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Just here, indeed, was where the shoe of naval service pinched him most sorely; for though upon the whole life on board a man-of-war was not many shades worse than life aboard a trader, it yet introduced into his already sadly circumscribed vista of happiness the additional element of absolute loss of free-will, and the additional dangers of being shot as an enemy or hanged as a deserter.
In his solution, this great luminary of science, like others before him, seems to suffer a sad eclipse. “Before God sent us into the world,” says he, “he knew exactly what all the inclinations of our wills would be; it is he that has implanted them in us; it is he also that has disposed all things, so that such or such objects should present themselves to us at such or such times, by means of which he has known that our free-will would determine us to such or such actions, he has willed that it should be so; but he has not willed to constrain us thereto.” This is found in a letter to the Princess Elizabeth, for whose benefit he endeavoured to reconcile the liberty of man with the perfections of God.
It is necessary, in the first place, that the object of our pity should belong to our own species I mean belong in the full sense of the term and that the action in which it is sought to interest us be a moral action; that is, an action comprehended in the field of free-will.
Robin rode away at last with a very clear idea of what he was to do in the immediate present, and with no idea at all of what was to be done later. Marjorie had given him three things advice; a pair of beads that had been the property of Mr. Cuthbert Maine, seminary priest, recently executed in Cornwall for his religion; and a kiss the first deliberate, free-will kiss she had ever given him.
'He had watched me out, of course. 'Just so. Well, when she mentioned you, he swore you were an adventurer, and a beggarly impostor, and what not, and bade her say whether she thought it likely that her friend would have entrusted such a mission to such a man. 'And then she went with him? The student nodded. 'Readily? Of her own free-will? 'Certainly, he answered. 'It seemed so to me.
I cannot help fancying that Milton made a mistake in a certain celebrated passage; and that it was not "sitting on a hill apart," but tramping four miles out and four miles in along a turnpike-road, that his hapless spirits discoursed "Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."
Though, midway on the passage, the ill-fated Spaniard, relaxed from constraint, showed some signs of regaining health with free-will; yet, agreeably to his own foreboding, shortly before arriving at Lima, he relapsed, finally becoming so reduced as to be carried ashore in arms.
He knew very well that he was not a favourite with the bishop, and that Dr Pendle would not give him more of the Levitical loaves and fishes than he could help; but as the holder of the Beorminster See was the sole dispenser of these viands with whom Cargrim was acquainted, it behoved him at all risks to compel the bestowal of gifts which were not likely to be given of free-will.
Their radical inability to understand or believe the self-reliant moral person grows from the very heart of their theology. For "free-will" the only freedom they know is the necessary condition, not of man's morality, but of God's! There is no fatalism in Spinoza's system. Fatalism is the moral value of a theory of the universe.
The poet should slavishly obey the laws he lays down for himself of his own free-will, and subordinate to them every word, and yet his matter and his song should seem to float on a free and soaring wing. Now, even the original Hebrew text of the Psalms has no metrical laws."
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