Every fallacy of Confusion (it is almost unnecessary to repeat) will, if cleared up, become a fallacy of some other sort; and it will be found of deductive or ratiocinative fallacies generally, that when they mislead, there is mostly, as in this case, a fallacy of some other description lurking under them, by virtue of which chiefly it is that the verbal juggle, which is the outside or body of this kind of fallacy, passes undetected.
Euler's Algebra, a book otherwise of great merit, but full, to overflowing, of logical errors in respect to the foundation of the science, contains the following argument to prove that _minus_ multiplied by _minus_ gives _plus_, a doctrine the opprobrium of all mere mathematicians, and which Euler had not a glimpse of the true method of proving. He says _minus_ multiplied by _minus_ can not give _minus_; for _minus_ multiplied by _plus_ gives _minus_, and _minus_ multiplied by _minus_ can not give the same product as _minus_ multiplied by _plus_. Now one is obliged to ask, why minus multiplied by minus must give any product at all? and if it does, why its product can not be the same as that of minus multiplied by plus? for this would seem, at the first glance, not more absurd than that minus by minus should give the same as plus by plus, the proposition which Euler prefers to it. The premise requires proof, as much as the conclusion; nor can it be proved, except by that more comprehensive view of the nature of multiplication, and of algebraic processes in general, which would also supply a far better proof of the mysterious doctrine which Euler is here endeavoring to demonstrate.
A striking instance of reasoning in a circle is that of some ethical writers, who first take for their standard of moral truth what, being the general, they deem to be the natural or instinctive sentiments and perceptions of mankind, and then explain away the numerous instances of divergence from their assumed standard, by representing them as cases in which the perceptions are unhealthy. Some particular mode of conduct or feeling is affirmed to be _unnatural_; why? because it is abhorrent to the universal and natural sentiments of mankind. Finding no such sentiment in yourself, you question the fact; and the answer is (if your antagonist is polite), that you are an exception, a peculiar case. But neither (say you) do I find in the people of some other country, or of some former age, any such feeling of abhorrence; "ay, but their feelings were sophisticated and unhealthy."
One of the most notable specimens of reasoning in a circle is the doctrine of Hobbes, Rousseau, and others, which rests the obligations by which human beings are bound as members of society, on a supposed social compact. I waive the consideration of the fictitious nature of the compact itself; but when Hobbes, through the whole Leviathan, elaborately deduces the obligation of obeying the sovereign, not from the necessity or utility of doing so, but from a promise supposed to have been made by our ancestors, on renouncing savage life and agreeing to establish political society, it is impossible not to retort by the question, Why are we bound to keep a promise made for us by others? or why bound to keep a promise at all? No satisfactory ground can be assigned for the obligation, except the mischievous consequences of the absence of faith and mutual confidence among mankind. We are, therefore, brought round to the interests of society, as the ultimate ground of the obligation of a promise; and yet those interests are not admitted to be a sufficient justification for the existence of government and law. Without a promise it is thought that we should not be bound to that which is implied in all modes of living in society, namely, to yield a general obedience to the laws therein established; and so necessary is the promise deemed, that if none has actually been made, some additional safety is supposed to be given to the foundations of society by feigning one.
-- 3. Two principal subdivisions of the class of Fallacies of Confusion having been disposed of; there remains a third, in which the confusion is not, as in the Fallacy of Ambiguity, in misconceiving the import of the premises, nor, as in Petitio Principii, in forgetting what the premises are, but in mistaking the conclusion which is to be proved. This is the fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi, in the widest sense of the phrase; also called by Archbishop Whately the Fallacy of Irrelevant Conclusion. His examples and remarks are highly worthy of citation.
