Jonathan Edwards [1754], Freedom of the Will (WJE Online Vol. 1) , Ed. Paul Ramsey [word count] [jec-wjeo01].
4. Edwards and John Locke
1. Sereno Dwight tells us that "in the second year of his collegiate course, while at Wethersfield, Edwards read Locke on the Human Understanding with peculiar pleasure. … From his own account of the subject, he was inexpressibly entertained and delighted with that profound work, when he read it at the age of fourteen; enjoying a far higher pleasure in the perusal of its pages, 'than the most greedy miser finds, when gathering up handfuls of silver and gold, from some newly discovered treasure.'"Dwight ed., 1:30. To understand Edwards' inquiry into the modern notions of freedom it will be helpful to search again into the relation between his thought and that of John Locke (1632–1704), as set down particularly in the chapter "Of Power" in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Bk. II, ch. 21; Ed. A. C. Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894), 1:308–80. After all that has been written upon the subject of Edwards' Lockean views, insufficient attention has been given to the present work in this regard. A close study of it will add both clarity and puzzlement to the problem of Edwards' philosophical lineage.
The question of the freedom of the will is, in the opinion of both Edwards and Locke, a question badly posed. "To talk of liberty," writes Edwards, "as belonging to the very will itself, is not to speak good sense. . . . For the will itself is not an agent that has a will. . . . He that has the liberty of doing according to his will, is the agent or doer who is possessed of the will; and not the will which he is possessed of." It is the bird, and not the bird's power of flying, that "has a power and liberty of flying" (p. 163; italics mine).
In this Edwards' thought and language follow Locke closely. The British philosopher wonders whether his analysis of power and the definition of liberty as a power of the soul "may not help to put an end to that long agitated, and, I think, unreasonable, because unintelligible question, viz. Whether man's will be free or no?" and he gives as reason for this expectation the fact that
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The question itself is altogether improper; and it is as insignificant to ask whether man's will be free, as to ask whether his sleep be swift, or his virtue square. . . . Liberty, which is but a power, belongs only to agents, and cannot be an attribute or modification of the will, which is also but a power No. 14. . . . . Liberty . . . is the power a man has to do or forbear doing. No. 15. . . . The will is nothing but one power, and freedom another power or ability; so that, to ask whether the will has freedom, is to ask whether one power has another power, one ability another ability. … For who is it that sees not that powers belong only to agents, and are attributes only of substances, and not of powers themselves? So that this way of putting the question (viz. whether the will be free) is in effect to ask, whether the will be a substance, an agent, or at least to suppose it. . . . But if any one should ask, whether freedom were free, he would be suspected not to understand well what he said; and he would be thought to deserve Midas's ears, who, knowing that rich was a denomination for the possession of riches, should demand whether riches themselves were rich. No. 16. . . . It is the mind that operates, and exerts these powers; it is the man that does the action; it is the agent that has power or is able to do. For powers are relations, not agents: and that which has the power or not the power to operate, is that alone which is or is not free, and not the power itself. No. 19. . . . I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free. No. 21. In like manner Edwards maintains that it is the agent, and not his will, that has the power or liberty of doing according to his will. One suspects, however, that he lacks some degree of thoroughness or consistency in directing attention always to this question which he and Locke agree is at issue—namely, whether a man be free or no? Instead, Edwards' polemic against the definition of freedom as a self-determining power (shaped as it is by the view he is opposing) leads him to reduce this question back again to the one from which Locke departed—namely, whether the will, not the man, has the power, or whether the will be free by prior act of will to determine itself?
2. This agreement of Edwards with Locke upon the matter of attributing freedom (however it be understood) to the soul or mind and not to an attribute or power or faculty of the soul is based on their common rejection of the division of the person into various -- 49 -- distinct faculties, such as the tripartite distinction between the reason, the will, and the appetites in traditional psychology. In short, we have here a conception of the fundamental unity or coinherence of human capacities. "The ordinary way of speaking," writes Locke, "is, that the understanding and will are two faculties of the mind; a word proper enough, if it be used, as all words should be, so as not to breed any confusion in man's thoughts, by being supposed (as I suspect it has been) to stand for some real beings in the soul that performed those actions of understanding and volition. . . . I suspect, I say, that this way of speaking of faculties has misled many into a confused notion of so many distinct agents in us" (no. 6). This is the same as to suppose that there is a speaking faculty, a walking faculty, a dancing faculty, etc.; and "we may as properly say that it is the singing faculty sings, and the dancing faculty dances, as that the will chooses, or that the understanding conceives" (no. 17), and we may as properly speak of a digestive faculty or an expulsive faculty as of motive, intellectual, and elective faculties (no. 20).
