Freedom

Abstract

Man is free, and his freedom has been supposed on one ground or another to separate him from the rest of creation. As free, he has been thought either to be exempt from causality, or to possess a causality of a different sort so as to be independent of determination, like the rest of the world, by some antecedent cause. If it were so, causality would no longer claim to be a category as entering into the constitution of every form of finite existence. But we are already familiar with the notion that mental processes affect each other causally, and that a mental process may be the cause of a non-mental one or the effect of it. It remains then to identify the consciousness of freedom that we possess. It will be seen that freedom is nothing but the form which causal action assumes when both cause and effect are enjoyed; so that freedom is determination as enjoyed, or in enjoyment, and human freedom is a case of something universal which is found wherever the distinction of enjoyment and contemplation, in the widest sense of those terms, is found.