"Various kinds of propositions are, according to the occasion, substituted for the one of which proof is required; sometimes the particular for the universal; sometimes a proposition with different terms; and various are the contrivances employed to effect and to conceal this substitution, and to make the conclusion which the sophist has drawn, answer practically the same purpose as the one he ought to have established. We say, 'practically the same purpose,' because it will very often happen that some _emotion_ will be excited, some sentiment impressed on the mind (by a dexterous employment of this fallacy), such as shall bring men into the _disposition_ requisite for your purpose; though they may not have assented to, or even stated distinctly in their own minds, the _proposition_ which it was your business to establish. Thus if a sophist has to defend one who has been guilty of some _serious_ offense, which he wishes to extenuate, though he is unable distinctly to prove that it is not such, yet if he can succeed in _making the audience laugh_ at some casual matter, he has gained practically the same point. So also if any one has pointed out the extenuating circumstances in some particular case of offense, so as to show that it differs widely from the generality of the same class, the sophist, if he finds himself unable to disprove these circumstances, may do away the force of them, by simply _referring the action to that very class_, which no one can deny that it belongs to, and the very name of which will excite a feeling of disgust sufficient to counteract the extenuation; _e.g._, let it be a case of peculation, and that many _mitigating_ circumstances have been brought forward which can not be denied; the sophistical opponent will reply, 'Well, but after all, the man is a _rogue_, and there is an end of it;' now in reality this was (by hypothesis) never the question; and the mere assertion of what was never denied _ought_ not, in fairness, to be regarded as decisive; but, practically, the odiousness of the word, arising in great measure from the association of those very circumstances which belong to most of the class, but which we have supposed to be _absent_ in _this particular_ instance, excites precisely that feeling of disgust which, in effect, destroys the force of the defense. In like manner we may refer to this head all cases of improper appeal to the passions, and every thing else which is mentioned by Aristotle as extraneous to the matter in hand (??? t??
p???at??)."
Again, "instead of proving that 'this prisoner has committed an atrocious fraud,' you prove that the fraud he is accused of is atrocious; instead of proving (as in the well-known tale of Cyrus and the two coats) that the taller boy had a right to force the other boy to exchange coats with him, you prove that the exchange would have been advantageous to both; instead of proving that the poor ought to be relieved in this way rather than in that, you prove that the poor ought to be relieved; instead of proving that the irrational agent-whether a brute or a madman-can never be deterred from any act by apprehension of punishment (as, for instance, a dog from sheep-biting, by fear of being beaten), you prove that the beating of one dog does not operate as an _example_ to _other_ dogs, etc.
"It is evident that Ignoratio Elenchi may be employed as well for the apparent refutation of your opponent's proposition, as for the apparent establishment of your own; for it is substantially the same thing, to prove what was not denied or to disprove what was not asserted. The latter practice is not less common, and it is more offensive, because it frequently amounts to a personal affront, in attributing to a person opinions, etc., which he perhaps holds in abhorrence. Thus, when in a discussion one party vindicates, on the ground of general expediency, a particular instance of resistance to government in a case of intolerable oppression, the opponent may gravely maintain, 'that we ought not to do evil that good may come;' a proposition which of course had never been denied, the point in dispute being, 'whether resistance in this particular case _were_ doing evil or not.' Or again, by way of disproving the assertion of the right of private judgment in religion, one may hear a grave argument to prove that 'it is impossible every one can be _right in his judgment_.' "
The works of controversial writers are seldom free from this fallacy. The attempts, for instance, to disprove the population doctrines of Malthus, have been mostly cases of _ignoratio elenchi_. Malthus has been supposed to be refuted if it could be shown that in some countries or ages population has been nearly stationary; as if he had asserted that population always increases in a given ratio, or had not expressly declared that it increases only in so far as it is not restrained by prudence, or kept down by poverty and disease. Or, perhaps, a collection of facts is produced to prove that in some one country the people are better off with a dense population than they are in another country with a thin one; or that the people have become more numerous and better off at the same time. As if the assertion were that a dense population could not possibly be well off; as if it were not part of the very doctrine, and essential to it, that where there is a more abundant production there may be a greater population without any increase of poverty, or even with a diminution of it.
