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

THE PROBLEM OP FREE WILL
will are not free. If we knew enough about the machinery
of the brain and could observe its workings through a
sufficiently powerful microscope, we should see minute
changet in its cells whenever we experienced the sensation
of willing something. These changes would be the
causes of the sensation of willing.
ftiufl (3) Psychological Physiological Determinism.
A distinguishing characteristic of the forms of determinism
just considered is that they regard man as a member of a
world order which extends beyond him. This world order
is physical, and the events in it are determined in accordance
with the laws ofcause and effect. On this view, human
choice is, in the last resort, an event not different from other
natural events. Therefore it is functionally dependent upon
the nature of the world order in which it occurs. Man's
will, in short, is determined by events outside himself and
other than
Another and not less formidable form of determinism
is that which represents man's will as determined by events
within himself. This form of determinism is not perhaps,
in the last resort, different from those already considered,
since in representing our choices as made for us by
the accumulated influence of all the forces and factors of
our natures, it would not wish to suggest that these forces
and factors were causeless and purely arbitrary facts. Thr
forces and factors of our natures must, it would be said,
spring from something; and, in point of fact, our natures,
temperaments and dispositions are represented by those
who are in general disposed to adopt what I have elsewhere
called explanations in terms of origins, * as being conditioned
by the nature of the origins from which .they sprang.
Although, however, the two forms of determinism, that
which holds that our actions are determined by events
outside ourselves, and that which holds that they are determined
by forces and factors within ourselves, may not, in
the last resort, b$ distinguishable, their immediate bearing
1 See Chapter I, p. 39.