The GOSPEL TRUTH A GENETIC HISTORY OF THE
NEW ENGLAND THEOLOGY
By
FRANK HUGH FOSTER
1907
CHAPTER IX:
The Development Of The Theory Of The Will
At the time at which we have now arrived in the progress of this history (1795), the air was full of the portents of the great controversy, commonly styled the Unitarian controversy, which was soon to engage the energies of the churches and to rend them into two hostile divisions. One brief campaign with an allied movement, the Universalists, had already been fought. It might have seemed as if such struggles were enough to exhaust the attention of our divines. But it was not so. Out of many a quiet pastor's study came a book, the product of profound reflections upon themes suggested by no immediate issue, which after a little called forth a reply from some other study where the same great themes had been meditated in all retirement and seclusion. So the debate went on; and many a movement of thought, destined in the end to find a close application to the practical necessities of troubled days, was carried on in entire unconsciousness of any such probable application.
One of these movements, in many respects the most important, certainly the most tragic, we must now turn aside to describe. It is that which resulted in great practical modifications of the theory of the will, as derived from Edwards, from which flowed other and great modifications in both theory and practice. Modifications of Edwards' views began with the very first writers who carried on his work, as we have already had occasion to remark. These became considerable in the process of time and brought the school to the very verge of a doctrine of genuine freedom. Many of the results of such a doctrine were actually incorporated in the received systems of theology. But the tragic element was not wanting, for upon the whole, even in the person of its final and greatest representative, Professor Edwards A. Park, the New England theology did not break loose from the substantial supralapsarianism in which Edwards had left it. Every great reasoner upon this theme believed himself to be in entire accord with Edwards. So profound was their admiration for their great leader that his successors scarcely conceived it possible that they should disagree with him, except in some small details of phraseology, or possibly, now and then, of thought. Whether they did differ or not we are soon to see; but the outcome of this intense loyalty to one man and one book was that they remained restricted by both phraseology and thought to the narrow limits there found. Their mighty struggles to escape, all incomprehensibly futile, remind one of nothing so much as of a lion caught in a net.
When we look at the so-called "New England" writers exclusively, we are in danger of thinking that they represent the whole of New England, and that Edwards' work upon the will was received with the universal conviction of its unanswerable greatness with which they were impressed. But this was not so, and the progress made in the theory of the will was the result of the action and reaction of many minds, of which some were decidedly hostile to the whole Edwardean theology. For twelve years the silence of the opposing party was unbroken, and then appeared an Examination by Rev. James Dana, of Wallingford, Conn., which very sharply and effectively called Edwards to account. Its view, of Edwards' theory was precisely that taken in this history. It rested upon the contrary theory of a self-determination of the will, by which was intended a real and originative causality, conceived as the special and distinctive peculiarity of man. The examination begins with an inquiry into the connection of motives with the action of the will, and an indication is soon given that, in the examiner's opinion, President Edwards must view every volition as an immediate and necessary effect of the supreme cause, God. This intimation soon becomes a vigorous argument, and the chief merit of the book is its strongly maintained thesis that upon the Edwardean foundation the divine efficiency becomes the only efficiency in the universe. Finally he asks:
To what extrinsic cause, then, or to whom, are the volitions of men to be ascribed, since they are not the cause of them themselves? By whom or what is the state of men's will determined? According to Mr. Edwards, it is the strongest motive from without. But motives to choice are exhibited to the mind by some agent. By whom are they exhibited? In regard to sinful volitions, we know that one man enticeth another, and Satan enticeth all mankind. But this will not be given as an answer to our question, since the sinful act of one sinner in enticing another, and of Satan in tempting all men, must be determined by a previous cause--an antecedent highest motive exhibited by some other agent. (Though, by the way, it may be difficult to show how one man can be the cause of sin in another, when he cannot be the cause of it in himself.) What we are inquiring after is the cause of "the first and leading sinful volition, which determines the whole affair." Nor is there any stop, till we arrive at the first cause, whose immediate conduct Mr. Edwards saith is first in the series of events, connected with nothing preceding.
Edwards was himself so merciless in the pursuance of any infelicity of diction into which an adversary might fall, like the selection of the word "self-determination" to express originative and causal action on the will's part, that it may be interesting to remark that Dana held him squarely to the implications of that remarkable passage in which he identified the choice and the motive. Dana writes:
As no authority can be of equal weight to overthrow this main position as the author's own, we beg the reader would consider the following passage; which is so full to our purpose that we are saved the trouble of a labored confutation of the principle alluded to. "I have rather chose to express myself thus, that the will always is as the greatest apparent good, or as what appears most agreeable, than to say that the will is determined by the greatest apparent good or by what seems most agreeable, because an appearing most agreeable or pleasing to the mind, and the mind's preferring and choosing, seem hardly to be properly and perfectly distinct. If strict propriety of speech be insisted on, it may more properly be said that the voluntary action, which is the immediate fruit--and consequence of the mind's volition or choice, is determined by that which appears most agreeable, than the preference or choice itself." Here it is fully declared that, "properly speaking," volition and the highest motive are not distinct things--that the former is only as the latter, and not determined by it. Motive cannot be the ground and determiner of volition and at the same time the act of volition itself. It is not the cause of volition, but the thing, "if strict propriety of speech be insisted on." Instead of the strongest motive's being the cause of volition, the real truth is that volition is the cause of external action.
And on this basis he later affirms that the whole question, What determines the will? is "unanswered, and yet returns."
It is unnecessary to quote at greater length from Dana, since the work which it called out, the Essay on Moral Agency, by Stephen West, of Stockbridge (1772), was an independent treatise rather than a detailed reply.
West's essay is divided into two parts, of which the second is occupied with the problem of the existence of evil. It takes the general Hopkinsian position that sin is the necessary means of the greatest good. The first part is occupied with the theory of the will, and hence particularly calls for our present attention.
West professes his general agreement with Edwards. He agrees with him in the first and determinative peculiarity of his treatise, in the view of the constitution of the mind. Evidence of this appears upon the earliest pages of the book. He rejects the idea that "the action and preference of the mind" may be "so different from each other as that they might properly be treated of as cause and effect." He speaks of the "moral beauty and deformity of affections." Again, motives "obtain the appellation of motives only in the mind's feeling their influence, or being in actual motion in view of them." "When the mind feels or perceives the influence of a motive, it is then too late for the motive to produce effects in the mind--exciting it to motion, choice, or action; the mind being already moved, the will exerted, towards some common object; and choice having gained existence." "In the mind's perceiving anything . . . is really all the choice which is ever made of it."
In his definitions of moral agency, while in the main agreeing with Edwards, West reminds us frequently of Hopkins, who was the friend under whose influence he had made the transfer of himself from Arminianism to Calvinism. "When we talk of moral agency . . . it is agreeable to the common sense . . . of men to consider him [man] as in exercise." Freedom is made to reside not in "liberty to do as we please," as Edwards makes it, but in "spontaneous, voluntary exertion." "To be free and to be voluntary in any action whatsoever, whether internal or external, I suppose are one and the same thing." But, whereas in Hopkins this position looked toward greater freedom of the will, in West it looks toward less.
Advancing still farther upon the path which Edwards had marked out, but still in essential accord with him, West emphasizes the fact that we can have no consciousness of a power to choose "distinguishable from actual choosing." He says:
Minds are conversant only with their own ideas: they perceive and are immediately conscious of nothing beside their own exercises and ideas. However they may reason and infer--concerning other things and form premises and make conclusions with a great degree of justice or precision, still those things of which they attain knowledge in such a way as this are not the objects of direct, immediate perception. If liberty is what we perceive tactually to exist in the mind, it can certainly be perceived no otherwise than in its exercise: just as a power of choice can be perceived only in actual choosing.
He thus attempts to cut the nerve of the argument for freedom from consciousness.