The favorite argument against Berkeley's theory of the non-existence of matter, and the most popularly effective, next to a "grin"(267)-an argument, moreover, which is not confined to "coxcombs," nor to men like Samuel Johnson, whose greatly overrated ability certainly did not lie in the direction of metaphysical speculation, but is the stock argument of the Scotch school of metaphysicians-is a palpable Ignoratio Elenchi. The argument is perhaps as frequently expressed by gesture as by words, and one of its commonest forms consists in knocking a stick against the ground. This short and easy confutation overlooks the fact, that in denying matter, Berkeley did not deny any thing to which our senses bear witness, and therefore can not be answered by any appeal to them. His skepticism related to the supposed substratum, or hidden cause of the appearances perceived by our senses; the evidence of which, whatever may be thought of its conclusiveness, is certainly not the evidence of sense.
And it will always remain a signal proof of the want of metaphysical profundity of Reid, Stewart, and, I am sorry to add, of Brown, that they should have persisted in asserting that Berkeley, if he believed his own doctrine, was bound to walk into the kennel, or run his head against a post. As if persons who do not recognize an occult cause of their sensations could not possibly believe that a fixed order subsists among the sensations themselves. Such a want of comprehension of the distinction between a thing and its sensible manifestation, or, in metaphysical language, between the noumenon and the phenomenon, would be impossible to even the dullest disciple of Kant or Coleridge.
It would be easy to add a greater number of examples of this fallacy, as well as of the others which I have attempted to characterize. But a more copious exemplification does not seem to be necessary; and the intelligent reader will have little difficulty in adding to the catalogue from his own reading and experience. We shall, therefore, here close our exposition of the general principles of logic, and proceed to the supplementary inquiry which is necessary to complete our design.
Book VI.
ON THE LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES.
"Si l'homme peut predire, avec une assurance presque entiere, les phenomenes dont il connait les lois; si lors meme qu'elles lui sont inconnues, il peut, d'apres l'experience, prevoir avec une grande probabilite les evenements de l'avenir; pourquoi regarderait-on comme une entreprise chimerique, celle de tracer avec quelque vraisemblance le tableau des destinees futures de l'espece humaine, d'apres les resultats de son histoire? Le seul fondement de croyance dans les sciences naturelles, est cette idee, que les lois generales, connues ou ignorees, qui reglent les phenomenes de l'univers, sont necessaires et constantes; et par quelle raison ce principe serait-il moins vrai pour le developpement des facultes intellectuelles et morales de l'homme, que pour les autres operations de la nature? Enfin, puisque des opinions formees d'apres l'experience ... sont la seule regle de la conduite des hommes les plus sages, pourquoi interdirait-on au philosophe d'appuyer ses conjectures sur cette meme base, pourvu qu'il ne leur attribue pas une certitude superieure a celle qui peut naitre du nombre, de la constance, de l'exactitude des observations?"-CONDORCET, _Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de l'Esprit Humain_.
Chapter I.
Introductory Remarks.
-- 1. Principles of Evidence and Theories of Method are not to be constructed _a priori_. The laws of our rational faculty, like those of every other natural agency, are only learned by seeing the agent at work.
The earlier achievements of science were made without the conscious observance of any Scientific Method; and we should never have known by what process truth is to be ascertained, if we had not previously ascertained many truths. But it was only the easier problems which could be thus resolved: natural sagacity, when it tried its strength against the more difficult ones, either failed altogether, or, if it succeeded here and there in obtaining a solution, had no sure means of convincing others that its solution was correct. In scientific investigation, as in all other works of human skill, the way of obtaining the end is seen as it were instinctively by superior minds in some comparatively simple case, and is then, by judicious generalization, adapted to the variety of complex cases. We learn to do a thing in difficult circumstances, by attending to the manner in which we have spontaneously done the same thing in easier ones.
This truth is exemplified by the history of the various branches of knowledge which have successively, in the ascending order of their complication, assumed the character of sciences; and will doubtless receive fresh confirmation from those of which the final scientific constitution is yet to come, and which are still abandoned to the uncertainties of vague and popular discussion. Although several other sciences have emerged from this state at a comparatively recent date, none now remain in it except those which relate to man himself, the most complex and most difficult subject of study on which the human mind can be engaged.
