"We cannot choose but reject _the_ will.... As physiologists we
have to deal with volition as a function of the supreme centres,
following reflection, varying in quantity and quality as its
cause varies, strengthened by education and exercise, enfeebled
by disuse, decaying with decay of structure.... We have to deal
with will not as a single undecomposable faculty unaffected by
bodily conditions, but as a result of organic changes in the
supreme centres, affected as certainly and as seriously by
disorders of them as our motor faculties are by disorders of
their centres."
And, says Professor Sully, referring to _the_ will:--
"Modern scientific psychology knows nothing of such an entity.
As a science of phenomena and their laws, it confines itself to
a consideration of the processes of volition, and wholly
discards the hypothesis of a substantial will as unnecessary and
unscientific."
Neither physiology nor psychology, neither a sane science nor a sound
philosophy, knows anything of, or can find use for, an autonomous
"will." "Will" as the final term of a discoverable series may be
admitted; "will" as a self-directing force, deciding whether particular
desires shall or shall not prevail, answers to nothing conformable to
our knowledge of man, and is plainly but the ghost of the wills and
souls of our savage ancestors. If instead of speaking of the freedom of
the will, we spoke of uncaused volitions, the position of the
volitionist would be clear, and its indefensible character plain to all.
But by giving the abstraction "will" a concrete existence, and by taking
from sociology a word such as "freedom" and using it in a sphere in
which it has no legitimate application, the issue is confused, and a
scientifically absurd theory given an air of plausibility. The dispute
between the Determinist and the Indeterminist is certainly not one of
words only, but it is one in which the cardinal terms employed need the
most careful examination if we are to clear away from the subject the
verbal fog created by theologians and metaphysicians.
III.
CONSCIOUSNESS, DELIBERATION, AND CHOICE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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