The Press. — London, England, 1856-07-12 00:00:00

666 Mr. Solly contends for free-will or human liberty as the very groundwork of man's being. He writes at the close of his essay:— I will repeat my innermost convlction that the existence of free-will, in man as a fact of the consciousness, in God at an object of our faith, is the cardinal point on which all that is sound in philosophy, or true in religion, ulti mately turns. Banish it from heaven and earth, and men become nothing more than the petty wheels in the vast machine of which God is the involuntary motive•power. But the engineer is absent, and he whom we then call God is bound in the trammels of a merciless necessity—no object of love, for he cannot hate ; no object of prayer, for he cannot aid ; no object of praise, for he is a tool in the hands of a higher fate. Morality then sinks into a cal culation of pressure and leverage, and nice adjustment of screws and :logs ; reverence is but the yielding of the various parts to the primary force, the spiritual finds no resting-place, and the material has undivided sway. Restore free-will, and where all before was death and dark ness, all now becomes light and life. Then indeed does God cease to be the omnipresent automaton, the dead God of the dead, and becomes a spirit and a power, and the living God of the living. Then, indeed, are love, and prayer, and praise, his just meed and our high privilege, for of his own free-will and of no necessity is he a gracious God and mercitul, slow to anger and of great kindness, and his tender mercies are over all his works. The argument of Mr. Solly is so essentially logical that it requires a considerable effort of the reasoning faculty to follow him. We shall not attempt to do so here, but shall en deavour to give a popular notion of the lead ing point at issue. The Necessarians do not, as a rule, deny that man may act according to his will. But they assert that the will itself is influenced by conditions beyond his control, as, for instance, the constitution of his mind and the circum stances which surround it. The Libertarians, on the other hand, assert that there is in the will sufficient force to mould the mind and to con trol surrounding circumstances. Whence, then, it may be asked, does this force come ? What is the will, independent of the mind and of the circumstances which surround, move, and direct it ? To this ques tion Mr. Solly does not reply so satisfactorily as could be wished. If we understand him rightly, he asserts that there is in the will an absolute and independent principle, equal to shape its own coutse, and even to mould its own faculties. Each being has, according to Mr. Solly, a portion of the Divine Essence within him, perfectly free, and subject to no conditions, save those which the general con ditions of humanity impose. Yet it does not appear how the will can possibly be independent of the original con stitution of the mind, or of those circum stances which, entirely apart from the will of the individual, contribute to fashion the incli nations of the will. Suppose two infants of ordinarily facile dis position—one the son of a philanthropic noble man, the other of a dexterous pickpocket—is it not tolerably certain that each would obey the influences of surrounding circumstances— that one would become an ornament to the House of Lords, and preside over institutions for the reformation of offenders, while the other would tax the ingenuity of penal disci• plinarians, and come in due time to be re garded as an incorrigible criminal? What is it makes the difference between a negro of Central Africa, or a Red Indian of North America, and a polished European ? Must not the answer be—Difference of natural and physical constitution in the first instance, and of surrounding and influencing circum stances in the second ? _ These examples show that free-will, however it may be magnified, can only exist within certain limits. The bulk of mankind are so constituted and so circumstanced, even in civilised communities, that we can feel little hesitation in pronouncing what their future will be. Knowing the characters in a country village, we can affirm with tolerable certainty in what channels their stream of life will run. On the other hand, it appears highly proba ble, that as those fetters which circumstances impose on the will of the individual are re moved, the will itself may become more really independent ; and this consideration should, perhaps, of itself be sufficient to determine us in favour of encouraging the widest liberty of thought and action which is consistentiAth the safoty of communities. As the body of man is undoubtedly capable of much greater exertion, and of more free and independent action, when unfettered than when confined, 16. THE PRESS. so we may reasonably conclude it is with the mind, and that it can know no bonds like those which ignorance imposes. Know ledge is not necessarily power, nor, if it were, does it follow that power would be of itself a good. But knowledge is life—spiritual life ; and in proportion as it expands the faculties of the soul, does it seem probable that the will becomes more truly free ; for it can be free only in the sense of being able to perceive and to pursue what is right in itself. The will is not free, but is in bondage, which of its own choice prefers evil to good. Of all forms of free-will, or of all courses which the will has power of itself to pursue, the most undoubted seems to be its capacity of raising itself to God. Its spiritual freedom is certainly not independent of all conditions, but its movements in the spiritual sphere are more free than we can imagine possible in any other. The mind must be informed before it can be religious ; but when the information— by which we understand the convictions which right teaching inspires—has been given, the will is, if we suppose it free in any sense, abso lutely free by its own internal principle of movement, of soaring upwards. Nor does it seem improbable that the germ of freedom with which man was originally endowed is capable of indefinite expansion, and that it is being greatly nourished by the action of the Christian communities of our day. On some collateral points Mr. Solly's inqui ries are of much value. He refuses to attach more than "historical importance" to the difficulty which has been experienced in recon ciling the free-will of man to the foreknow ledge of God. Yet a difficulty which Locke professed himself utterly unable to explain, demands respectful consideration for its own sake. In this treatise the case is put:— When a future time arrives I may be perfectly free to choose between the actions A or B, the only difference being that if I perform B, God will have foreknown B in stead of A. I may have perfectly liberty to perform A or B. If I shall perform A, God foreknows A ; if B, He fore- knows B. Like most of the metaphysicians of our day, Mr. Solly is not deficient in the imaginative faculty, and, lo show the possibility of recon ciling Divine foreknowledge with human free will, he asks us to consider a conversation which a friend of his once had with a native of the Island of Typhlia. The passage is long, but will not bear abridgment : The friend in question had been wrecked on the above•mentioned island, and on reaching the shore and recovering his senses, was astonished