Concerning the physical nature of man, as an organized being-though there is still much uncertainty and much controversy, which can only be terminated by the general acknowledgment and employment of stricter rules of induction than are commonly recognized-there is, however, a considerable body of truths which all who have attended to the subject consider to be fully established; nor is there now any radical imperfection in the method observed in the department of science by its most distinguished modern teachers. But the laws of Mind, and, in even a greater degree, those of Society, are so far from having attained a similar state of even partial recognition, that it is still a controversy whether they are capable of becoming subjects of science in the strict sense of the term: and among those who are agreed on this point, there reigns the most irreconcilable diversity on almost every other. Here, therefore, if anywhere, the principles laid down in the preceding Books may be expected to be useful.
If on matters so much the most important with which human intellect can occupy itself a more general agreement is ever to exist among thinkers; if what has been pronounced "the proper study of mankind" is not destined to remain the only subject which Philosophy can not succeed in rescuing from Empiricism; the same process through which the laws of many simpler phenomena have by general acknowledgment been placed beyond dispute, must be consciously and deliberately applied to those more difficult inquiries.
If there are some subjects on which the results obtained have finally received the unanimous assent of all who have attended to the proof, and others on which mankind have not yet been equally successful; on which the most sagacious minds have occupied themselves from the earliest date, and have never succeeded in establishing any considerable body of truths, so as to be beyond denial or doubt; it is by generalizing the methods successfully followed in the former inquiries, and adapting them to the latter, that we may hope to remove this blot on the face of science. The remaining chapters are an endeavor to facilitate this most desirable object.
-- 2. In attempting this, I am not unmindful how little can be done toward it in a mere treatise on Logic, or how vague and unsatisfactory all precepts of Method must necessarily appear when not practically exemplified in the establishment of a body of doctrine. Doubtless, the most effectual mode of showing how the sciences of Ethics and Politics may be constructed would be to construct them: a task which, it needs scarcely be said, I am not about to undertake. But even if there were no other examples, the memorable one of Bacon would be sufficient to demonstrate, that it is sometimes both possible and useful to point out the way, though without being one's self prepared to adventure far into it. And if more were to be attempted, this at least is not a proper place for the attempt.
In substance, whatever can be done in a work like this for the Logic of the Moral Sciences, has been or ought to have been accomplished in the five preceding Books; to which the present can be only a kind of supplement or appendix, since the methods of investigation applicable to moral and social science must have been already described, if I have succeeded in enumerating and characterizing those of science in general.
It remains, however, to examine which of those methods are more especially suited to the various branches of moral inquiry; under what peculiar facilities or difficulties they are there employed; how far the unsatisfactory state of those inquiries is owing to a wrong choice of methods, how far to want of skill in the application of right ones; and what degree of ultimate success may be attained or hoped for by a better choice or more careful employment of logical processes appropriate to the case. In other words, whether moral sciences exist, or can exist; to what degree of perfection they are susceptible of being carried; and by what selection or adaptation of the methods brought to view in the previous part of this work that degree of perfection is attainable.
At the threshold of this inquiry we are met by an objection, which, if not removed, would be fatal to the attempt to treat human conduct as a subject of science. Are the actions of human beings, like all other natural events, subject to invariable laws? Does that constancy of causation, which is the foundation of every scientific theory of successive phenomena, really obtain among them? This is often denied; and for the sake of systematic completeness, if not from any very urgent practical necessity, the question should receive a deliberate answer in this place.
We shall devote to the subject a chapter apart.
Chapter II.
Of Liberty And Necessity.
-- 1. The question, whether the law of causality applies in the same strict sense to human actions as to other phenomena, is the celebrated controversy concerning the freedom of the will; which, from at least as far back as the time of Pelagius, has divided both the philosophical and the religious world. The affirmative opinion is commonly called the doctrine of Necessity, as asserting human volitions and actions to be necessary and inevitable. The negative maintains that the will is not determined, like other phenomena, by antecedents, but determines itself; that our volitions are not, properly speaking, the effects of causes, or at least have no causes which they uniformly and implicitly obey.
