided that it is convenient to do so, and that it does not give rise
to misunderstandings.

But, in a stricter sense, we are not justified in thus speaking, for in
doing so we are carrying over into the sphere of the merely physical a
distinction which does not properly belong there, but has its place in
another realm. The student of mechanics tells us that the second ball
has affected the first quite as much as the first has affected the
second. We cannot simply regard the first as cause and the second as
effect, nor may we regard the motion of the first as cause and the
subsequent motion of the second as its effect alone. _The whole
situation at the one instant_--both balls, their relative positions and
their motion and rest--must be taken as the cause of _the whole situation
at the next instant_, and in this whole situation the condition of the
second ball has its place as well as that of the first.

If, then, we insist that to have causal efficiency is the same thing as
to be active, we should also admit that the second ball was active, and
quite as active as the first. It has certainly had as much to do with
the total result. But it offends us to speak of it in this way. We
prefer to say that the first was active and the second was acted upon.
What is the source of this distinction?

Its original source is to be found in the judgments we pass upon
conscious beings, bodies with minds; and it could never have been drawn
if men had not taken into consideration the relations of minds to the
changes in the physical world. As carried over to inanimate things it is
a transferred distinction; and its transference to this field is not
strictly justifiable, as has been indicated above.

I must make this clear by an illustration. I hurry along a street
towards the university, because the hour for my lecture is approaching.
I am struck down by a falling tile. In my advance up the street I am
regarded as active; in my fall to the ground I am regarded as passive.

Now, looking at both occurrences from the purely physical point of view,
we have nothing before us but a series of changes in the space relations
of certain masses of matter; and in all those changes both my body and
its environment are concerned. As I advance, my body cannot be regarded
as the sole cause of the changes which are taking place. My progress
would be impossible without the aid of the ground upon which I tread.
Nor can I accuse the tile of being the sole cause of my demolition. Had
I not been what I was and where I was, the tile would have fallen in
vain. I must be regarded as a concurrent cause of my own disaster, and
my unhappy state is attributable to me as truly as it is to the tile.

Why, then, am I in the one case regarded as active and in the other as
passive? In each case I am a cause of the result. How does it happen
that, in the first instance, I seem to most men to be _the_ cause, and in
the second to be not a cause at all? The rapidity of my motion in the
first instance cannot account for this judgment. He who rides in the
police van and he who is thrown from the car of a balloon may move with
great rapidity and yet be regarded as passive.

Men speak as they do because they are not content to point out the
physical antecedents of this and that occurrence and stop with that.
They recognize that, between my advance up the street and my fall to the
ground there is one very important difference. In the first case what is
happening _may be referred to an idea in my mind_. Were the idea not
there, I should not do what I am doing. In the second case, what has
happened _cannot be referred to an idea in my mind_.

Here we have come to the recognition that there are such things as
_purposes_ and _ends_; that an idea and some change in the external world
may be related as _plan_ and _accomplishment_. In other words, we have
been brought face to face with what has been given the somewhat
misleading name of _final cause_. In so far as that in the bringing
about of which I have had a share is my _end_, I am _active_; in so far
as it is not my end, but comes upon me as something not planned, I am
_passive_. The enormous importance of the distinction may readily be
seen; it is only in so far as I am a creature who can have purposes, that
_desire_ and _will_, _foresight_ and _prudence_, _right_ and _wrong_, can
have a significance for me.

I have dwelt upon the meaning of the words "activity" and "passivity,"
and have been at pains to distinguish them from cause and effect, because
the two pairs of terms have often been confounded with each other, and
this confusion has given rise to a peculiarly unfortunate error. It is
this error that lies at the foundation of the objection referred to at
the beginning of this section.

We have seen that certain men of science are inclined to look upon the
physical world as a great system, all the changes in which may be
accounted for by an appeal to physical causes. And we have seen that the
parallelist regards ideas, not as links in this chain, but as parallel
with physical changes.

It is argued by some that, if this is a true view of things, we must
embrace the conclusion that _the mind cannot be active at all_, that it
can _accomplish nothing_. We must look upon the mind as an
"epiphenomenon," a useless decoration; and must regard man as "a physical
automaton with parallel psychical states."

