freedom of the will. It is not true, he says, that a man is governed by motives; “the man makes the motive, not the motive the man;” the proof being that “what is a strong motive to one man is no motive at all to another.” The premise is true, but only amounts to this, that different persons have different degrees of susceptibility to the same motive; as they have also to the same intoxicating liquid, which, however, does not prove that they are free to be drunk or not drunk, whatever quantity of the fluid they may drink. What is proved is, that certain mental conditions in the person himself must co-operate, in the production of the act, with the external inducement; but those mental conditions also are the effect of causes; and there is nothing in the argument to prove that they can arise without a cause—that a spontaneous determination of the will, without any cause at all, ever takes place, as the free-will doctrine supposes.
The double use, in the free-will controversy, of the word Necessity, which sometimes stands only for Certainty, at other times for Compulsion; sometimes [pg 567] for what can not be prevented, at other times only for what we have reason to be assured will not; we shall have occasion hereafter to pursue to some of its ulterior consequences.
A most important ambiguity, both in common and in metaphysical language, is thus pointed out by Archbishop Whately in the Appendix to his Logic: “Same (as well as One, Identical, and other words derived from them) is used frequently in a sense very different from its primary one, as applicable to a single object; being employed to denote great similarity. When several objects are undistinguishably alike, one single description will apply equally to any of them; and thence they are said to be all of one and the same nature, appearance, etc. As, e.g., when we say ‘this house is built of the same stone with such another,’ we only mean that the stones are undistinguishable in their qualities; not that the one building was pulled down, and the other constructed with the materials. Whereas sameness, in the primary sense, does not even necessarily imply similarity; for if we say of any man that he is greatly altered since such a time, we understand, and indeed imply by the very expression,