West's discussions of the subject of power form the most original and important part of his book. He was brought to some difference with Edwards upon certain points, but with regard to the relations of power to moral agency he remains exactly where Edwards was. "Power . . . is not essential to moral agency, virtue, or vice." It is an external matter. "When an event taketh place upon our choosing it and in consequence of our choice, according to the use and import of the word in common language, we have the power of that event, or power to produce it." "Power implieth a connection between the volitions of the agent and the event which is the object of the volition." It was natural that the question should arise upon this view of the matter: Who established this connection"? West has removed from the idea of power the idea of efficient causation, so far as man is concerned, when he has said that we have power over an event if it "taketh place upon our choosing it," for we have no more real causation under such a definition than under John Stuart Mill's "invariable consequence" upon unchanged antecedents. But the question as to the efficient cause of an event cannot be suppressed. Accordingly West says: "Power, therefore, strictly speaking, is no more than a law of constant divine operation." That is, when I will, God operates in a predetermined manner, producing the corresponding event. He thus introduces the idea of occasionalism, derived from Edwards or directly from Berkeley, to explain our efficiency.
And now we have arrived at the critical point of the whole question. West has left us no true efficiency in the external world; will he maintain the same position as to the internal world? This is the next step, and it is boldly taken in the following discussion of motives. After a number of useful distinctions in respect to motives, he says:
It appeareth that there is an utter impropriety in saying that the mind is governed and determined by motive, if the expression is designed to represent motive as the cause, and choice or volition its effect . . . To view the matter in such a light as this would lead to evident inconsistency and confusion. Motives are not the causes of volitions. When we are inquiring into the sources of things and the cause of their existence; as in the natural, so in the moral world, we are compelled to resolve all into the divine disposal and a certain law or method of constant divine agency and operation. What are usually termed secondary causes have no productive agency or efficiency in them . . . When motives are represented as the causes of volition . . . the word cause . . . implieth nothing more than an occasion of the event.
Here, then, lie West's difference from Edwards, and his contribution to the thinking of the school, the idea that moral agency consists in exercises, and that these are the action of the deity as the sole efficient cause.
So far as the work is intended as a reply to Dana, it accepts at this important point the doctrine to which Dana intended to drive the Edwardeans, that God was the true efficient cause of volitions.
The relation of this position to Hopkins' doctrine of the will is even more interesting. Hopkins contributed all the elements of this conclusion which West has only been consistent in drawing; but he did not himself draw it. He taught that God is the cause of our volitions, but he did not say exactly how, whether through motives or immediate agency, and evidently intended to leave place for the agency of man. He had place in his philosophy for second causes, and a difference between God's immediate and mediate agency. Yet he says: "All power is in God, and all creatures which act or move, exist and move or are moved in and by him." And again: "The divine hand of power and energy is as really and as much concerned and exerted . . . as if no instrument, agent, or second cause were used or had any concern in the matter." While he was thus moving toward a doctrine of freedom, as already said, his movement was quite capable of being reversed, and West reversed it. He reversed it effectively for more than one theological generation; and although at last some of the later members of the school refused to follow in the direction thus prescribed to them, the influence of Edwards prevented them from giving a consistent form to the new truths they dimly saw.
The controversy between Dana and West did not stop here, for Dana replied with an Examination . . . Continued, which considered some topics of the controversy more fully, particularly defining self-determination better, and discussing the questions connected with moral evil and the divine foreknowledge. He did not, however, make any large contributions to the theme, nor did West when, in an appendix to a new edition of his Essay, he took special notice of Dana's second book. He merely reiterated Edwards' arguments, especially that of the infinite series involved in the idea of self-determination. The matter was left where it was before, every suggestion of a better view of the subject being rejected with emphasis.
Of course, so downright contradiction of the protest which Dana had attempted to put in against the strangling of all human freedom by Edwards' treatise could not be allowed to pass without another effort to give it effective utterance. This was made by Samuel West, of New Bedford, in his Essays on Liberty and Necessity, in the year 1793. It was the fruit of long reflection and no mere hasty reply to an obnoxious tract. It is said that he disputed with his teacher, who superintended his preparation for college, against the common necessitarian ideas of his day. He probably had embraced the old Arminian system which Stephen West had also earlier embraced, from which arises his reputation as a "Unitarian." The book was brief, exercised but little influence, and has now become exceedingly rare; but Dr. Edwards, who answered it, called it the ablest thing which had appeared upon that side. It was in fact revolutionary, and ought to have called forth that decisive change in New England psychology which it was reserved for Burton to produce. But it suffered the misfortune of being ahead of its times.
West begins his treatise by proposing a threefold division of the faculties of the mind. Stephen West, he says, confounds the perception of an object, in which we are entirely passive, with a volition, in which we are active.
Hence he observes that there are three main faculties of the mind--"the perception, the propension, and the Will."
The last only is properly the active faculty of the mind . . . The active faculty is exerted to acquire many of our perceptions, but still perceptions are not acts of the will . . . In demonstrating the truth of a proposition, a man is active in orderly arranging the several steps of the demonstration; but when he has done that, the perception of the truths demonstrated depends not upon an act of his will. By propension I mean to include inclination, affection, passion. These are all entirely distinct from the will. That bodily appetites, such as hunger, thirst, drowsiness, etc., are involuntary, I suppose will be allowed; and we may say the same of mental propensions, such as fear, love, anger, etc . . . A man may love a person whom he knows to be utterly unworthy of his affections, and may really choose to eradicate this propension from his breast; and yet he may find this passion rising in his breast in direct opposition to his will and choice.
This is a perfectly clear and comprehensive description of the essential elements of the case. And, if it was, as it may have been, derived from Locke, it is clearer than his. West also seems to see the confusing effect of Edwards' philosophy upon his theory of the will, for he says: "He everywhere confounds the propensity of the mind with volition. Hence he tells us, `The affections are only certain modes of the exercise of the will;' whereas I think the propensities of the mind, whether you call them inclinations, affections, or passions, are as different from the exercises of the will as light is from darkness." But he fails to bring out the exact nature of the fallacy under which Edwards labored, for he goes on to say: "It is very evident . . . that the will and the propensities are so distinct that they may be in direct opposition to each other; and that though these propensities may be so strong as to hinder us from doing what we choose, yet they cannot take away the freedom of the will; that is, the freedom of the will, or a self-determining power, is consistent with the strongest habits of virtue or vice." He adds below: "I believe, now, that it will appear, my notion of self-determination is very different from that which Mr. Edwards opposes, being a kind of medium between that and the doctrine of necessity." There is nothing further upon this point. A positive, Edwards-like annihilation of his adversary was called for if West could hope to make an impression upon the obstinacy with which the New England writers were still prepared to follow their great leader; but it was not forthcoming.
Upon the basis of this division of the mind, yet without consistent application of it, West now proceeds to make several forcible objections to Edwards' theories. His fundamental objection to necessity goes to the bottom of the subject. He says: "We certainly feel ourselves agents, feel ourselves free and accountable for our conduct we feel ourselves capable of praise and blame. How all these things can be reconciled to a doctrine of necessity I cannot conceive."
In opposition to Edwards' theory he therefore teaches that the will is self-determined. He expresses his meaning in a variety of ways. He says: "By liberty or freedom we mean a power of acting, willing, or choosing: and by a power of acting we mean that, when all circumstances necessary for action have taken place, then the mind can act or not act." Again: "The sense in which we use self-determination is simply this, that we ourselves will or choose; that we ourselves act; that is, that we are agents and not mere passive beings; or, in other words, that we are the determiners in the active voice, and not the determined in the passive voice." Again: "There is no infallible connection between motive and action." He defines self-determination by reference to the Deity, who, he says, "has a self-determining power . . . being the first cause." He often says "Volition is no effect." And, finally, he holds that by divine communication we have the same self-determining power, or power of first causation, which the Deity has. Certainly these distinctions are clear enough to have called attention, if anything could have done so, to Edwards' misinterpretation of his antagonists, and to the merely verbal character of his argument when he pressed the term "self-determination" in a way acute and strong, but in no relation to their real meaning. If there is any idea expressed by the phrase "first cause" whatever, then it is no absurdity to apply it to man, whether the application is correct or not.
