(1) The testimony of consciousness. This is clear and explicit. We
are directly conscious of free choice. And there can be no evidence
more immediate and authoritative than that of consciousness. It is the
form of evidence in which all psychical facts, activities, powers, and
laws, are made known and stand certified in our knowledge. It is the
certifying element for both the form and reality of all our knowing. It
is that in which we "know that we know," and without which there can be
no knowledge. It is, therefore, the foundation certitude. Our systems
of science, our conclusions in philosophy, our intuitions into first
truths and laws, and all the confidence with which we accept truth in
all these great realms of mental life, rest back on the observations,
reasonings and conclusions for whose reality and order consciousness
is our most fundamental voucher. To its tests and verifications all
the processes of knowing must submit. No truth is even visible except
in the light in which consciousness holds all our acts and forms
of intelligence. No form of our knowing can be surer than this.
To discredit it is to discredit that without whose help not a step
in knowledge can be taken. Upon this fundamental and unsurpassable
evidence rests the great fact of free-will. No person, in the simple
light of his unperverted and unperplexed consciousness, doubts his
free-will. He finds himself in exercise and use of it every day and
every hour. He knows himself to be perpetually making decisions within
his own liberty, if he knows anything. The witness to it is direct, and
he holds himself, and others hold him, responsible for his choices and
the deeds he does in carrying them out. He deliberately and consciously
elects his way through clearly seen open alternative possibilities. If
he is to believe that in reality he does not do so, he must believe
that his consciousness is a perpetual fraud upon him. But thus the
authority for the reality of all his psychical capacities and acts is
overthrown, and he does not "know that he knows" in any of his knowing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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