GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

998 ETHICS
it appeari; for, directly one begins to reflect upon the
problem of freedom, almost all the considerations that
occur to one seem to tell against it All the obvious arguments
in the freewill-determinism controversy are on
the side of the determinist In this sense it may be said
that free will is something that will not bear thinking
about, since directly you start to think about it,
that it disappears. The arguments against it
you find
may be
divided into three main groups.
(z) Cosmic Arguments for Determinism* There is,
first, a group of arguments which seek to establish the
general proposition that every event must have a deter-
mining cause. These arguments are in essence metaphysical .
They "%a^taTn that an uncaused event of any kind is
unthinkable. Acts of will are events; therefore they must
have been caused; therefore they cannot be other than
they are, their causes being what they are; therefore they
are not free. This view is generally put forward as both an
integral part and a necessary corollary of a mechanistmaterialist
theory of the universe. Nfechanism asserts that
the universe works after the manner of a vast machine;
Materialism, that whatever exists, is of the same nature as
a piece of matter. If all other events in the universe were
like mechanical events, it would be very odd indeed, if
one kind of event and one only, namely, the event which
is an act of the human will, were an exception, since there
would then be two orders of events in die universe, the
order ofcaused and the order of uncaused events, the latter
order being confined to acts of die human will. Since an
event of the latter order might at any moment interfere
with one belonging to die former order, that is, with the
order of caused events, the order of nature which science
investigates, is liable at any moment to be upset by an
event from outside die boundaries of the scientific scheme
of which science can give absolutely no account Such
a suggestion is intolerable to the scientist, since it implies
that his whole endeavour, which is to discover the laws