In defense of this doctrine West denies the Edwardean doctrine that motives are the causes of volitions. He maintains that, if motives are causes, they must be efficient causes, and hence minds, which is absurd. He appeals to experience to show that "when motives have done all that they can do," the mind may act or not act. If volition is an effect, then man is passive in willing; and if so, then he is active in nothing else; that is, he is no agent. If volition were an effect, we could not be causes of effects, and so could never have the idea of cause. He even reduces Edwards to the absurdity of the infinite series, which may be said to be carrying the war into Africa. If volition is the activity of the mind, as Edwards maintains, and at the same time caused from abroad, then our only activity is caused. But it is caused by some mind, which in its activity needs another mind to cause it, which in its turn needs another mind to cause it, and so ad infinitum. He also says that motives cannot be compared so as to obtain the strongest motive which Edwards seeks as the cause of action.
In order to compare motives together to enable us to determine which is the strongest, the motives compared must all belong to the same faculty of the soul; and if they belong to different faculties of the mind no comparison can be made between them. Thus we find ourselves possessed of two different faculties, reason and propensity. Objects that are agreeable to our propensities are easily compared: thus of different kinds of food . . . we can easily tell which we have the greatest relish for . . . We can also compare things that are agreeable to reason and judgment . . . But how can we compare things together that belong to different faculties of the mind? For example, one has an inordinate thirst after strong drink though his reason tells him it will ruin his health, his estate, and his reputation, etc.
Turning now to the work of Stephen West, Samuel West notices the idea that the efficient cause in human volitions is the Deity. He himself prefers the doctrine that the Deity produces all the requisites for action in the mind, and that then it is capable of acting or not acting. But, he says, if volition is the immediate action of the Deity, then there is no action in the mind but the divine action, and, since action is essential to the life of every mind, it will follow that the Deity is the only living principle in the mind, and so in the universe, and that there is no such thing as a creation. Hence there is no Creator who has made and who governs all things by his power and providence.
But Edwards would have objected to West's arguments against necessity that he himself was defending only certainty. This leads West to consider the natural and moral necessity and ability taught by Edwards, which, in agreement with Dana, he finds to be one and the same thing. He also maintains that the certainty of future events does not involve their necessity. "The deity," he says, "being himself uncaused, must be possessed of an underived, self-existing knowledge, which is independent of any cause or medium whatever."
Thus an attack, strong in its main positions, however defective in amplitude of statement or dialectic form, had been made upon the New England theory and upon its latest exponent. Would it produce any effect?
Upon one man at least it produced an effect; but he was only led to reject it as a part of the old "Arminianism" against which he had long set himself. This was the younger Edwards, who came to the defense of his father and of Stephen West in a considerable treatise entitled A Dissertation concerning Liberty and Necessity, etc. It was strictly a reply to West and other Arminians, and therefore does not present any distinct and systematic theory of the will. It was, however, said by Professor Park to be the best exposition of President Edwards' theory. We may dismiss it for this reason with the briefer consideration, occupying ourselves with the points in which it lends its aid to the current already so strongly setting in the work of Stephen West. As a reply it is a masterpiece. It has the Edwardean thoroughness. Its favorite method is to show that West really meant, and often said, precisely what President Edwards had said, and that nothing but consistency is necessary to make him a full-fledged Edwardean. Its keenness makes it constantly interesting, and even absorbing, to everyone who loves thought. And yet, fundamentally, it concerns itself with words rather than realities, and Edwards fails to understand the important and new truth which his adversary was so richly offering him.
The great contribution which West had made to the discussion of the will was the proposal of the division of the faculties of the mind into three--perception, propension, and will. This made no impression upon Edwards. He noticed it, but did not seem to understand it. And yet, by that strange mental obliviousness by which men repeatedly miss great opportunities in every department of human thought, he once came near both understanding and accepting it, only, however, to do neither! When engaged in refuting West's theory as to our choice between objects of equal eligibility, he says that President Edwards ascribed "a great part of our volitions to disposition, inclination, passion, and habit, meaning certain biases of the mind distinct from volition and prior to it." If he could have seen that they were radically distinct from volition, he would have been ready to understand West. But he let the issue drop without adequate thought. He left to others to reap the benefits and the glory of accomplishing this forward step.
West's irrefutable argument from self-consciousness is evaded in the same way as Stephen West would have evaded it. Samuel West had expressed himself as if freedom were the object of immediate consciousness, for he said, "We feel ourselves free." But he had also expressed his idea in better form by saying that we "feel ourselves accountable for our conduct, and capable of praise and blame." Hence he would reason to freedom. This is the decisive argument, and was made by Lotze, for example, the turning-point of the argument for freedom. But Edwards contents himself with bringing out the fact that we cannot be conscious of freedom, but only of volitions. He does not enter into the significant and vital question which West had started: What is the freedom we must conceive human agents to have to render them responsible? This is the crucial failure of his reply.
West's arguments against the causative power of motives seem to have made more impression upon him. In reply he has recourse to Stephen West's doctrine of occasionalism. He says that President Edwards has "explained himself to mean by cause no other than occasion, reason, or previous circumstance necessary for volition." It is true that President Edwards did include every antecedent of a volition in its cause, and that he can be interpreted, as his son here interprets him, by straining his language. Hence arose that school of Edwardeans of which mention is to be made at length later. Dr. Edwards constantly reverts to this explanation, and it constitutes his standard interpretation of his father. That it was false we have already seen. Indeed, Dr. Edwards only presents it in this instance to cancel it effectually almost in the article of proposing it; for he continues:
I do not pretend that motives are the efficient causes of volition. If any expression importing this have dropped from any defender of the connection between motive and volition, either it must have happened through inadvertence, or he must have meant that motive is an efficient cause in no other sense than rain and the rays of the sun are the efficient cause of the growth of vegetables, or than medicine is the efficient cause of health.
Now, in accordance with the Berkeleian idealism which pervaded, whether consciously or unconsciously, the whole New England school at this point of its history, physical causes had no efficient power. Hence Edwards could deny that motives--which, it should be strictly marked, he puts in the same category with these physical causes--had efficient causation. But if one was not an idealist, and attached to the physical causes of events real power and a consequent efficiency, then to him the causation of motives became an efficient causation, and West's interpretation of Edwards must become his interpretation. Dr. Edwards proceeds now to carry out his line of defence to its consequences. If motives have no efficient causation, where is the causative force efficiently producing volitions? He says:
It is denied that man himself is the efficient cause of it [volition]. He who established the laws of nature so-called is the primary cause of all things. What is meant by the efficient cause in any case in which an effect is produced according to established laws? For instance, what is the efficient cause of the sensation of heat from fire? If it be answered: Fire is the efficient cause; I also answer that the motive is the efficient cause of the volition and doing aforesaid. If it be said that the Great First Cause is the efficient of the sensation of heat, the same Great Agent is the efficient cause of volition, in the same way, by a general law establishing a connection between motives and volitions, as there is a connection between fire in certain situations and the sensation of heat.
Here the son is true to the father, who said that the difference between causation in the moral and physical realms lay, not in the nature of the connection, but in the nature of the things connected. Thus the milder interpretation proposed by Edwards really vanishes, and the critics of the original treatise of the elder Edwards are abundantly justified.
