H 01 The Psychological Law of Man's acting

1. The Psychological Law of Man’s acting. In regard to this, I must content myself with simply enunciating and briefly illustrating certain positions.

(i.) The actions of men are determined by their volitions. As we will so we act; that is to say, when we are free to obey the impulses of the will, when no extraneous force constrains our actions. This is sometimes called freedom of will; but properly it is freedom of action liberty to act as we will.

(ii.) The will is determined by motives. We choose to do that which we are moved by certain inducements to prefer.

(iii.) The general law is, that what appears to us the strongest motive determines our choice, determines our volition. To this position it has been objected that, in point of fact, men do not always obey the strongest motive; that, for instance, men are seen obeying impulses which are positively weak, foolish, and wicked, in the face of the strongest reasons for an opposite course. But this objection is doubly fallacious. For 1. It confounds motives with reasons. These two are not the same. A reason does not become a motive until it is felt; and consequently, whilst there may be the most potent reasons why a certain course of action should be preferred, these may never act as motives on an individual, simply because they are not felt by him, or only feebly felt. And 2. This objection is irrelevant; it involves an ignoratio elenchi. It proceeds on the assumption that what is said to determine the will is what is the strongest motive, whereas what we assert is that the will is determined by what appears to be the strongest motive.

These two are not always the same. We all know that a man may resist the strongest motive simply because another presents itself with greater power, i.e. appears stronger to him. It is not by what things are, but by what they appear to be, that our choice is determined. We may bring the strongest motives to bear on a man, but if he meets us with the reply, " I cannot see it," we feel that it is in vain to urge him further. As our proposition is, that it is what appears the strongest motive that determines the will, it is irrelevant to object that sometimes what is the strongest motive determines the will.

(iv.) The light in which motives appear to us is deter mined not only, perhaps not so much, by what they are in themselves as by what is lent to them by the mind itself. The mind of man, it is to be ever kept in view, is not a dead or inert substance; it is vital and active, and each mind has its own personality. In no case, therefore, do we see things exactly as they are nakedly and per se; the mind always lends some tinge or hue from itself to them as they are perceived by us; and what is lent by one man may differ very much from what is lent by another. Hence differences of conception, of taste, of belief in regard to the same objects among different men. This applies also to motives. No motive acts pure and simple on the will; every one derives from the mind through which it passes a peculiar tinge and character by which its effect on the will is affected, it may be powerfully affected.

(v.) The hue which the mind lends to motives, and by which they are made to appear strong or otherwise so as to move the will, is derived from various sources. It may be due to natural constitution, or to acquired habit, or to fixed opinion. Thus the child of a drunkard may have derived from his parent a constitution which strongly predisposes him to intemperance, i.e. causes the motive to indulgence in intoxicating drinks to appear much stronger to him than it does to a man of another constitution; or a man may, from the habit of sensual indulgence, have his mental eye so jaundiced that he gives a wrong colour to objects of this class; or a man, from a strong and established opinion, may lend to some motives a force which does not really belong to them, or refuse to others that which is their due. Hence it is that men are found putting sweet for bitter and bitter for sweet, good for evil and evil for good. The bearing of these remarks on our present object must be obvious. We are in search of the principle of sin; and these remarks show that, according to the constitution arid laws of our nature, that principle must be something which biasses the will in favour of transgression something in the mind which lends to the motives to transgression an attrac tive hue, and makes them appear stronger than the motives to obedience.