I raise my finger.  Every man of sense must admit that, under normal conditions, I can raise my finger or keep it down, as I please.  There is no ground for a difference of opinion so far.  But there is a further point upon which men differ.  One holds that my “pleasing” and the brain-change that corresponds to it have their place in the world-order; that is, he maintains that every volition can be accounted for.  Another holds that, under precisely the same circumstances, one may “please” or not “please”; which means that the “pleasing” cannot be wholly accounted for by anything that has preceded.  The first man is a determinist, and the second a “free-willist.”  I beg the reader to observe that the word “free-willist” is in quotation marks, and not to suppose that it means simply a believer in the freedom of the will.

When in common life we speak of a man as free, what do we understand by the word?  Usually we mean that he is free from external compulsion.  If my finger is held by another, I am not free to raise it.  But I may be free in this sense, and yet one may demur to the statement that I am a free man.  If a pistol be held to my head with the remark, “Hands up!” my finger will mount very quickly, and the bystanders will maintain that I had no choice.

We speak in somewhat the same way of men under the influence of intoxicants, of men crazed by some passion and unable to take into consideration the consequences of their acts, and of men bound by the spell of hypnotic suggestion.  Indeed, whenever a man is in such a condition that he is glaringly incapable of leading a normal human life and of being influenced by the motives that commonly move men, we are inclined to say that he is not free.

But does it ever occur to us to maintain that, in general, the possession of a character and the capacity of being influenced by considerations make it impossible for a man to be free?  Surely not.  If I am a prudent man, I will invest my money in good securities.  Is it sensible to say that I cannot have been free in refusing a twenty per cent investment, because I am by nature prudent?  Am I a slave because I eat when I am hungry, and can I partake of a meal freely, only when there is no reason why I should eat at all?

He who calls me free only when my acts do violence to my nature or cannot be justified by a reference to anything whatever has strange notions of freedom.  Patriots, poets, moralists, have had much to say of freedom; men have lived for it, and have died for it; men love it as they love their own souls.  Is the object of all this adoration the metaphysical absurdity indicated above?

To insist that a man is free only in so far as his actions are unaccountable is to do violence to the meaning of a word in very common use, and to mislead men by perverting it to strange and unwholesome uses.  Yet this is done by the “free-willist.”  He keeps insisting that man is free, and then goes on to maintain that he cannot be free unless he is “free.”  He does not, unfortunately, supply the quotation marks, and he profits by the natural mistake in identity.  As he defines freedom it becomes “freedom,” which is a very different thing.