Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Free Will

The only question in dispute between the advocates of philosophical liberty and the necessarians is this: Whether volition can take place independently of motive?

By giving man a free will he allows man that highest satisfaction and privilege of co-operating to his own felicity.

Since, therefore, neither the foreknowledge of God nor the liberty of man can, without a plain contradiction, be denied, it follows unavoidably that the foreknowledge of God must be of such a nature as is not inconsistent with the liberty of man.

Neither the divine determinations, persuasions or inflections of the understanding or will of rational creatures doth deceive the understanding, pervert the will, or necessitate either to any moral evil.

This predetermination of God’s own will is so far from being the determining of ours, that it is distinctly the contrary; for supposing God to predetermine that I shall act freely, ’tis certain from thence that my will is free in respect of God, and not predetermined.

God’s foreseeing doth not include or connotate pre-determining, any more than I decree with my intellect.

’Tis as certainly conclusible from God’s prescience that they will voluntarily do this as that they will do it at all.

If mankind had no power to avoid ill or choose good by free deliberation, it should never be guilty of anything that was done.

The question is not, whether a man be a free agent, that is to say, whether he can write or forbear, speak or be silent, according to his will; but whether the will to write, and the will to forbear, come upon him according to his will, or according to anything else in his own power. I acknowledge this liberty, that I can do if I will; but to say, I can will if I will, I take to be an absurd speech.

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.

It may help put an end to that long-agitated and unreasonable question, Whether man’s will be free or no?

We run into great difficulties about free created agents, which reason cannot well extricate itself out.

If the ideas of liberty and volition were carried along with us in our minds, a great part of the difficulties that perplex men’s thoughts would be easier resolved.

To ask, Whether the will has freedom? is to ask, Whether one power has another? A question too absurd to need an answer.

The forbearance of that action, consequent to such command of the mind, is called voluntary, and whatsoever action is performed without such a thought of the mind is called involuntary.

We are far from any necessary determination of our will to any particular action, and from a necessary compliance with our desire set upon any particular, and then appearing preferable, good.

This is the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual beings in their steady prosecution of true felicity, that they can suspend this prosecution in particular cases, till they have looked before them.

We have a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire: this seems to me the source of all liberty; in this seems to consist that which is improperly called free will.

In respect of actions within the reach of such a power in him, a man seems as free as it is possible for freedom to make him.

Albeit the will is not capable of being compelled to any of its actings, yet it is capable of being made to act with more or less difficulty, according to the different impressions it receives from motives or objects.

All mankind acknowledge themselves able and sufficient to do many things which actually they never do.