I have already made it sufficiently apparent that the former of these opinions is that which I consider the true one; but the misleading terms in which it is often expressed, and the indistinct manner in which it is usually apprehended, have both obstructed its reception, and perverted its influence when received. The metaphysical theory of free-will, as held by philosophers (for the practical feeling of it, common in a greater or less degree to all mankind, is in no way inconsistent with the contrary theory), was invented because the supposed alternative of admitting human actions to be _necessary_ was deemed inconsistent with every one's instinctive consciousness, as well as humiliating to the pride and even degrading to the moral nature of man. Nor do I deny that the doctrine, as sometimes held, is open to these imputations; for the misapprehension in which I shall be able to show that they originate, unfortunately is not confined to the opponents of the doctrine, but is participated in by many, perhaps we might say by most, of its supporters.
-- 2. Correctly conceived, the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual's mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred; that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event. This proposition I take to be a mere interpretation of universal experience, a statement in words of what every one is internally convinced of. No one who believed that he knew thoroughly the circumstances of any case, and the characters of the different persons concerned, would hesitate to foretell how all of them would act. Whatever degree of doubt he may in fact feel, arises from the uncertainty whether he really knows the circumstances, or the character of some one or other of the persons, with the degree of accuracy required; but by no means from thinking that if he did know these things, there could be any uncertainty what the conduct would be. Nor does this full assurance conflict in the smallest degree with what is called our feeling of freedom. We do not feel ourselves the less free, because those to whom we are intimately known are well assured how we shall will to act in a particular case. We often, on the contrary, regard the doubt what our conduct will be, as a mark of ignorance of our character, and sometimes even resent it as an imputation. The religious metaphysicians who have asserted the freedom of the will, have always maintained it to be consistent with divine foreknowledge of our actions: and if with divine, then with any other foreknowledge. We may be free, and yet another may have reason to be perfectly certain what use we shall make of our freedom.
It is not, therefore, the doctrine that our volitions and actions are invariable consequents of our antecedent states of mind, that is either contradicted by our consciousness, or felt to be degrading.
But the doctrine of causation, when considered as obtaining between our volitions and their antecedents, is almost universally conceived as involving more than this. Many do not believe, and very few practically feel, that there is nothing in causation but invariable, certain, and unconditional sequence. There are few to whom mere constancy of succession appears a sufficiently stringent bond of union for so peculiar a relation as that of cause and effect. Even if the reason repudiates, the imagination retains, the feeling of some more intimate connection, of some peculiar tie, or mysterious constraint exercised by the antecedent over the consequent. Now this it is which, considered as applying to the human will, conflicts with our consciousness, and revolts our feelings. We are certain that, in the case of our volitions, there is not this mysterious constraint. We know that we are not compelled, as by a magical spell, to obey any particular motive. We feel, that if we wished to prove that we have the power of resisting the motive, we could do so (that wish being, it needs scarcely be observed, a _new antecedent_); and it would be humiliating to our pride, and (what is of more importance) paralyzing to our desire of excellence, if we thought otherwise. But neither is any such mysterious compulsion now supposed, by the best philosophical authorities, to be exercised by any other cause over its effect. Those who think that causes draw their effects after them by a mystical tie, are right in believing that the relation between volitions and their antecedents is of another nature. But they should go farther, and admit that this is also true of all other effects and their antecedents. If such a tie is considered to be involved in the word Necessity, the doctrine is not true of human actions; but neither is it then true of inanimate objects. It would be more correct to say that matter is not bound by necessity, than that mind is so.
That the free-will metaphysicians, being mostly of the school which rejects Hume's and Brown's analysis of Cause and Effect, should miss their way for want of the light which that analysis affords, can not surprise us. The wonder is, that the necessitarians, who usually admit that philosophical theory, should in practice equally lose sight of it. The very same misconception of the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity, which prevents the opposite party from recognizing its truth, I believe to exist more or less obscurely in the minds of most necessitarians, however they may in words disavow it. I am much mistaken if they habitually feel that the necessity which they recognize in actions is but uniformity of order, and capability of being predicted. They have a feeling as if there were at bottom a stronger tie between the volitions and their causes; as if, when they asserted that the will is governed by the balance of motives, they meant something more cogent than if they had only said, that whoever knew the motives, and our habitual susceptibilities to them, could predict how we should will to act. They commit, in opposition to their own scientific system, the very same mistake which their adversaries commit in obedience to theirs; and in consequence do really in some instances suffer those depressing consequences which their opponents erroneously impute to the doctrine itself.