Of course, on the verbal level it is impossible to avoid altogether the use of such words as "understanding" and "will" to refer to different functions of human nature or different relations into which its powers enter. Thus Edwards writes, "If it be possible for the understanding to act in indifference, yet to be sure the will never does" (p. 197), "every act of the will is some way connected with the understanding" (p. 217), and he seems to believe that Clarke too much "confounds the understanding and will, and makes them the same" (p. 223). Such statements as these may indicate something below the level of language that demands to be acknowledged. Therefore John Locke says concerning the terms of faculty psychology that "such words . . . are to have their place in the common use of languages" since "it looks like too much affectation wholly to lay them by." Concerning the ideas behind the terms, he also writes, "Not that I deny there are faculties, both in the body and mind: they both of them have their powers of operating" (no. 20). His view requires only that the faculties of the mind be carefully redefined as powers, and as such they are still clearly distinguishable: "For these being all different powers in the mind, or in the man, to do several actions, he exerts them as he thinks fit: but the power to do one action [e.g. willing] is not operated on by the power of doing another action [e.g. perceiving, understanding]" (no. 18).
Joining with Locke in placing the powers formerly called faculties in the mind or in the man, Edwards goes beyond Locke in abolishing -- 50 -- differentiation between them. This is manifest in Edwards' judgment that the will and the understanding cannot properly be said ever to oppose each other in regard to the same thing. This was possible according to the older faculty psychology.
Even deeper diremptions were placed in the mind or in the man by the theological literature on the bondage of the will within the Pauline-Augustinian-Calvinist tradition which Edwards continues and reformulates. One thinks here of St. Paul's "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Rom. 7:19), and of St. Augustine's cry, "I it was who willed, I who was unwilling. It was I, even I myself. I neither willed entirely, nor was entirely unwilling. Therefore I was at war with myself, and destroyed myself."The Confessions, bk. VIII, ch. 10. According to Augustine it is possible for a man to will and "nill" the same thing at the same time. No such conception of the self-contradiction in the will is to be found in Edwards. Yet Edwards' variance from Augustinianism on this matter is in large measure verbal and arises from the fact that his view in the main consists of an analysis of an act of effective volition or choice in which any contradiction in the man is supposed to be past. What Augustine calls contradiction in the will Edwards takes into account in what he says about simultaneous "consent to being" and "dissent from being":
[I]t is naturally agreeable to perceiving being that being should consent to being, and the contrary disagreeable. If by any means, therefore, a particular and restrained love overcomes this general consent, the foundation of that consent yet remaining in the nature exerts itself again, so that there is the contradiction of one consent to another. . . . [A]nd by inclining or doing that which is against his natural inclination as a perceiving being, he must necessarily cause uneasiness, inasmuch as that natural inclination is contradicted: and this is the disquiet of conscience. If these youthful notes are to be credited as part of Edwards' mature system, it is evident that the war between the will or love to God and the will or love to lesser beings in Augustine's view was expressed by Edwards in terms of a conflict between man's basic consent -- 51 -- to being in general and his dissent from being when consenting only to more restricted being. Edwards simply does not locate this conflict among the acts of the will, since for him "an act of the will is the same as an act of choosing or choice" (p. 137), the conflict being supposed to be overcome before ever the mind chooses, or else out of a multitude of contending inclinations the least preponderation one way he defined as an act of will. Augustine could never choose or act rightly because before grace he could never will entirely; while, according to Edwards, an act of will is by definition the entire mind acting. Nevertheless, a man cannot actually will or act entirely unless his inclinations and consent to being have been made captive to the beauty of Being itself. For, according to both men, consent or love to any lesser being cannot possibly be whole-hearted, on account of the unacknowledged but ineradicable foundation of consent or love to God in the human heart.