But Dr. Edwards goes still farther. He has banished efficient causation from the physical universe, and he now proceeds to banish it from the universe at large. The Deity, says Edwards, "is no more the efficient cause of his own volitions than he is of his own existence." How mightily the lion is struggling in the entanglements of the invisible net! This is utter confusion of thought, and should have brought Edwards back to the error lurking in his premises. But he remains entangled in the result of his own consistency. God is, however, he grants, the efficient cause of our volitions. Certainly, these sentences constitute a reductio ad absurdum, perpetrated by Edwards himself, greater than all the infinite series of his father together!
Emmons closes this drift of thought. He puts the theory of the divine agency in its extremest form. Men act freely in view of motives. They act freely because they act voluntarily, since these two are one and the same thing. When they act in view of motives, God "exhibits the motives and then excites them to act voluntarily in view of the motives exhibited," "for the bare perception of motive is incapable of producing volition." Thus God "produces" our volitions. For producing, Emmons often uses the word "creating," and the operations of God in creating the material world and governing it are made exactly parallel with his operations in renewing the hearts of men. He expressly rejects the idea "that God only upholds moral agents in existence and preserves their active powers without exerting any influence upon their wills which moves them to act in every instance according to his pleasure." "Adam could not be the efficient cause of his own volition."
But this is only a part of Emmons. Extreme as his statements are, they must be understood in the light of equally extreme statements upon the other side. He also says: "How God operates on our minds in our free voluntary exercises, we are unable to comprehend." He proposes therefore to hold the fact that God so operates, and also to hold every other fact, let them be consistent or inconsistent. Therefore he teaches that God has made men free moral agents. They are this in the same sense that he is. Under his universal agency, human beings have a true agency. In the divine mind this consists in volition, and in the human mind it consists in the same. Moral agency and moral character consist in "exercises." God works in men to lead them to perform the ordinary actions of life, such as sowing, planting, etc., in the same way as he does to produce the religious actions, such as repentance. Man is as free in the one class as the other. He has all the freedom of which he can conceive.
Up to this point the tendency of New England theology has been to destroy more and more completely the freedom of the will. The two tendencies characteristic of Calvinism and Berkeleianism--to exalt the agency of God, and to deny to second causes efficiency and even existence--have been reducing man more and more to the position of a mere puppet upon the stage of human history. But now there was introduced by a remarkable book, written by an obscure country minister, the idea which was finally to reverse the current and set this theology in motion toward a doctrine of freedom. It did not break with the prevailing necessitarianism, and so was not denied a hearing at the very start, as its predecessors upon the same path had been. This was Asa Burton's Essays on Some of the First Principles of Metaphysicks, Ethicks, and Theology (1824) which is one of the classics of New England theology, and one of the great influential philosophical books of the world.
All the previous writers had maintained the twofold division of the mind into understanding and will. As we have seen, Samuel West's clear statement of the threefold division had been without effect. The common-sense which had directed what opposition was made to the prevailing necessitarianism had had no sufficient theoretical basis in a sounder psychology. Burton supplied this basis. After showing that there are faculties in the mind, and developing briefly the fact that there are three main faculties; the understanding, the heart, and the will--he takes up each of these faculties in order. In his treatment of the understanding we find him determining the terminology of a long line of successors. The special treatment of the "taste," as he calls the sensibility, begins upon page 53. He classifies the emotions, desires, etc., as properly belonging to one class of mental affections, and declares that they must have a cause, which cause is the "taste." This he defines as "that preparedness, adaptedness, or disposition of the mind by which the mind is affected agreeably or disagreeably when objects are presented to it." At a later point he distinguishes sharply between the "heart" and the Will. It is evident, he says, "that neither a pleasant nor a painful sensation is a volition."
Volitions and desires are not operations of the same faculty . . . Though desire has an object, yet its object is not an action nor an effect . . . I may desire meat or drink . . . and yet not one effect follow necessary to obtain them. But when I will these effects, they follow, they are produced . . . Whether objects shall please or disgust us does not depend upon anything in us except our nature; but whether they shall be chosen or not depends upon our pleasure . . . Pleasure and pain are not produced by choice, neither can choice prevent them. Whether we will or not, some objects will please us and others will disgust us. But whether they are chosen or not depends upon our pleasure.
Burton thus brings out distinctly, though not with absolute correctness, the fact that there is a distinction between the sensibility and the will. We shall see that through the ambiguity of the word "pleasure" he seems to state here more than he actually does.
Varying the order of Burton's discussion somewhat, we now advance to his definition of liberty. Here he makes a very decided improvement upon any of his predecessors. Liberty, he says, is not to be predicated of the intellect or of the desires. The operations of these faculties is necessary. Neither does liberty consist in volition. A person may be bound and so have no power of motion, though he wills it. He is not then at liberty, and hence volitions do not constitute liberty. Neither is it a power which the mind possesses, as to act or not to act. Burton distinguishes between liberty of action and liberty of will. We have liberty of will when we can choose objects according to our wish--that is, our strongest wish or desire. This, evidently, can never be taken from us, and we, therefore always have it. Liberty of action is the privilege of acting externally according to our volitions; and of this we may be deprived.
We are thus introduced to Burton's theory of the will. The action of the taste is necessary. Objects excite our desires, and our desires move our wills. Hence the taste is the "spring of action in all moral agents," and operates as the cause of volitions. "The will is only an executive faculty; . . . its office is to obey the commands of the heart." The clearest and completest statement of the theory may be thus condensed:
This internal cause [the taste] by its operation produces every volition . . . Between this cause and volition, God has established an infallible connection . . . Hence the reason why the liberty of the will [in the sense of a liberty of willing according to our pleasure] can never be abridged . . . This connection is moral necessity, and this necessity renders liberty of will absolutely sure and certain.
We are thus left by Burton still in the toils of Edwards' necessity. He has corrected, one by one, the minor errors of his predecessors, having rejected the position of Hopkins, that freedom consists in voluntariness; of Emmons, that our mind is a chain of exercises (the extremest result of the hereditary Berkeleianism), and that our volitions are "created" by God. He has distinguished between the necessity of the operation of the intellect and that of the will. But still the will remains necessitated through its dependence upon the taste. Hence, so far as the theory of the will is concerned, he has given but little relief. It seems the fate of all sound theological progress to move with exceeding slowness, by almost infinitesimal increments. It is as in animal development, where the "variation" is generally minute. But, as we shall soon see, by the distinction established between the taste and the will he has prepared the way for an altogether new conception, which he did not himself attain, and which introduces ultimately the idea of freedom in its true form. There was need of still another laborer before the wide-reaching consequences of Burton's new truth could be brought out.
This successor to Burton's labors and completer of his work was Nathaniel W. Taylor, the most original, powerful, and widely influential mind which New England theology ever possessed. He derived his impulse to productive work upon the will from Burton, and alone proved able to effect anything in the further development of the doctrine. But he was not solely dependent upon Burton for he stood in the succession of Yale teachers, and had been brought by his predecessors in this great school to a new philosophical position--to the final abandonment of the Berkeleianism which had been so influential, and so balefully so, up to this time. Dwight had been familiar with English and Scotch philosophy, and the great master Reid, and had laid the foundation of the philosophy of common sense, which Taylor adopted, and which became the great offensive weapon of New England apology as well as its great instrument of constructive reasoning. Day, Fitch, and Goodrich had taken part in the discussion of the will, and had cleared the ground somewhat for Taylor. With all the advantage derived from a new philosophy and a new method, Taylor, having once seen the wide-reaching consequences of Burton's discoveries, was able to draw them without embarrassment and apply them courageously both in theory and in practice.
Taylor followed Burton in adopting the threefold division of the mind. There must be something in the mind of the sinner to which the gospel could appeal, some neutral point not thoroughly corrupted with the corruption of his moral nature, though that corruption, in respect to the will, was entire. Such a neutral point Taylor found in the sensibility, whence the will might be reached. This was a position which commended itself to him because he was profoundly interested in the work of converting men, in which as a pastor and evangelist of great power and eloquence he had long been variously engaged.
