Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

CHAP. -mi. of Freewill. 197
holds in common with the rival and opposite doctrine re
specting the will.
The validity indeed of this whole distinction between
the will itself and the will as self-determining, i.e. the
existence of this self-determining power in the will over
and above the fact of is
willing, denied by the school of
metaphysicians, who take against the common doctrine of
freewill and favour that of necessity. They maintain free
will to consist in the simple fact of will that we act wil
;
lingly and without constraint ; and they deny that we can
go any further than this, or see anything whatever more
than this fact, however far we may try to look. They say
that in this consists the whole of freewill, that this is all
we mean or can mean by it ; and that if we try to go
any deeper, we involve ourselves in confusion and absurdity.
This position is among others maintained by Locke, whose
great fairness of mind and anxiety to represent faithfully
and exactly the truth respecting the human mind and its
constitution entitle his opinions on this subject to much
consideration, because he does not appear to have started
with any bias one way or another on the examination cf
the question, but to have decided according to what he
thought the plain facts of the case. I cannot but think,
however, that his love of exact truth and the test of actual
perception and apprehension which his philosophy applies,
have been carried too far in this instance, and led him into
a mistake. For this test cannot be applied with absolute
strictness in all cases, as I have often said ; there being
truths of reason, which do not admit of it, truths in their
very nature indeterminate and indistinct ; to which class
belongs the truth now in question, that
mining power of the will.
of the self-deter
Locke s elaborate argument on this subject divides
itself into two questions one whether the will is ;
free, the
other whether the man or the agent is free to will.
The first question is not really the question at issue
between the two sides for what those who maintain the
;
self-determining power of the will mean by the will being
free, is, that the agent is free to will : nor does their posi-