The fact that Edwards understands human nature in terms of a more thoroughgoing unity than even Locke did is made evident by the objections he raises against certain of Locke's views. In the first section of the Inquiry, Edwards disagrees with Locke's suggestion that the word "preferring" may not be precisely the equivalent of a "choice" or "act of volition" (no. 21), and with his stronger statement that "the will is perfectly distinguished from desire" (no. 30). Edwards argues that on closer inspection it will be found that (1) "will" and "prefer" and (2) "will" and "desire" mean the same thing. The quotation cited from Locke on the second point, distinguishing will from desire, is preceded in his text and introduced by a definition of volition which seems to forestall Edwards' objections to his hesitancy in the first instance to using the word "preferring." "Volition," Locke writes, "is nothing but that particular determination of the mind, whereby, barely by a thought, the mind endeavors to give rise, continuation, or stop, to any action which it takes to be in its power" (no. 30; ed. italics). Both men, then, agree in substance that properly to will requires, in Edwards' words, "a concurring habitual expectation that it will be so; having ever found by experience, that on such an immediate preference, such sensations and motions do actually instantaneously, and constantly arise" (p. 138).
Locke, however, seeks a different term for the mind's relation to what is not "nextly chosen" or for what is not the "next and immediate object of the will" (p. 138); or rather, he judges that the word -- 52 -- "prefer" somewhat and the word "desire" more emphatically suggest our attitude toward an impossible or a remote end which may not now be willed or chosen. Edwards simply wants no such distinction of terms, although he does not explicity deny that human motivation, in the whole of it, includes what Locke directs attention to by means of these distinctions. Edwards telescopes these meanings and finds as a consequence that will and preference and will and desire always agree in respect to the same thing, whether thius be an immediate or a remote object. These powers or relations of the mind to its ends are believed to run counter only by a confusion in thinking in cases where the immediate and remote objects of action are different. This is to say that, strictly speaking, will and desire or preference never run counter. The reader may judge which of these views accords the more with ordinary language, to which Edwards frequently makes appeal, or which is more to be preferred as a product of that capacity of mankind "to improve th ebenefit of language, in the proper use and sign of names, given to things which they have often occasion to speak of, or signify their minds about" (p. 130).
A more important, because more than verbal, issue is whether Edwards' refusal to follow Locke in adopting or devising terms that have different shades of meaning does not lead him to adopt, or reveal in him, a too extreme conception of the unity of human powers or a too monolithic view of the motivations to action. "This insistence that will, preference, desire … are all merely different names for the act of the will, closed, so Edwards hoped, all the loopholes by which his opponents might drag in some notion of freedom under the guise of opposition among the affections." Faust and Johnson, xivii. Edwards went beyond Locke in order to stop the mouths of his New England opponents who, even as they too were absorbing Locke, continued to use the jargon of faculty psychology and found room for freedom in the interstitial spaces left open by such a view of human nature. Edwards wanted to stop all crevices in the argument. As Tappan remarks, "Edwards' analysis is more nice than Locke's, and his whole development more true to the great principle of the system—necessary determination. Locke, in distinguishing the will from the desire, seems about to launch into a different psychology, and one destructive of the principle." A Review of Edwards's "Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will," 86.
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3. Another important aspect of Edwards' relationship to Locke which can be clarified by a study of this treatise appears in the author's discussion, in pt. I, sec. 2, of the question whether the will be determined by the strongest motive, i.e. by the greatest apparent good. Here he affirms that since the word "good" includes in its signification the removal of what is disagreeable or evil, his own view of the determination of the will always by greater good succeeds in including that "uneasiness" which "Mr. Locke supposes determines the will" (p. 143). Whether this be so or not may be questioned; but before entering upon a discussion of this subject we need briefly to call to mind the radical difference between the first and the second editions of Locke's great work, particularly in the extensive revision of the chapter "Of Power."
In the second and subsequent editions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, "upon a stricter inquiry" (no. 35) Locke inserted his "second thoughts" (no. 31) concerning the liberty of the will, substituting nos. 28–62 of this chapter for nos. 28–38 of the first edition (1690). The revision was retained in the third and fourth editions printed in Locke's lifetime, in the French translation supervised by him, and of course in the many editions published after his death in 1704. When writing the present treatise, Edwards used a copy of the seventh edition, as he indicates in the footnotes. This was the first octavo edition, in two volumes, published in London in 1716. However, Edwards may have studied the first edition of Locke's Essay when he was a student and later tutor at Yale College. The so-called "Dummer Library," a catalogue of books given to Yale College in January 1713, lists among the donations of Elihu Yale a copy of the 1690 edition. If Edwards originally became acquainted with Locke's first edition, and this was the form in which Locke's thought first made its impact upon him, that would explain why Edwards' views on freedom of the will correspond so closely in substance to Locke's "first thoughts" on the same subject, together with a strange reluctance on Edwards' part to take issue directly with important elements of the sweeping revision incorporated in the edition he actually used in composing his own Inquiry. Against such an hypothesis, however, one of his notes on "The Mind" makes objection to Locke's view, introduced into the second and subsequent editions, that willing always arises from uneasiness, for, says Edwards, a man's "voluntary refusal is an act of the will which does -- 54 -- not arise from any uneasiness in his present circumstances." No. 70, Dwight ed., 1:693; WJE 6:385. This demonstrates that Edwards must have known the second or some subsequent edition of Locke's Essay (perhaps even the seventh he used in writing the Inquiry) sometime during the years 1717–20 when he composed these notes.
