This is natural enough in Mr. Shaw, for all his plays are prefaces:  Mr. Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.  But that Mr. Davidson (who can write excellent poetry) should write instead laborious metaphysics in defence of this doctrine of will, does show that the doctrine of will has taken hold of men.  Even Mr. H.G.  Wells has half spoken in its language; saying that one should test acts not like a thinker, but like an artist, saying, “I feel this curve is right,” or “that line shall go thus.”  They are all excited; and well they may be.  For by this doctrine of the divine authority of will, they think they can break out of the doomed fortress of rationalism.  They think they can escape.

But they cannot escape.  This pure praise of volition ends in the same break up and blank as the mere pursuit of logic.  Exactly as complete free thought involves the doubting of thought itself, so the acceptation of mere “willing” really paralyzes the will.  Mr. Bernard Shaw has not perceived the real difference between the old utilitarian test of pleasure (clumsy, of course, and easily misstated) and that which he propounds.  The real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn’t.  You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will.  Of course it was.  You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul.  But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action.  By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another.  And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.

The worship of will is the negation of will.  To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.  If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, “Will something,” that is tantamount to saying, “I do not mind what you will,” and that is tantamount to saying, “I have no will in the matter.”  You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.  A brilliant anarchist like Mr. John Davidson feels an irritation against ordinary morality, and therefore he invokes will—­will to anything.  He only wants humanity to want something.  But humanity does want something.  It wants ordinary morality.  He rebels against the law and tells us to will something or anything.  But we have willed something.  We have willed the law against which he rebels.