Moral System
Section 1 - IV.
Comments on the power of the will over a part of the faculty of knowledge
113. This theory is based on the first fact we have observed: `The will has some power over a part of the faculty of knowledge. And the part of the faculty of knowledge over which the will exercises its hidden, but powerful influence is that with which we judge the worth and goodness of the things that the faculty has apprehended. We call this our practical judgment because it is moved by the force of the will, that is, by the principle of human action. This judgment must be distinguished from the theoretical judgment which is stimulated only by the light of truth. Truth, which sometimes activates the spontaneity of our judgment, terminates in this theoretical judgment to which its action is confined.
114. We have to understand that if we do not wish to admit practical judgment, a judgment activated by the will, we have consequently to deny all will and all freedom. Will and freedom either have their place in our judgment, or are totally lacking in human nature. This can easily be seen if we consider that our physical activities cannot be free unless carried out as a consequence of the decree of a will which knows and wants them. But the will cannot want them unless it has previously judged them as good. These activities are not free of themselves, therefore, but are free because the will which judges them to be good is free, and hence wants them.
The same can be said about our affections. Taken by themselves, without any connection with a will which moves them freely, they are blind phenomena; freedom and will are extraneous to them. But as soon as the rational will attaches itself to affections, they become willed and free; the will, having declared them good, approves and stimulates them. Our judgment about the goodness of things precedes and informs the affections and operations we call `willed. It is in this judgment that the will first unfolds its power to reign over and command the lower powers.
115. The many errors against freedom originate from the false supposition that all judgments are necessary, and that judgment about things never lies within our free power.
116. If Spinoza, Collins and Jansen had considered the distinction between the two faculties of apprehension and of reflection on the things we apprehend and judge, they would have easily found a way to escape from the labyrinth of sophistry in which their denial of human freedom had entangled them.(84) In their eyes, there is only one way of knowing things; they were oblivious to another great, highly important fact proper to the human spirit, the fact that we acknowledge things with practical force. And we have to admit that there can be no place for human freedom when only simple, direct knowledge is seen in the human mind without any reference at all to reflective acknowledgement. In fact, simple, primitive knowledge is not free; it is passive, receiving as it were, without acting. It absorbs truth, that is, the ideas or essences of things, as they present themselves.
This system, which denies freedom because it eliminates freedoms essential power to assent to or dissent from the truth, which is its essential act, renders error inexplicable in human beings. Hobbes himself denied freedom by reducing it to nothing.(85)
117. Others on the contrary grant too large a part to error present in the human spirit. Their observation is deficient in the opposite sense. They do not reflect that our immediate cognitions are provided by nature itself and are therefore infallible precisely because our power of free decision is completely absent from the formation of such cognitions.
118. Let us imagine that two people, who have both seen Trajans column, offer estimates of its height. One of them hates Rome and is inclined to detract from its grandeur; he will tell you that the column is lower than it actually is. The other admires Rome and wants to extol it as much as he can; this is enough for him to elevate the height of the column out of all proportion. Both of them are wrong in their estimate of the height of the column, although both of them actually possess the type of what is true. The image of the column was received equally by both of them through the medium of their sense organs without the intervention of their free decision. The first idea they form of the column as a whole is equal in both. But they begin to disagree when they reflect on the image they have of the column and calculate its approximate height. The one who wants to keep it as low as possible makes his calculation according to his free decision and maintains that it is five metres lower than it actually is; the other, who also wants to make the calculation depend upon his estimation of things, decides that it is five metres higher than it actually is. There is therefore some part of the truth which is necessarily received in the minds of both these persons; and there is also in both of them something false created by their free decision.