"Good, then, the greater good, is that which determines the will"—this is what Locke said (no. 28) in the first edition of this chapter, and Edwards says the same thing now. The shift in Locke's thought from the second edition onward was from the greater good to felt uneasiness as the motive of willing. It may be questioned whether Edwards, in adopting in effect the position of Locke's first edition, does in fact include without significant alteration what Mr. Locke, upon second thought concerning the question, supposed determines the will. For while Locke admits that the avoiding or removal of uneasiness is in every case good, not every acknowledged good produces motivating uneasiness on account of its absence. He writes: "The greater visible good does not always raise men's desires in proportion to the greatness it appears, and is acknowledged to have: though every little trouble moves us, and sets us on work to get rid of it. . . . All present pain, whatever it be, makes a part of our present misery: but all absent good does not at any time make a necessary part of our present happiness, nor the absence of it a part of our misery. If it did, we should be constantly and infinitely miserable; there being infinite degrees of happiness which are not in our possession" (no. 45).
Here again the difference in their viewpoints turns upon Locke's readiness and Edwards' refusal to devise a term, or appropriate and refine one in common usage, for the mind's relation to remote good. For Edwards requests it be "carefully observed" that he is speaking only of "the direct and immediate object of the act of volition" (p. 143). From this restriction Edwards', and Locke's first, view follows unavoidably. Moreover, this is never denied in Locke's second and later editions:
For, as to present happiness and misery, when that alone comes into consideration, and the consequences are quite removed, a man never chooses amiss: he knows what best pleases him, and that he actually prefers. Things in their present enjoyment are what they seem: the apparent and real good are, in this case, always the same. For, the pain and pleasure being just so great -- 55 -- and no greater than it is felt, the present good or evil is really so much as it appears. And therefore were every action of ours included within itself and drew no consequences after it, we should undoubtedly never err in our choice of good: we should always infallibly prefer the best. No. 60. These words are good commentary upon Edwards' illustration of the drunkard, but Locke did not think this admission opposed to the conclusion that present uneasiness motivates action, and not the mind's total apprehension of the good. Thus Locke distinguishes between the greatest apparent good (which, though objectively good, may be remote and unappealing) and the good that makes itself felt in uneasiness or dissatisfaction. Edwards joins together what Locke put asunder. He needs only one term to describe the motivations to voluntary action and the appearance of good to the mind.
We have seen that one of the numbers in "The Mind" explicitly opposes Locke's theory of uneasiness. It seems likely, therefore, that other numbers which do not expressly mention Locke reveal the young Edwards at work constructing (or reconstructing) a verbally more simplified, monolithic account of the powers and motivations of men. As a consequence Edwards was able to adopt language similar to Locke's first edition without explicitly denying (what Locke needed more than one word to express) that there may be remote and objective good not at present part of the soul's apprehension:
[21(b).] THE WILL. It is not that which appears the greatest good, or the greatest apparent good, that determines the will. It is not the greatest good apprehended, or that which is apprehended to be the greatest good, but the greatest apprehension of good. It is not merely by judging that anything is a great good that good is apprehended or appears; there are other ways of apprehending good. The having a clear and sensible idea of any good is one way of good's appearing, as well as judging that there is good. . . . And that good of which there is the greatest apprehension or sense . . . is chosen by the will. And if there be a greater apprehension of good to be obtained or evil escaped, by doing a thing, than in letting it alone, the will determines to the doing of it. . . . The degree of apprehension of good, which I suppose to determine the will, is composed of the degree of good apprehended, and the degree of apprehension.
