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

nature as iupplying us with various "solicitations" to
action. He holds that from these "reason " selects, or should
select, that particular one with which the man who is
entitled to be regarded as acting rationally and volun-
tarily will "identify himself". But that we have responsi-
bility for our desires, that, to use Green's own language,
the "solicitations" from which "reason selects", .are in
any sense such as we voluntarily provide for ourselves and
not such as are provided for us by a given condition of
ourselves, Green nowhere suggests. Again, William James
(1842 1910), speaks of what he calls our "passional
nature", supplying the determining factor in all choice.
What in fact chooses is, he suggests, not an intellectual
or rational faculty, but a passional and non-rational
faculty. Since choosing is a preliminary to all so-called
voluntary actions, it follows that thought never motivates
to action.
That what does motivate to action is something which is
not properly entitled to be called thought, is a premise,
whether implicit or explicit, which underlies the treatment
of the subject by almost all modern philosophers. More
logically than Green, more explicitly than James, Thomas
Hobbes (15881679) states the doctrine of the nonrationality
of choice. Deliberation, he holds, is a mere
seesaw of conflicting appetites; one pulls us this way,
another that There is an appetite for X, and an appetite
to restrain the appetite for X, for reasons of prudence, or
ofreputation, or ofwhat die agent conceives to be morality.
Whatever the object of the restraining appetite may be,
it is no less "desirefiil", no more rational, than the appetite
which it seeks to restrain. What is called the will is merely
"the last appetite in deliberation", "In 'deliberation',"
Hobbes writes, "the last appetite, or aversion, immediately
adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is what
we call the 'will'." The will is thus, for Hobbes, the final
weight whicfc inclines the scales of action, but its substance
is not ewentially different from that of the other weights.
This conclusion of Hobbes's, and the steps by which it