119. By establishing that one part of human cognitions is always unfailingly and necessarily true, we have annihilated scepticism; by establishing that another part can be falsified by our free decision, we defend the existence of truth, the possibility of error, and morality.(86)
Notes
(84) The argument which misled Collins in his Dissertazione contro la libertà umana [Inquiry concerning Human Freedom] begins from the principle that `the will is determined by the intellect'. According to Episcopius `this is the rock against which the ablest defenders of freedom have come to grief, and to which they have no answer.' That apparently awesome objection would have been resolved easily if sufficient distinction had been made between the faculty of knowledge and the faculty of acknowledgement in the intellect. It could have been shown that one of these two parts of the understanding was subject to necessity, and the other guided by freedom. In fact, experience shows us that our thought contains something which is free and something which is not free. This explains why both the defenders and adversaries of freedom appeal to experience in their own favour. But distinguishing the two intermingled elements enables us to see the exact limits of truth and error in these systems.
(85) The mistake into which Hobbes was led by his subtle explanations about the nature of error has its origin in his failure to distinguish between the faculties of knowledge and acknowledgement, a failure he had in common with many other philosophers. Hobbes came to the conclusion that truth and falsity cannot exist except in the words with which propositions are expressed. Words, he says, are arbitrarily imposed upon things by us; the first truths simply depend upon the arbitrary decision of those who first used words (Logic, c. 3, n. 7–8). This system could not be avoided once it was admitted that the first ideas were known to human beings and that the whole of knowledge originated from the analysis of these ideas.
This analysis was accepted as a necessary process to which human beings could not deny their assent (c. 6). Once posited, Hobbes' principle allowed no possibility of error to the human mind, in which everything was determined. Error could be found only in a collision in the wrong application of words. If Hobbes had observed the presence in human beings of a free power of assent to or dissent from what is true, a power capable of disturbing the attention of the spirit and hence of altering our very cognitions by creating opinions and persuasions, he would have noticed immediately that falsehood does not lie in words alone.
He would have realised that it is found in the affirmations, whether expressed or not in words, of internal judgments not in conformity with things. In fact, he was unable to deny human self-deception (c. 5), but attributed it to his false principle that `a thing is signified by a sign which does not signify it.' It is extraordinary that after seeing how a person can deceive himself by wrongly interpreting a sign, Hobbes cannot take one further step and advert to the power of free decision which is also enclosed within that error. If we can deceive ourselves through the power of free decision, by interpreting badly the signs of things, can we not equally deceive ourselves by uniting or separating badly our ideas and assents?
(86) Leibniz is among the few who have recognised the immense power of the human will to move the judgments of the understanding in one way rather than another. — Amongst more recent authors, G. Burlamachi admitted this power without any hesitation, as we can see in his Principi di Diritto naturale, p. 1, c. 1, §12 and c. 2, §4–9, but without taking advantage of it as he could have done. In fact, he was a subjectivist, and believed that law and obligation could be deduced from the happiness towards which human beings are ordered, rather than from the authority of what is true itself.
The Scottish school, ignoring the existence of free knowledge, the seat of morality, was obliged to recur to a new faculty in order to explain moral obligation. This faculty was devised for the purpose and called `moral'. Dugald Stewart, in his synopsis of moral philosophy (Edinburgh, 1793), dedicates the second part to examining the active and moral faculties of the human spirit.
After saying that he believes it absurd to ask why we are obliged to conform our actions to the rules of virtue, he makes use of a moral conscience as a supreme rule, or better as a moral necessity. He attributes to Butler the honour of being the first amongst the moderns to base morals upon this fundamental principle. He concludes: `From what we have said, it appears that the moral faculty, considered as an active faculty of the human spirit, differs essentially from all the faculties which we have already listed' (c. 1, sect. 6, art. 3). In the system we have expounded, there is no need for any arbitrary supposition about such a mysterious, hidden faculty which presides over morality in human beings. `The moral element, according to us, consists in the relationship between the faculty of perception or knowledge with the faculty of practical judgment or acknowledgment of what is true.' Because we are free in such judgments, we feel ourselves strictly obliged by the force of truth: and this is `moral obligation', resulting from `the relationship of what is true with a being free to acknowledge what is true.' By transgressing or carrying out this duty, human beings become morally evil or morally good. Malice or probity is the effect of the execution or transgression of duty, or `the relationship between human action and obligation.'