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Page 45
The hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an habitual
drunkard under temptation. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is
now solicited again by the bottle. His moral triumph or failure
literally consists in his finding the right _name_ for the case. If he
says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or
a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of
friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of
whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public
holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in
favor of abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His
choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all the
plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes
him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the
case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard,"
his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He saves himself by
thinking rightly.
Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with
which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention
that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however unpalatable;
and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter
to which they have been successfully trained.
In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole
procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our
moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were talking of the
subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and
brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed. If
they were all summed together, the time that they occupy would cover an
almost incredibly small portion of our lives. But I also said, you will
remember, that their brevity was not in proportion to their
significance, and that I should return to the subject again. So I return
to it now. It is not the mere size of a thing which, constitutes its
importance: it is its position in the organism to which it belongs. Our
acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are
nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to
higher or lower destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the
schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
appreciate this now without any further explanation.
I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these
talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind. I have
called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of its reaction on
the environment as the essential thing about it; and I have referred
this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous
system. I have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging
me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly
whether I am a complete materialist, or not.
Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to
keep free from all speculative complications. Nevertheless, I do not
wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore
say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count
myself a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness
can possibly be _produced_ by a nervous machinery, though I can
perfectly well see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the
machinery, the _order_ of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
_order_ of the machine's operations. Our habitual associations of ideas,
trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences
of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible
stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from
might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain.
If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I
sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by
brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws.
But, after what we have just seen,--namely, the part played by voluntary
attention in volition,--a belief in free will and purely spiritual
causation is still open to us. The duration and amount of this attention
_seem_ within certain limits indeterminate. We _feel_ as if we could
make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard
were a genuine critical point in nature,--a point on which our destiny
and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the
appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?"
It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes
the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an
illusion. I myself hold with the free-willists,--not because I cannot
conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand
its plausibility, but simply because, if free will _were_ true, it would
be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the
very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the
belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my
freedom; I do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that
the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never
receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example
in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such
psychological and psychophysical theories as I hold do not necessarily
force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist.
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