The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
the other is the opprobrious word _chance_. The word 'chance' I wish
to keep, but I wish to get rid of the word 'freedom.' Its eulogistic
associations have so far overshadowed all the rest of its meaning that
both parties claim the sole right to use it, and determinists to-day
insist that they alone are freedom's champions. Old-fashioned
determinism was what we may call _hard_ determinism. It did not shrink
from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and
the like. Nowadays, we have a _soft_ determinism which abhors harsh
words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination,
says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity
understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom.
Even a writer as little used to making capital out of soft words as Mr.
Hodgson hesitates not to call himself a 'free-will determinist.'
Now, all this is a quagmire of evasion under which the real issue of
fact has been entirely smothered. Freedom in all these senses presents
simply no problem at all. No matter what the soft determinist mean by
it,--whether he mean the acting without external constraint; whether he
mean the acting rightly, or whether he mean the acquiescing in the law
of the whole,--who cannot answer him that sometimes we are free and
sometimes we are not? But there _is_ a problem, an issue of fact and
not of words, an issue of the most momentous importance, which is often
decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a
sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.
Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may
happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now,
evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for
ourselves. What does determinism profess?
It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The
future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other
future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The
whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
shadow of turning.
"With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."
Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It
admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
ambiguous. Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both
may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that
view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
out of which they are chosen; and, _somewhere_, indeterminism says,
such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.
Determinism, on the contrary, says they exist _nowhere_, and that
necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get realized are,
for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all.
There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all
that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity
virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass
of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which
'impossibilities' is the only name that rightfully belongs.
The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out. The truth _must_
lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
other false.
The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the
strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be. Both
sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred. The
indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place;
the determinists swear that nothing could possibly {152} have occurred
in its place. Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these
two point-blank contradicters of each other is right? Science
professes to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of
fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of
assurance that something actually happened give us the least grain of
information as to whether another thing might or might not have
happened in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With
things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If
we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the
possibility-question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.
And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with
making us either determinists or indeterminists. Sure enough, we make
a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are
determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict
one another's conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great
stress on the fact that it is just because we cannot foretell one
another's conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great
and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely
anxious and hazardous a game. But who does not see the wretched
insufficiency of this so-called objective testimony on both sides?
What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not
external. What divides us into possibility men and anti-possibility
men is different faiths or postulates,--postulates of rationality. To
this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it,--to
that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and talk as we will
about having to yield to {153} evidence, what makes us monists or
pluralists, determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some
sentiment like this.
The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the
idea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our
friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of
alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of
several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name
for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind
can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but
barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law? And
if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the
whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos
from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?
Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as
quickly as anything one can find. I have already told you that
'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use. Let us then examine
exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible
bugbear to us. I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it
of its sting.
The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it
means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it
must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous
sort. Now, chance means nothing of the kind. It is a purely negative
and relative term,[4] giving us {154} no information about that of
which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with
something else,--not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other
things in advance of its own actual presence. As this point is the
most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point
on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to
it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be
in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good
thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the
system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its
origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.
This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
thus considered _ab. extra_, or from the point of view of previous
things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
moment. All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
unconditional property of the whole. If the whole wants this property,
the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.
Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of
disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Since
future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.
What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
moment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
Street are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shall
be chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten
minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door
of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then
that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and
traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see
the two alternative universes,--one of them with me walking through
Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking through
Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these