-- 3. I am inclined to think that this error is almost wholly an effect of the associations with a word, and that it would be prevented, by forbearing to employ, for the expression of the simple fact of causation, so extremely inappropriate a term as Necessity. That word, in its other acceptations, involves much more than mere uniformity of sequence: it implies irresistibleness. Applied to the will, it only means that, the given cause will be followed by the effect, subject to all possibilities of counteraction by other causes; but in common use it stands for the operation of those causes exclusively which are supposed too powerful to be counteracted at all. When we say that all human actions take place of necessity, we only mean that they will certainly happen if nothing prevents; when we say that dying of want, to those who can not get food, is a necessity, we mean that it will certainly happen whatever may be done to prevent it. The application of the same term to the agencies on which human actions depend, as is used to express those agencies of nature which are really uncontrollable, can not fail, when habitual, to create a feeling of uncontrollableness in the former also. This, however, is a mere illusion. There are physical sequences which we call necessary, as death for want of food or air; there are others which, though as much cases of causation as the former, are not said to be necessary, as death from poison, which an antidote, or the use of the stomach-pump, will sometimes avert. It is apt to be forgotten by people's feelings, even if remembered by their understandings, that human actions are in this last predicament: they are never (except in some cases of mania) ruled by any one motive with such absolute sway that there is no room for the influence of any other. The causes, therefore, on which action depends, are never uncontrollable; and any given effect is only necessary provided that the causes tending to produce it are not controlled. That whatever happens, could not have happened otherwise, unless something had taken place which was capable of preventing it, no one surely needs hesitate to admit. But to call this by the name Necessity is to use the term in a sense so different from its primitive and familiar meaning, from that which it bears in the common occasions of life, as to amount almost to a play upon words. The associations derived from the ordinary sense of the term will adhere to it in spite of all we can do; and though the doctrine of Necessity, as stated by most who hold it, is very remote from fatalism, it is probable that most necessitarians are fatalists, more or less, in their feelings.
A fatalist believes, or half believes (for nobody is a consistent fatalist), not only that whatever is about to happen will be the infallible result of the causes which produce it (which is the true necessitarian doctrine), but moreover that there is no use in struggling against it; that it will happen, however we may strive to prevent it. Now, a necessitarian, believing that our actions follow from our characters, and that our characters follow from our organization, our education, and our circumstances, is apt to be, with more or less of consciousness on his part, a fatalist as to his own actions, and to believe that his nature is such, or that his education and circumstances have so moulded his character, that nothing can now prevent him from feeling and acting in a particular way, or at least that no effort of his own can hinder it. In the words of the sect which in our own day has most perseveringly inculcated and most perversely misunderstood this great doctrine, his character is formed _for_ him, and not _by_ him; therefore his wishing that it had been formed differently is of no use; he has no power to alter it. But this is a grand error. He has, to a certain extent, a power to alter his character. Its being, in the ultimate resort, formed for him, is not inconsistent with its being, in part, formed _by_ him as one of the intermediate agents. His character is formed by his circumstances (including among these his particular organization); but his own desire to mould it in a particular way, is one of those circumstances, and by no means one of the least influential. We can not, indeed, directly will to be different from what we are. But neither did those who are supposed to have formed our characters directly will that we should be what we are.
Their will had no direct power except over their own actions. They made us what they did make us, by willing, not the end, but the requisite means; and we, when our habits are not too inveterate, can, by similarly willing the requisite means, make ourselves different. If they could place us under the influence of certain circumstances, we, in like manner, can place ourselves under the influence of other circumstances. We are exactly as capable of making our own character, _if we will_, as others are of making it for us.
Yes (answers the Owenite), but these words, "if we will," surrender the whole point: since the will to alter our own character is given us, not by any efforts of ours, but by circumstances which we can not help, it comes to us either from external causes, or not at all. Most true: if the Owenite stops here, he is in a position from which nothing can expel him.
