A MATHEMATICAL VIEW OF THE FREE WILL QUESTION.
BEFORE discussing objections to the doctrine of Freedom, let me try to state what, in my own thought, that doctrine really is. My notion of the matter is more or less analogous to the ordinary theory of Attention. As the current of suggestions, whether determined mechanically or otherwise, passes before the ego, the ego puts forth a free selective power whose result is physically directive. Here Stewart's account of attention may or may not come in: either the ego may merely arrest the current long enough for the mechanism to do the rest, like the "type-wheel" in the telegraph, which prints whenever it stops, or else, possibly, the ego may deflect the current without arresting it. Does the ego here act apart from motives, feeling no pressure from them, or as one among motives, and often against some of the others? i.e. if by "Volition" we understand, not the observable resultant of the ego's free and original act as combined with other causes, but only that act, pure and simple, then are all volitions alike as to strength, intensity, degree of effort, — or do they differ in this respect according to the strength of the opposing motives? Either alternative appears to be tenable; but, in so far as they really differ, I incline to the second one. This raises the question of relative strength of will-power and determined motives, and I incline to believe that the will-power, in its possibilities, and perhaps even as commonly exerted, — is by no means infinitesimal in comparison.
Thus motives and volitions would belong to a system of what we may call "spiritual forces," because like physical forces they may oppose one another, conspire and perhaps combine into intermediately directed resultants; but these spiritual forces cannot so conspire with or oppose the actual physical changes