Prepared thus to perceive and escape the fundamental fallacy of Edwards, Taylor was ready for various improvements upon his predecessors. He corrected the tendency which had done so much to make theology impossible, by pronouncing for human efficiency. "Moral agents," he says, "are the proximate efficient causes of their own acts." He does not hold them to be the sole efficient agents, or the ultimate, but the proximate, having a true agency. The same efficiency he also ascribes to material objects. "My mind inclines to the belief of the efficiency of second causes." An argument in favor of this is "our consciousness of the existence of created agents of one sort," viz., ourselves.
In possessing this agency, the soul possesses "power to the contrary," or, in any definite choice which it makes, acts under no necessity but with power to make the contrary choice equally with the choice actually made, the circumstances of the choice remaining unaltered. Taylor said, in order to avoid the evasions of Edwards: "A man not only can if he will, but he can if he won't." He says:
Moral agency implies free agency--the power of choice--the power to choose morally wrong as well as morally right under every possible influence to prevent such choice or action . . . I now speak of preventing sin in moral beings, free moral agents, who can sin under every possible influence from God to prevent their sinning.
At the same time, Dr. Taylor does not deny the influence of motives. The system under which we live is a system of moral influence, of law possessing authority and uttering commands designed to influence men. In some way also, however impossible to understand or explain, the moral system, including free moral agency, with its "power to the contrary," secures certainty as to future moral events. Moral government "is an influence which is designed and fitted to give, not the necessity, but merely the certainty of its effect. How this is secured Dr. Taylor does not say. He objects to the theory that it is produced through motives, and prefers to say, "through the constitution of man and the circumstances in which he acts. To these sources we ourselves refer all our actions. How the constitution and circumstances of man are managed to secure a definite volition in every case is the point left unexplained. The theory, as a theory, is therefore still defective, the idea of freedom, so clearly and decidedly advanced, being left altogether unadjusted to the sovereignty and foreknowledge of God. The crux of the New England theology begins therefore to appear in this hitherto unequaled thinker. Will he be able to resolve the difficulty, or will the lion, now grown greater and more powerful, still prove himself unable to escape the net in which he is enmeshed?
Meantime Taylor holds to the old distinction between natural and moral ability. The natural ability is the true power; the moral ability, the condition of the will. A man is morally unable to will one thing, such as to love God, while he is at the same time willing the opposite thing, such as to love himself supremely. The real difficulty in spiritual struggles consists in the obstinacy of the will, or the actual preference of other things to the service and glory of God.
Taylor has thus seized upon the great advance made by Burton, in adopting the threefold division of the mind, and has at the same time freed himself from the necessitarianism in which Burton had remained, by breaking the bond which in Burton's scheme still connected the action of the will with the condition of the sensibility. While still a most intense admirer of Edwards, he has broken with his distinctive idea also--with the infallible connection between the greatest apparent good and the volition. He stands for a true freedom, upon the basis of consciousness, and will allow nothing to interfere with its reality. But he stands at the same time, upon quite other grounds, for the previous certainty of all human actions.
Another writer, more a psychologist than a theologian, who accepted Burton's new division of the faculties of the mind, and contributed to liberate our philosophy and theology from thraldom to Edwards, was Thomas C. Upham, professor for many years in Bowdoin College. In his Philosophical and Practical Treatise on the Will (1834) he issued one of the first original and comprehensive contributions of American scholarship to modern psychology. It embraced descriptions of the phenomena of the mind drawn from a wide range of reading, and was not written with a view of sustaining some preconceived theory. Though not without a purpose, it was not so occupied with its purpose as to select its material with reference to that alone, and confine itself to a single and narrow line of inquiry. It was more largely influenced than many later productions by the conception of psychology which is now controlling, viz., that it is a chapter in the natural history of the soul.
Upham begins with the "General Nature of the Will," in which he sets forth the existence and general relations of the three faculties of the mind, intellect, sensibility, and will. All parts and powers of the mind are connected. The intellectual part is the foundation of the others. The intellect reaches the will through the sensibilities. When an object is perceived, the emotions are excited, upon which follow the desires, and then the will acts. It is an example of the breadth of Upham's view that he pauses here, in the onward movement of his theme, to note that, while the intellect acts on the sensibility, this reacts upon the intellect. The will itself is the controlling power of the mind which maintains the harmony of the mind. It "is not meant to express anything separate from the mind," and may be defined as "the mental power or susceptibility by which we put forth volitions." The term "volition," designating a "simple state of the mind," admits of no definition.
After a concluding chapter on the distinction between the desires and the volitions, necessary in those times, Upham advanced to his second part, in which, by a long discussion of the universality of law, and of various specific laws, he arrives at the conclusion that there are laws of the will. This view is contrasted in his mind with the view that the actions of the will are "without respect to antecedent, and regulated by no conditions." The laws considered are those of causality, those found in moral government, those implied in the prescience of the Deity and the foresight of men, in the sciences relating to human conduct, and those intimated by consciousness, and the influence of motives. In all this wide range of discussion the central idea is that brought out in the following extract:
Every moral government implies, in the first place, a ruler, a governor, some species of supreme authority. The term government itself, separate from any qualifying epithet, obviously expresses the fact that there are some beings governed, which is inconceivable without the correlative of a higher and governing power. And what is true of all other government is certainly not less so of that species of government which is denominated moral. In all moral government, therefore, there must undoubtedly be some supreme authority to which those who are governed are amenable.
Now if men are under government, they are under law. To be governed is obviously to be regulated, guided, or controlled, in a greater or less degree. To say that men are governed and are at the same time exempt from law, is but little short of a verbal contradiction, and is certainly a real one. But when we speak of men as being under laws, we do not mean to assert a mere abstraction. We mean to express something actually existing; in other words, we intend to assert the fact, that the actions of men, whatever may be true of their freedom, are in some way or other reached by an effective supervision. But when we consider the undenied and undoubted dependence of the outward act on the inward volition, we very naturally and properly conclude that the supervision of the outward act is the result of the antecedent supervision of the inward principle of will; in other words, the will has its laws.
With this principle copiously proved and definitely laid down, but without attempt to enumerate or describe the laws themselves, Upham passes to the topic of the freedom of the will. Freedom, he says, is the name of a simple idea (here recurring to Locke's phraseology), and therefore is indefinable. But it is not impossible to gain a tolerably correct view of what Upham meant by freedom. Although he wanders off into a discussion of "mental harmony," by which he means what the Germans designate by their term reale Freiheit, in which the powers all co-operate under the guidance of conscience in perfect union with one another, and declares this the only condition in which true freedom can be realized, it is evident on the whole that he means by freedom a true power of causality. He proves it by man's moral nature, gaining evidence of it from the feelings of approval and disapproval, those of remorse, the mere existence of the abstract ideas of right and wrong, the feeling of moral obligation, and men's views of crimes and punishments. He adduces to the same end evidence from language, from occasional suspension of the will's acts, from our control over our own motives, from our attempts to influence other men, and from the language of the Scriptures. And at a later point he also employs the word "self-determining" power to express his doctrine, though he objects to that use of the word against which Edwards had argued. And, while he defers the whole matter of the consistency of the will's subjection to law with the fact of freedom, he affirms that they are consistent, using Emmons' appeal to reason for the idea of law, and to consciousness for the knowledge of freedom. An interesting Part IV on the "Power of the Will" closes the work.
The ideas of Taylor were taken up at Oberlin by President Finney. He adopted the division of the mind into intellect, sensibility, and will. He criticized Edwards' distinction between natural and moral ability, and reduced them, upon the basis of Edwards' philosophy, to one and the same thing. His definition of freedom was as follows:
Free will implies the power of originating and deciding our own choices, and of exercising our own sovereignty in every instance of choice upon moral questions . . . The sequences of choice or volition are always under the law of necessity, and unless the will is free, man has no freedom; and if he has no freedom, he is not a moral agent.
