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Updated: June 26, 2025
It is said that free-agency is the absence of those obstacles competent to oppose themselves to the actions of man, or to the exercise of his faculties: it is pretended that he is a free agent, whenever, making use of these faculties, he produces the effect he has proposed to himself.
His idea of free-agency is precisely that of Hobbes, and so many others before him. “By liberty,” says he, “we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determination of the will: that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may.” Such he declares is all that can possibly be meant by the term liberty; and hence it follows that any other idea of it is a mere dream.
On the contrary, he boldly carries out his doctrine to its legitimate consequences, denying the existence of a God, the free-agency of man, and the reality of moral distinctions. Mr. Mill also refuses to avail himself of the notion of liberty entertained by Hobbes and Hume, in order to lay a foundation for human responsibility. He sees that it really cannot be made to answer such a purpose.
We cannot suppose, however, that this solution of the problem made a very clear or deep impression on the mind of Descartes himself, or he would not, on other occasions, have pronounced every attempt at the solution of it vain and hopeless. In his attempt to reconcile the free-agency of man with the divine perfections, Descartes deceives himself by a false analogy.
This philosopher employed all the resources of a sublime genius, and all the stores of a vast erudition, in order to maintain the scheme of necessity, and at the same time vindicate the purity of the Divine Being. That subtle and adroit sceptic, M. Bayle, had drawn out all the consequences of the doctrine of necessity in opposition to the free-agency of man, and to the holiness of God.
This charge has been fixed upon him, in spite of his solemn protestations against its injustice, and his earnest endeavours to reconcile his scheme of necessity with the free-agency and accountability of man. “I conceive,” says Hobbes, “that nothing taketh beginning from itself, but from the action of some other immediate agent without itself.
Thus says Reid, for example: “By the liberty of a moral agent, I understand a power over the determinations of his own will.” Now, it is not at all strange that this language should be conceived by necessitarians in such a manner as to involve the doctrine of liberty in the absurd consequence of an infinite series of acts, since it is so understood by some of the most enlightened advocates of free-agency themselves. “A power over the determinations of our will,” says Sir William Hamilton, “supposes an act of the will that our will should determine so and so; for we can only exert power through a rational determination or volition.
It has been most unfortunately sanctioned by the greatest advocates of free-agency. Thus says Dr. Reid, in relation to the appetites and passions: “Such motives are not addressed to the rational powers. Their influence is immediately upon the will.” “When a man is acted upon by contrary motives of this kind, he finds it easy to yield to the strongest.
The whole Pagan world escaped the evils of redundant population by vicious repressions of it beforehand. But under Christianity a new state of things was destined to take effect. Many protections and excitements to population were laid in the framework of this new religion, which, by its new code of rules and impulses, in so many ways extended the free-agency of human beings.
Section V. The manner in which Leibnitz endeavours to reconcile liberty and necessity. Leibnitz censures the language of Descartes, in which he ascribes all the thoughts and volitions of men to God, and complains that he thereby shuts out free-agency from the world.
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