From “Essays Scientific and Philosophical.”
THE MORAL judgments which we form of the actions of other men are necessarily as imperfect as our predictions of their conduct; since no one can fully estimate the relative potency of heredity and environments, on the one side, and of the sense of duty and capacity of willing, on the other; and the consciousness of our own weakness in resisting the temptations which we feel most attractive to ourselves, should lead us to make large allowance for the frailties and shortcomings of others. There are too many, who, as old Butler pithily said:—
| “Compound for sins they are inclined to, | |
| By damning those they have no mind to.” |
It seems to me (as to Mr. Sidgwick, op. cit., p. 50) quite clear that on the automatist or determinist theory, such words as “ought,” “duty,” “responsibility,” have to be used, if used at all, in new significations. The welfare of that aggregate of automata which we call society may require that every individual automaton shall be prevented from doing what is injurious to it; and punishment for offenses actually committed may be reasonably inflicted as a deterrent from the repetition of such offenses by the individual or by others. But if the individual has in himself no power either to do the right or to avoid the wrong, and if the potency of that aggregate of feelings about actions as being “right or wrong” which is termed conscience, entirely depends upon “circumstances” over which he neither has, nor ever has had any control, I fail to see in what other sense he should be held “responsible” for doing what he knows that he “ought not” to have done, or for doing what he knows that he “ought” to have done, than a steam-engine, which breaks away from its “governor” in consequence of a sudden increase of steam pressure, or which comes to a stop through the bursting of its steam pipe, can be accounted responsible for the damage thence arising.
The idea of “responsibility,” on the other hand, which is entertained by mankind at large, rests upon the assumption, not only that each Ego has a conscience which recognizes a distinction between right and wrong, and which (according to the training it has received) decides what is right and what is wrong in each individual case, but also that he has a volitional power which enables him to intensify his sense of “duty” by fixing his attention upon it, and thus gives it a potency in determining his conduct which it might not have otherwise possessed. That this power is a part of the Ego’s “formed character,” and that it can only be exerted within certain limits, is fully admitted on the doctrine I advocate; but the responsibility of the Ego is shifted backwards to the share he has had in the formation of his character and in the determination of those limits. And here, again, the results of scientific investigation are in complete harmony with the precepts of the greatest of all religious teachers. For no one can study these with care, without perceiving that Jesus and Paul addressed themselves rather to the formation of the character than to the laying down rules for conduct; that they endeavored rather to cultivate the dispositions which should lead to right action than to fix rigid lines of duty, the enforcement of which under other circumstances might be not only unsuitable, but actually mischievous; and that they not only most fully recognize the power of each individual to direct the habitual course of his thoughts to cherish his nobler affections, and to repress his sensual inclinations, but made the possession of that power the basis of the entire system of Christian morality.
That system has been found to harmonize with the experience of the best and wisest of our race; which has proved its capability of strengthening every virtuous effort, of giving force to every noble aspiration, of aiding the resistance to the allurements of self-interest, and of keeping at bay the stronger temptations of vicious indulgence. The tendency of the automatist philosophy, on the other hand, which represents man as nothing but “a part of the great series of causes and effects, which, in unbroken continuity, compose that which is, and has been, and shall be,—the sum of existence,” seems to be no less certainly towards the discouragement of all determinate effort, either for individual self-improvement, or for the general welfare of the race. For though it fully recognizes, as factors in human action, the most elevated as well as the most degraded classes of motives, and gives all the encouragement to the culture of the one and to the repression of the other that faith in the uniformity of causation can afford, yet, by refusing to the Ego any capability of himself modifying the potency of those factors, it dries up the source of that sense of independence which springs from the conviction that man’s “volition counts for something as a condition in the course of events,” and leaves him a mere instrument in the hands of an inexorable fate.
To myself it seems as if nothing was wanting either in my own self-consciousness, or in what I know of the conscious experience of other men, to establish the existence of the “self-determining power” for which I contend. I cannot conceive of any kind of evidence of its existence more cogent than that which I already possess. And feeling assured that the sources of my belief in it lie deep down in the nature of every normally constituted human being, I cannot anticipate the time when that belief will be eliminated from the thought of mankind; when the words “ought,” “duty,” “responsibility,” “choice,” “self-control,” and the like, will cease to have the meaning we at present attach to them;—and when we shall really treat each other as automata who cannot help doing whatever our “heredity” and “environments” necessitate.