The argument from consciousness for freedom had not escaped the attention even of the Berkeleian period; and we have had occasion to note in Stephen West close distinctions relative to consciousness of power. Now that our theology had passed over to the new basis of the Scotch school fresh discussions of consciousness might be expected. Finney occupied himself with them somewhat, but gives a rather uncertain answer to the question whether we are actually conscious of freedom. He says: "Consciousness gives us the reasons of the affirmation that liberty is an attribute of the actions of the will." This is probably the phrase by which we gain the true interpretation of another phrase of Finney's: "Man is conscious of possessing the powers of a moral agent." The freedom of the will is an affirmation of the reason upon consciousness of the phenomena which pass on within us.
Finney also maintained the perfect certainty of all future volitions, which are embraced in the purposes of God, so that God's foreknowledge of what will be done depends upon his purposes as to what he will himself do. In respect to all these subjects, however, there is no philosophical discussion; but Finney contents himself with the affirmation of what he regards simple and indisputable truth.
Finney's successor, President Fairchild, presented the same doctrine, but with new and juster emphasis upon the testimony of consciousness. The intellect and the sensibility are marked in their action by the law of necessity. But in the case of the will, in view of at least two courses,
we consciously determine for ourselves, by a free choice between the two, upon which of these courses we shall enter . . . In this decision we are conscious of the fact of freedom, or liberty. We know that we can will to take either of the attitudes, or pursue either of the courses open to us; this is the beginning and the end of our freedom . . . The proof of our freedom is found only in our consciousness, and can be found nowhere else. We know that we are free, and that is the end of the argument; it is a fact of consciousness . . . The argument for freedom derived from our moral consciousness, the fact that we hold ourselves bound by duty or obligation to a certain course of action, is a good argument for the freedom of the will. But the perception or conviction of the obligation presupposes the consciousness of freedom. The view is sometimes presented that we infer our freedom from our consciousness of obligation. But it is not merely a logical inference. The consciousness of freedom is doubtless involved in our perception or conviction of obligation. The fact of freedom is the logical antecedent of that of obligation, and the thought of freedom must come before, or with, the thought of obligation.
Fairchild attempted to make the possibility of freedom a little clearer by dividing, as Samuel West had done, between the two classes of motives--those which appeal to the intelligence, and those which appeal to the desires. All motives reduce to these two classes. Between the two the will chooses in perfect freedom. In fact, freedom is made possible by the fact that the two are incomparable as to their strength, since they appeal to the personality in two completely different ways.
How do we measure strength of motive? There are two ways--by the judgment or reason, and by the sensibility or feeling. The two standards are entirely different, but the will is not always as the strongest motive, tested by either standard. It is not always as the best judgment; for the sinner always acts against the true reason as presented by his judgment. Nor is it always as the strongest feeling; the good man often obeys his judgment, against his feeling.
This is more illuminating than anything that had yet been said. Yet Fairchild did not quite rise to the true height of freedom, for he said:
If motive acts only in the shape of desire, then there is but one kind of motive acting upon us, and no alternative in action; only one course open to us, and hence no choice, no freedom. The strongest desire, or the resultant of the desires, must control the will. There is nothing possible in action but to obey the feeling.
This is entirely to surrender freedom; for the fact is that the strength of desires does not touch freedom. Action must, to be sure, "obey the feeling;" but which, of several feelings? It erects the authority which it obeys into an authority in the act of obeying it. Fairchild further held the certainty of all future events, because he maintained God's perfect foreknowledge. But foreknowledge was mysterious. God must be supposed to have "some direct beholding of the future, a power which we cannot explain or understand."
The Oberlin school thus attained the best statement of the meaning of freedom which had yet been given in the New England theology. But its atomistic theory of the will's action prevented it from accepting Taylor's idea of a "primary predominant choice," with all which that involves for the idea of character. For the highest point reached in this development we must turn to Samuel Harris, who in his Philosophical Basis of Theism gave a new statement to freedom and rendered many of the old disputations forever unnecessary.
Harris begins his treatment of the will with definitions. To summarize:
The will is the power of a person, in the light of reason and with susceptibility to the influence of rational motives, to determine the end or objects to which he will direct his energy, and the exertion of his energy with reference to the determined end or object. The will is a person's power of self-determination. It is his power of determining the exercise of his own causal efficiency or energy. He has the power of self-direction, self-exertion, and self-restraint . . . The determinations of the will are of two kinds--Choice and Volition. In choice a person determines the object or end to which he will direct his energies. In volition a person exerts his energies or calls them into action; or he refuses to do so . . . Choice is self-direction. Volition is self-exertion or self-restraint. Both are self-determinations.
The distinction here made between choice and volition is vital to Harris' understanding of the subject. It
is essential to the reality of free-will and moral responsibility. If will is merely the volitional power of calling the energies into action, then we no longer determine by free-will the ends or objects of action; and these are determined by the constitutional impulses or motives which are at the time the strongest. And thus all freedom both of choice and volition disappears, since the man has no power of self-direction and can exert his energies only in the direction already determined for him by the unreasoning impulses of nature.
Choice "presupposes a comparison of objects in the light of reason . . . After the comparison follows the choice, which is the simple, indefinable determination of the will."
A choice is an abiding determination of the will. It may abide for an hour or a day; it may be a life-long choice or preference . . . Choices may be distinguished by their objects as supreme and subordinate. A subordinate choice is the choice of an object as subordinate to an ulterior end; as when one chooses wealth as an object of pursuit, but chooses it simply as a means of political preferment. The supreme choice is the choice of the supreme end of action, to which all other ends are subordinate and which itself is subordinate to no ulterior end. Because man is rational he must choose some supreme end; for he recognizes reason as supreme.
With these definitions the affirmation of freedom is closely connected. "The definition of will is in itself the definition of free-will." "The freedom of the will consists in the fact that the will is a will . . . Freedom is inherent in rationality." Edwards was wrong in considering the will "from the point of view of efficient causation," and forgetting that it might be exercised (in choice) prior to all causation. The threefold division of the mind, separating sharply between the determinations of the sensibilities and those of the will, is of essential help in maintaining the correct view. "Man's knowledge of his free-will is of the highest certainty." The proof is derived from the immediate affirmations of consciousness, from the consciousness of moral responsibility which involves freedom, from the fact that it "sustains the tests of primitive knowledge," and from human history. The "implication of man in nature," which proves that he is above nature, is considered at length; and then the old historic struggle is taken up in a section upon "the influence of motives." The motive is not the efficient cause of the will's determinations; nor does it determine it to choose this rather than that. The various formulas have been suggested. The will always is as the strongest motive; as the greatest apparent good; as the last dictate of the understanding are all aside from the true point. This portion of the subject is summed up in the following paragraph, which also anticipates the substance of a valuable section upon "Sociology and Free-Will:"
The uniformity of human action cannot be explained by any law of the uniform influence of motives on the will. Another factor is concerned in this uniformity; it is the character in the will. By its choice the will forms in itself a character; and by action in accordance with the choice, it confirms and develops the character. This must be recognized in explaining the uniformity of human action. The attempt to explain it by some law of the uniform influence of motives assumes that the will is always characterless. Writers on the will who attempt to explain the uniformity of human action in this way, have much to say about the necessity of finding the laws of the will. But in fact they are seeking for a law of the will which shall be only a necessary uniform sequence of nature; should they succeed they would only prove that the determinations of the will are a part of the course of nature and subject to the dictum necessitatis. This would prove that personal beings do not exist and that nature is all. The real law to the determinations of the will is the moral law which declares the ends to which rational beings ought to direct their energies and the principles which ought to guide them in their actions. If personal beings exist they must at some point rise above the fixed course and uniform sequences of nature and find themselves under obligation to conform their free action to the truths, laws, ideals, and ends of reason.