Such abuse of one's fellow-man seems unchristian, and it is wholly
uncalled for on any hypothesis. Our first answer to it is that it seems
to be sufficiently refuted by the experiences of common life. We have
abundant evidence that men's minds do count for something. I conclude
that I want a coat, and I order one of my tailor; he believes that I will
pay for it, he wants the money, and he makes the coat; his man desires to
earn his wages and he delivers it. If I had not wanted the coat, if the
tailor had not wanted my money, if the man had not wanted to earn his
wages, the end would not have been attained. No philosopher has the
right to deny these facts.

Ah! but, it may be answered, these three "wants" are not supposed to be
the _causes_ of the motions in matter which result in my appearing
well-dressed on Sunday. They are only _concomitant phenomena_.

To this I reply: What of that? We must not forget what is meant by such
concomitance (section 39). We are dealing with a fixed and necessary
relation, not with an accidental one. If these "wants" had been lacking,
there would have been no coat. So my second answer to the objector is,
that, on the hypothesis of the parallelist, the relations between mental
phenomena and physical phenomena are just as dependable as that relation
between physical phenomena which we call that of cause and effect.
Moreover, since activity and causality are not the same thing, there is
no ground for asserting that the mind cannot be active, merely because it
is not material and, hence, cannot be, strictly speaking, a cause of
motions in matter.

The plain man is entirely in the right in thinking that minds are active.
The truth is that _nothing can be active except as it has a mind_. The
relation of purpose and end is the one we have in view when we speak of
the activity of minds.

It is, thus, highly unjust to a man to tell him that he is "a physical
automaton with parallel psychical states," and that he is wound up by
putting food into his mouth. He who hears this may be excused if he
feels it his duty to emit steam, walk with a jerk, and repudiate all
responsibility for his actions. Creatures that think, form plans, and
_act_, are not what we call automata. It is an abuse of language to call
them such, and it misleads us into looking upon them as we have no right
to look upon them. If men really were automata in the proper sense of
the word, we could not look upon them as wise or unwise, good or bad; in
short, the whole world of moral distinctions would vanish.

Perhaps, in spite of all that has been said in this and in the preceding
section, some will feel a certain repugnance to being assigned a place in
a world as orderly as our world is in this chapter conceived to be--a
world in which every phenomenon, whether physical or mental, has its
definite place, and all are subject to law. But I suppose our content or
discontent will not be independent of our conception of what sort of a
world we conceive ourselves to be inhabiting.

If we conclude that we are in a world in which God is revealed, if the
orderliness of it is but another name for Divine Providence, we can
scarcely feel the same as we would if we discovered in the world nothing
of the Divine. I have in the last few pages been discussing the doctrine
of purposes and ends, teleology, but I have said nothing of the
significance of that doctrine for Theism. The reader can easily see that
it lies at the very foundation of our belief in God. The only arguments
for theism that have had much weight with mankind have been those which
have maintained there are revealed in the world generally evidences of a
plan and purpose at least analogous to what we discover when we
scrutinize the actions of our fellow-man. Such arguments are not at the
mercy of either interactionist or parallelist. On either hypothesis they
stand unshaken.

With this brief survey of some of the most interesting problems that
confront the philosopher, I must content myself here. Now let us turn
and see how some of the fundamental problems treated in previous chapters
have been approached by men belonging to certain well-recognized schools
of thought.

And since it is peculiarly true in philosophy that, to understand the
present, one must know something of the past, we shall begin by taking a
look at the historical background of the types of philosophical doctrine
to which reference is constantly made in the books and journals of the
day.

[1] Ostwald, "Vorlesungen ueber Naturphilosophie," s. 396. Leipzig, 1902.

IV. SOME TYPES OF PHILOSOPHICAL THEORY

CHAPTER XII

THEIR HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

48. THE DOCTRINE OF REPRESENTATIVE PERCEPTION.--We have seen in Chapter
II that it seems to the plain man abundantly evident that he really is
surrounded by material things and that he directly perceives such
things. This has always been the opinion of the plain man and it seems
probable that it always will be. It is only when he begins to reflect
upon things and upon his knowledge of them that it occurs to him to
call it in question.

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