Our character is formed by us as well as for us; but the wish which induces us to attempt to form it is formed for us; and how? Not, in general, by our organization, nor wholly by our education, but by our experience; experience of the painful consequences of the character we previously had; or by some strong feeling of admiration or aspiration, accidentally aroused. But to think that we have no power of altering our character, and to think that we shall not use our power unless we desire to use it, are very different things, and have a very different effect on the mind. A person who does not wish to alter his character, can not be the person who is supposed to feel discouraged or paralyzed by thinking himself unable to do it. The depressing effect of the fatalist doctrine can only be felt where there _is_ a wish to do what that doctrine represents as impossible. It is of no consequence what we think forms our character, when we have no desire of our own about forming it; but it is of great consequence that we should not be prevented from forming such a desire by thinking the attainment impracticable, and that if we have the desire, we should know that the work is not so irrevocably done as to be incapable of being altered.
And indeed, if we examine closely, we shall find that this feeling, of our being able to modify our own character _if we wish_, is itself the feeling of moral freedom which we are conscious of. A person feels morally free who feels that his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs; who, even in yielding to them, knows that he could resist; that were he desirous of altogether throwing them off, there would not be required for that purpose a stronger desire than he knows himself to be capable of feeling. It is of course necessary, to render our consciousness of freedom complete, that we should have succeeded in making our character all we have hitherto attempted to make it; for if we have wished and not attained, we have, to that extent, not power over our own character; we are not free. Or at least, we must feel that our wish, if not strong enough to alter our character, is strong enough to conquer our character when the two are brought into conflict in any particular case of conduct.
And hence it is said with truth, that none but a person of confirmed virtue is completely free.
The application of so improper a term as Necessity to the doctrine of cause and effect in the matter of human character, seems to me one of the most signal instances in philosophy of the abuse of terms, and its practical consequences one of the most striking examples of the power of language over our associations. The subject will never be generally understood until that objectionable term is dropped. The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the truth which the word Necessity puts out of sight, namely the power of the mind to co-operate in the formation of its own character, has given to its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of necessitarians. The latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of self-culture.
-- 4. There is still one fact which requires to be noticed (in addition to the existence of a power of self-formation) before the doctrine of the causation of human actions can be freed from the confusion and misapprehensions which surround it in many minds. When the will is said to be determined by motives, a motive does not mean always, or solely, the anticipation of a pleasure or of a pain. I shall not here inquire whether it be true that, in the commencement, all our voluntary actions are mere means consciously employed to obtain some pleasure or avoid some pain. It is at least certain that we gradually, through the influence of association, come to desire the means without thinking of the end; the action itself becomes an object of desire, and is performed without reference to any motive beyond itself. Thus far, it may still be objected that, the action having through association become pleasurable, we are, as much as before, moved to act by the anticipation of a pleasure, namely, the pleasure of the action itself. But granting this, the matter does not end here. As we proceed in the formation of habits, and become accustomed to will a particular act or a particular course of conduct because it is pleasurable, we at last continue to will it without any reference to its being pleasurable. Although, from some change in us or in our circumstances, we have ceased to find any pleasure in the action, or perhaps to anticipate any pleasure as the consequence of it, we still continue to desire the action, and consequently to do it. In this manner it is that habits of hurtful excess continue to be practiced although they have ceased to be pleasurable; and in this manner also it is that the habit of willing to persevere in the course which he has chosen, does not desert the moral hero, even when the reward, however real, which he doubtless receives from the consciousness of well-doing, is any thing but an equivalent for the sufferings he undergoes, or the wishes which he may have to renounce.
A habit of willing is commonly called a purpose; and among the causes of our volitions, and of the actions which flow from them, must be reckoned not only likings and aversions, but also purposes. It is only when our purposes have become independent of the feelings of pain or pleasure from which they originally took their rise, that we are said to have a confirmed character. "A character," says Novalis, "is a completely fashioned will:" and the will, once so fashioned, may be steady and constant, when the passive susceptibilities of pleasure and pain are greatly weakened or materially changed.