But this is a digression. We are here engaged with a theologian who represents a later stage in the history of theology, when the homogeneous and self-centered New England school was giving way to the introduction of a still "newer" theology. We revert, therefore, to Taylor as the propounder of a real freedom, and ask what the effect of this proposal is to be within the strict New England school, of which Taylor certainly was a member, both by training and by his hearty acceptance of its leading positions. What would be done with it in our oldest and then principal school of theology, in Andover, and by the greatest representative of the unmodified New England strain, Professor Park?
The real question for New England theology, after Taylor had led the way in so large a revision of Edwards' positions as substantially to reverse them, was whether the departure from Edwards should be frankly acknowledged, and the development of theological thought be allowed to go unhampered on its way, or whether the overshadowing influence of Edwards should be maintained to the great damage of the constructive processes so actively proceeding. Should the dogmatic or the historic spirit prevail? It was Park's peculiar fate to guide in the latter direction, and to maintain the historic attitude at the expense of perfect clearness and dogmatic success. He so admired and reverenced Edwards that he believed himself at every point a follower of the master. Why he thought so is one of the mysteries of the subject. He was himself a greater mind than Edwards. He must have known Edwards' entire dependence upon Locke for both doctrine and arguments. But Park's admiration of the acuteness, elaboration, comprehensiveness, and mercilessness in the pursuit of error, which mark Edwards' work, and of the great service rendered by the perfect timeliness of his writings to evangelical theology, was so great that it blinded him to every other aspect of the matter. This was the easier on account of that subtle ambiguity in Edwards' phraseology which we have already marked, and which gave rise to the interpretation of his father made by the younger Edwards. Park seized this interpretation and declared it the true interpretation, and thus concealed from himself his greatest divergence from Edwards. His further divergences could then the more easily remain hid from his own eyes.
These divergences pertained to three points:
1. Edwards followed the old division of the mind into the understanding and affections, and subsumed the will under the latter head. He hence confounded the affections and the will, and made a hundred times the fallacy of gliding from "inclination" considered as a desire to inclination as a volition, without being conscious of it; which, of course, was the fallacy of "ambiguous term." Park, on the contrary, followed the threefold division into intellect, sensibility, and will, and was always consistent in the distinction.
2. Park denied the causal connection between motives and choices. Hence he interpreted the maxim, which he himself preserved, "The will always is as the greatest apparent good," as embodying the usage, not the necessitated action, of the will, It might at any moment choose the least apparent good; but it never does, and it never will. This was the younger Edwards' interpretation of his father.
3. Park gave a new meaning, and above all a new force, to the idea of natural ability to choose, which he would have made a real freedom but for the shackles laid upon him by that maxim, which he thought he had evacuated of its mischief, but which, like a tamed cobra, possessed both the power and the will to poison the theory, if not the practical application, of any theology cherishing it.
These divergences were of the utmost importance for subsequent thinkers, but it was chiefly because of their extension and enlargement on account of practical considerations. We now concern ourselves with the question of the theoretical adjustment of the idea of freedom, and of the success of Park in maintaining a true freedom.
Park maintains that the will always is as the greatest apparent good. Take any human being, from Adam down, and he comes into a world of goods, already fixed independently of his volitional action. His own balance of desires and tendencies (subjective natural motives, in Park's terminology), previous to his first choice, is also fixed independently of himself. Now he chooses--puts forth his first choice. It is as the greatest apparent good. What that good presented to him is, is independent of himself. What there is about it, or about him, that renders it apparently good is independent of him. The "greatest apparent good" is absolutely objective to him considered as a free, choosing being; and his will is as that good. The same is true of every subsequent choice, for if the will, the previous choice, is at any moment operative in determining what he desires and thus modifies the "appearance," it was itself not his, but was as the (previously) apparent good. Hence two things follow:
1. Such a connection between motives and will is causative; and hence Park has not avoided the abyss of Edwards' necessity--nor that of Spencer or even Spinoza.
What is a causative connection between phenomena? I see a spark applied to powder and then I see an explosion. This is the uniform fact. The explosion always is as the application of the spark. I apply heat to ice and it melts. Whenever I see invariable connection of antecedents and certain consequents, I say the former are the cause of the latter. Professor Park elsewhere reasons in this way. He is thoroughly opposed to John Stuart Mill's theory of causation. He says that whenever we see the invariability which Mill affirms, we go farther than Mill, and declare that there is power there; and we thus arrive for the first time at the true idea of causation. Apply the same reasoning to his own maxim; and whenever we perceive that the "will always is as the greatest apparent good," we say: "The good is the cause of the action of the will;" and we cannot say anything else while we have the powers of human reasoning left.
Park, of course, perceived that this objection would be made to him, and his answer was ready. This uniformity is uniformity of usage. The will can choose the greatest apparent good freely--as freely as it could a lesser apparent good. And it always does freely choose the greatest apparent good. That it always does it freely, however so many times, is evident from consciousness; for consciousness declares of every choice that it is free.
We may rejoin that we are not conscious that every choice is free, for many are not; as, for example, my choice this morning to brush my hair with my brush. But of free choices--for man does make such, and of these only, is our discussion here--consciousness not only declares that the choice is free, but it often declares also that the choice is not one of "the greatest apparent good." It is an abuse of language as well as of morals to declare that the drunkard choosing the cup believes or feels it in any sense "good!" So that consciousness, if it is for freedom, as it is, is against the uniformity of the Edwardean maxim!
It is the more strange that Park did not see this because, if the will always is as the greatest apparent good, then, on his theory of virtue, there can never be any sin. Sin is the choice of the lower instead of the higher or greater good. If a man chooses the greatest apparent good--that is, the thing which on the whole seems best to him--that act is a virtuous act. And as every act is such a choice, according to Edwards, every act is virtuous. This argument can be met only by saying that the "greatest apparent good" is that which appeals most to the man, affords the greatest total present gratification, is the easiest to choose, has the most desire for itself. But if it is these, it is truly the greatest good, unless the man knows all the time that to choose it he must forsake duty for it, and that the desire it will gratify is an evil desire which he ought never to harbor. But then it is neither good nor apparently good! It is bad, and nothing but bad.
In fact, the term "greatest apparent good" is another example of the "ambiguous middle" in Edwards' reasoning of which "inclination" is the first and principal. Now it means the preponderating object of the sensibility, and now that of the conscience or of the whole harmonious man. No one can tell when it oscillates from one to the other; and hence any argument may be vitiated by it, and most are.
2. This theory is essentially supralapsarianism. The decrees of God are eternal. They surround the first, equally with every act of the will. There is never a moment of freedom, of action not predetermined. Augustine made man free in his fall; Edwards and Park made him no more free there than anywhere else. In view of this, all questions of the order of the decrees are trivial. Was the decree to make man sin prior or subsequent to the decree to damn him? Who cares? The main fact is that all of every man's action and of all men's is decreed--his fall, his sin, as well as his punishment for sin. God's decree embraces everything. It was not that God foresaw man's sin, and then decreed to punish him. He did not foresee, he decreed man's sin. There is not one atom of freedom, one moment of personal responsibility, deliberation, individual and uncaused action on the part of man, anywhere. All is necessitated.
