An Examination of President Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the WillBledsoe, Albert Taylor
Philosophy
An Examination of President Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will
Bledsoe, Albert Taylor
Edwards, Jonathan, 1703-1758. Freedom of the will; Free will and determinism
From a letter to a minister of the Church of Scotland, President Day
finds that in the phrase conducting as a man pleases, the author of the
Inquiry means to include the idea of _choosing as he pleases_. Now, this
is all true; and this is the internal liberty, which President Day has
extracted from the aforesaid letter. Then, according to Edwards, we have
two kinds of liberty: the one is a liberty to move the body as we
please, or as we choose; and the other is, to choose as we please, or as
we choose. In the vocabulary, and according to the psychology of
President Edwards, as we have frequently seen, and as we here see, our
pleasing and our choosing are one and the same thing. Hence, to move our
bodies according to our pleasure, is to move it according to our choice;
and to choose as we please, is to choose as we choose. President Day
need not have gone to the letter in question, in order to find this
doctrine; for it is repeatedly set forth in the inquiry. President
Edwards, as we have seen, frequently contends in the Inquiry, that we
always choose as we choose; and as frequently makes his adversaries
assert, that we can "choose without choosing;" which is just as absurd,
he truly declares, as to say that a body can move while it is in a state
of rest.
Now, to place liberty in this "choosing as we choose," without regard to
the cause or origin of our choice, is just about as rational as it would
be to place it in the axioms of geometry. Suppose a man is made to
choose, by an absolute and uncontrollable power; it is nevertheless
true, that he chooses as he does choose. This cannot be otherwise than
true; it is a self-evident and necessary truth; for nothing can be
different from itself, can be what it is, and yet not what it is, at one
and the same time. To speak of a power of choosing as we choose, as
Edwards and Day both do, is just about as reasonable as it were to speak
of a power to make two and two equal to four. Supposing the Almighty
should cause us to choose, it is not in his power to prevent us from
choosing as we do choose; for he cannot work contradictions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account