to find that the country was inhabited by a race of men entirely destitute of the sense of vision, but in other respects like the rest of mankind. Before he came among them they had never met with a man who could see, and had of course no conception of what sight was. After a residence in the island of some years, he succeeded in acquiring a perfect knowledge of the language spoken there. The Typhlians have their philosophers, like the rest of the world, and on one occasion my friend had the following conversation with one of their first scientific men : Typhlian. have not been very well lately, and I think a good long walk would do me good. Are you dis posed to join me ? Englishman. I shall have much pleasure in doing so. Typh. Where shall we go ? Engl. As you talk of a long walk, I propose that we explore the conical hill on the other side of the forest. It must be several thousand feet high, and the rocks near its base assume very wild and romantic forms. Typh (with evident aetonishment). A. conical hill ! I know of no such place, and had no idea that you had ever been even as far as to this side of the forest. When have you visited this hill, that you seem to know so much about it ? Engl. I have never been there in my life. Typh. Who then told you that we should find such a hill ? Engl. Nobody. Typh. You speak in riddles I You propose that we should walk to a hill which you have never yet visited, and the very existence of which nn one has ever hinted to you! How can you know that we shall come to such a place as you describe ? Engl. Trust yourself to my guidance, and I will con vince you that there is such a bill. But it will be two or three hours at least before we reach it. Typh. You English must be very remarkable people. You seem to have a most extraordinary knowledge of what we are going to experience in the future. The other day you cautioned me to be on my guard, as I should probably stumble over a stone. A minute afterwards I did stumble, and yet the stone was on my side, and I am sure you could not have touched it. Neither had you ever walked in that direction before. Can you explain to me this miraculous faculty of foreknowledge ?. . Engl. I saw the stone lying in your path. Typh. That is to say you knew it would be there and that I should run up against it, for sight and seeing are SATURDAY, evidently the English words for foreknowing. Rut in what manner did you attain this knowledge ? Engl. I was immediately conscious of it by my sense of sight. Typh (musing). Sense of sight! What words aro these! You allow that you did not touch it, and yet you knew it would be there. Sense of sight ! Yes, it must be so. The sense of sight is evidently a faculty of foreknow ledge. You English have extraordinary reasoning powers, and by your knowledge of the laws of nature you were able to conclude from something you trod upon as a cause, that I must tread apon the stone directly after as an effect. We Typhlians can also reason in a similar manner. When I pass through my garden•gate, I know that I shall feel the door of my house soon after. But then I have often been there, whereas you had never walked in that direction before, and yet you could foretell the stone. Ah, I ant afraid our natural science falls far short of yours ; you evi dently reason from cause to effect. Engl. No, that was not the way in which I became aware of the stone. I did not reason about it at all, but knew at once that you would stumble against it with• out ever having known of the existence of the stone till a minute before. _ _ Typh. Excuse me, but that is absurd. You may be gifted with other faculties than myself, but all knowledge must have an object. Now when you spoke, there was no object. No—l am sure that you foretell events by reason ing on the laws of nature you have observed. You must know, perhaps, that after walking over so much grass and so much sand, one must come to such a sort of stone. But as to any immediate faculty by which yon can foreknow such an event—the thing is absurd—it is a con tradiction. The reader will easily perceive the conclusion I would draw from the above dialogue. A future event is no im mediate object of human faculties, but who shall say that it is no object of the Divine ? To say that a future event is no object for any conceivable faculty, because it is no object for us, is to judge of a Divine faculty of prescience from our knowledge of other faculties. Now this is as absurd as the judgment of the Typhlian, who concluded that there was no object for any faculty, because none was presented to his sense of touch. It is true, we must not invent faculties for God at pleasure. But there are reasons of a moral and religious character for believing that God possesses the attribute of foreknowledge, there are also reasons for believing in man's freedom, and the intuition of space suggests by analogy a way of reconciling the seeming contradiction between them. Hence I arrive at what appears to me an irresistible conclusion, namely, that God looks through time as we look through space, and that for the Divine mind all that has been, is, or ever shall be, is an ever-present fact. It is in passages like these that the author skirts the bounds of human thought, and by ingenious analogy enables us to faintly appre hend higher faculties than our own. Such suggestion—inspiring humility while prompt ing aspiration—belongs to the teaching of the best kind of philosophy. In what Mr Solly says concerning the in tuitive ideas, or knowledge, of the mind we do not agree, for reasons which we have before stated. We do not believe that the mind is endowed with such ideas, though it is endowed with a capacity for acquiring them. We be lieve that the constitution of the mind deter mines it to certain conclusions when evidence is laid before it, but we do not believe that the conclusions are independent of the evi dence. The truths of mathematical science are arrived at in much the same manner as other truths. The conclusion that two straight lines cannot inclose space, is arrived at by the same process of the understanding as that the whole is greater than a part, and that three are more than two. If pressed with the quet-- tion—why the mind must conclude thus, and cannot possibly conclude otherwise, the only answer that can be given is, because the mind has a certain constitution or laws, which com pel it so to conclude. We believe that a capacity for acquiring elementary truths is inhe rent in the mind, but not that the truths them • selves are inherent. We believe that the mind is governed by the general laws of its consti tution, and must act in accordance with those laws; but only as that constitution and those laws are brought into action can any kind of knowledge be acquired, or any kind of conclu sions be formed. We recognise in the mind a great power or capacity, but in the senses we recognise the agents which alone can set that power in motion, and supply it with materials for activity. We have been greatly pleased with Mr. Solly's acuteness. His subject is a solemn one, and far too profound for human intellect to fathom ; but it is not wholly profitless to be made to comprehend that there are mys teries which transcend our knowledge, as scope is thus left for faith in the higher intelligence which we feel to exist in the very efforts we make to apprehend it.