Professor Park, of course, elaborately denies these positions, and, as we are about to show, escapes them--but not consistently. We are now holding him strictly to his theories as they must be interpreted, if he consistently maintains the Edwardean theory of the will, as he says he does. He says: God does not positively decree the sin of Adam or of any other man. But he "circumstances and places" man so that he "will certainly sin," and Adam as much as any son of his. Now that is, in plain words, surrounding him with motives leading to sin--and motives are causes producing sinful action. The distinctions utterly evaporate as soon as the maxim, "always is as the greatest apparent good," is remembered. That is causation. Thus Park was a supralapsarian, forced to that position against his choice by his theory of the will. True, he treats supralapsarianism in a special section, and rejects it by saying of it that it is "unreasonable and arbitrary;" but he does not give any reason for this condemnation. This is the stranger because he had in his theory of virtue the means of pulverizing it as no theologian before him had been able to do. He might have said: "Supralapsarianism is the theory that, irrespective of the fall, and without prevision of the same, God, from all eternity, for the glory of his mercy and the praise of his justice, separated men into two classes, and foreordained the one unto eternal life and the other unto eternal death. This theory is impossible; for (1) it regards men, antecedent to all sin, either as mere mathematical units, or as merely sentient beings, their moral nature and questions of desert being disregarded. (2) As mere mathematical units they can be the object of no moral judgment, and so neither condemned nor acquitted. (3) As merely sentient, they must become the objects of the divine benevolence, by which God must choose to do them good, and good only, and hence none of them can be reprobated. (4) Hence in neither case can there be the separation described." But Park does not say this. Why? The answer, I believe, is to be found in his determinism, which made substantial supralapsarianism necessary to him, however unwelcome. This discord between the nature of virtue and the theory of the will is the great defect of Park's system, and would have been fatal to it had there not been a corresponding inconsistency in the theory of the will itself. We are, accordingly, approaching rapidly to the deepest secret of Park's theology. It is his crux.
The charm of such a view of the will's action, by which this grim and inhuman theory of absolute predestination retained its hold upon the minds of Edwards and Park, is to be found in its relation to the concept of God. God was viewed by them both as unchangeable in all his perfections, in his wisdom, knowledge, blessedness, etc. His government was perfect also. Now, if there had been any true grief in God, his eternal blessedness would have been impaired; if any ignorance, even the slightest, of the future free acts of man, his infinite knowledge would have disappeared; if any failure to control any, even the least act of man, even so little an act as putting the finger at random on any square of a checker board (which example Edwards elaborately discussed), then there would be no divine government left whatever! The perfection of the logician, of the systematician--a geometrical perfection--was thus demanded in respect to life, even the life of God; and these great men continued to demand it in entire obliviousness of the fact that they were now discussing, not the Living God, but an intellectual abstraction, as cold as an iceberg, and as unreal as the Olympian Zeus. A colossal blunder certainly, but one of which "only colossal minds could be guilty."
The third peculiarity by which Park departed from Edwards undid, however, most of the harm of these supralapsarian positions. Following Bellamy, Hopkins, and Taylor, he gave a new meaning to "natural ability." This he defined as real ability, the ability to choose freely either right or wrong. "Moral ability" is not properly ability at all, since it is mere willingness. But natural ability is true, spontaneous, primal, causality. A man has natural ability to repent, always, everywhere, without the influence of the Holy Spirit, without church or Bible; but he never will so repent. He hasn't "moral ability;" that is, he won't. But he can.
Now, Park himself may have been perfectly consistent here with his Edwardean positions. He may have maintained that "natural ability," while complete, was never exercised, even in so small a matter as lifting the finger to brush away a fly, without "moral ability" conjoined--that is, without a balance of motives for such an action. His emphasis on certain positions, however, and the elaborateness with which he defined and removed objections when discussing the subject of decrees, would imply not. The toil would have been so futile unless the pupil, and the master, got for the time out from under the burden of Edwards' certainty. His pupils made an adjustment, even if Park did not, and the impression and total outcome of the system for them at this point were something as follows:
1. The will of man is free. He can, at any moment, choose right or wrong. This is the emphasis which Park constantly threw upon "natural ability." His statements were as extreme as the most ardent devotee of free will could desire. "Man can perfectly obey the law of God, because he can love God supremely and his neighbor as himself, and can maintain such a love, and exemplify it in every individual choice." "He can do right just as easily as he can do wrong." "He can break every decree of God relating to his own conduct." "He can repent at any moment without any aid from the Holy Spirit." Such were forms of expression Park constantly used. And out of them his pupils drew the doctrine that the will has a true, unchanged, primal causality, by which man truly originates action, and is himself the one, and the only, cause of his own action.
2. Motives, however, have a real influence on man: that is, a real tendency to move the will in this direction or that.
3. God's moral government is exercised through motives, influencing human wills. The action of a man can be determined, within reasonable limits, by his fellow creatures, as they plan to bring such or such other motives to bear upon him. God can in a far greater sense control men's action by the same method, because he has far greater knowledge of all the conditions, internal and external, which affect the operation of those motives.
4. The scope of this government thus includes the volitions of men, and extends far beyond the reach of finite comprehension. Has it any limits? Only such, whatever they may be, as God himself has given.
5. God set in motion a universe resulting in some degree of sin. Of course, he purposed to permit that sin. The explanation of that permission Park had already given. Sin entered by the free act of man; and that man was as able not to commit the sin he did commit, as he was to commit it. But God foresaw that man would sin; and he prepared for it.
6. The condition of things now is such that, left to themselves, men will sin. This is not a necessity, but it is a fact.
7. God interferes with the course of sin as largely as he can consistently, and calls some men unto salvation. This is election. It is not absolute in the sense that it renders faith necessary, for any elected man can persist in sin and be lost; and he can be saved only by exerting this same power of freedom in the way of repentance, faith, and reformation. Are any elect thus lost? Park would say, "No!" His pupils would say: "Possibly some are."
8. Those whom God must, to be consistent with the best interests of all, leave without such influence as will actually bring them to repentance, he so leaves. This is "praeterition," passing over, not "reprobation." But there is no absolute or complete praeterition. Men have grace enough to be saved, everyone. And they have "natural power," true freedom, to repent and be saved without any grace.
9. God never lets the world get out of his control. No "permissive decree," no "praeterition," ever implies that he stands by as a silent and helpless spectator, and sees the world going evil ways which he cannot hinder. He so guides and controls, even in the darkest times, as to bring all out eventually to his own glory. This is his perfection, but it is a living and not a mere geometrical perfection.
Park thus never accepted for himself fully an idea which is essential to his defense of the benevolence of God in the permission of sin--the idea of the divine self-limitation. He admitted it in respect to the permission of sin, for he taught that God, having made man as he did and given him the faculty of free will, could not then consistently do so and so. He never explicitly recognized the fact that God limits himself even when he creates matter; for he cannot thereafter proceed in the universe, matter having its fixed qualities, forces, and laws, exactly as he otherwise could. He expressly rejected the suggestion of Julius Muller and other Kenotics, that the divine Logos limited itself in the incarnation. He really wanted a self-limitation which should be at the same time no limitation; which should explain the permission of sin, and yet not infringe the absoluteness of God's control, foreknowledge, and eternal decree, which with differences was to cover everything alike. He erred here in maintaining a doctrine of the Absolute--the truly Unconditioned--which is impossible when once sin, incarnation, atonement, and forgiveness are introduced. He should have listened here to Kahnis, with whom he once studied, and to the great Thomasius.
This, then, may be said to be the outcome of the New England theology in respect to the doctrine of the will. The great idea of a true freedom, born of the revival efforts of the great leaders of the school, struggled in the minds of the successive thinkers as they labored at making the system of theology more true and more consistent, but was not able to attain clearness of statement even from the greatest of them--from him who was in most respects the representative and consummation of the whole movement. Here, then, the theology resulted in handing down to its successors the imperative problem of a better settlement of this pivotal doctrines settlement which should take the doctrine for itself, and discuss it upon its own evidences, and, having developed it in accordance with the facts of a sound psychology, should then give it its place, and its due influence in determining the other doctrines of the Christian system. New England theology, to the end, sacrificed the doctrine of freedom to that of the divine perfections. It hence failed at getting a true doctrine; and this was its crux.
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