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60. WILL, ITS DETERMINATION. The greatest mental existence of good; the greatest degree of the mind's sense of good; the greatest degree of apprehension, or perception, or idea of [our] good, always determines the will. . . . the degree of the ideal perceptive presence of the good in the mind. . . .
It is utterly impossible but that it should be so, that the inclination and choice of the mind should always be determined by good as mentally or ideally existing. "The Mind," Dwight ed., 1: The foregoing notes (which, if studied in their entirety, provide excellent supplementary explanation of what Edwards means in the Inquiry by "the manner of the mind's view") demonstrate again that Edwards' position consists simply of a clear analysis of an act of volition: The will is as the greatest apprehension of the good is, or the degree of such apprehension. The will is as is the degree of the ideal perceptive presence of the good in the mind.
The difference between Edwards and Locke appears again on p. 148, where Edwards states that "the will always follows the last dictate of the understanding." In doing so he takes "understanding" in "a large sense" to mean the mind's whole present or efficacious apprehension of the greater good, which might as well be called a "narrow" sense excluding reference to the remote good except insofar as this plays a part in present uneasiness—which comes down to saying that the mind is now motivated by present motivation. Locke, on the other hand, took the "last dictate of the understanding" in the other meaning and was forced to revise his view. The only way Edwards can deny the correctness of his doing so is in terms of the terms; for, as he points out, "If by the dictate of the understanding is meant what reason declares to be best or most for the person's happiness, taking in the whole of his duration, it is not true, that the will always follows the last dictate of the understanding" (p. 148).
Beneath the terms each man uses, more than terminology is at issue. At least by the time of the Inquiry, the idea of a remote or objective good somehow known by the mind alongside of the lively apprehension of good by the will plays no effective role in Edwards' thought; and as a consequence he has no need of the distinction between the powers of understanding and will except in the ordinary usage he occasionally adopts. A clear distinction between the "faculties" -- 57 -- of understanding and will was written into the complete title of the notes on "The Mind," "The Natural History of the Mental World, or of the Internal World: Being a Particular Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Mind, with Respect to Both Its Faculties—the Understanding and the Will—and Its Various Instincts, and Active and Passive Powers," Dwight ed., 1:664; WJE 6:386. and this distinction was useful when he wanted to set apart the mind's power of merely judging that anything is a great good (or the appearance of greatest good as an idea in the understanding) from the will or inclination of the mind (or the "greatest apprehension" of good). In the Inquiry, however, no actual distinction is made between "the degree of good apprehended" (by the understanding) and "the degree of apprehension" of good (by the mind's power of willing). The degree of good apprehended and the degree of apprehension, the nature and circumstance of the object and the state and manner of the mind's view, are now completely telescoped into one. If a remote or objective good is not effectively present in the mind's apprehension, it should not be regarded as actually present at all so far as the analysis of action is concerned. In place of the remote good actually appearing as "a clear and sensible idea" in the judgment of the understanding but perhaps not forcefully present in the degree of apprehension, there is only a good blurred and weakened in the present but distant scene before the mind's eye. The degree of good that appears and the degree of apprehension of the good are one. So are understanding the good and willing the good. The direction in which Edwards' thought was to move was forecast in the concluding words of the note on "The Mind" just quoted: "For we mean nothing else by 'good' but that which agrees with the inclination and disposition of the mind; and surely that which agrees with it must agree with it. And it also implies a contradiction to suppose that that good whose mental or ideal being is greatest does not always determine the will. For we mean nothing else by 'greatest good' but that which agrees most with the inclination or disposition of the soul. It is ridiculous to say that the soul does not incline to that most, which is most agreeable to the inclination of the soul." "The Mind," no. 60 (ed. italics), Dwight ed., 1:693; WJE 6:376. Therefore Tappan remarks upon how completely Edwards "makes mind and object to run together in choice, or how perfect a unition of the two, choice is." A Review, 31.
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It is interesting to observe that Isaac Watts, who before the mid-eighteenth century was with Edwards outstanding among orthodox theological writers as a purveyor of Lockean ideas, discusses at some length these same principles—uneasiness, the greatest apparent good, and the last assent of the understanding—as determiners of the will. Like Edwards he cannot discover much difference between these proposals. "The removal of this present uneasiness is itself the greatest apparent good, and if the will be determined to act thus or thus for the removal of its present uneasiness, then it is still determined by the greatest apparent good." But he takes more cognizance than Edwards of the distinction Locke himself had drawn, saying that he does not see in it "ground enough for that great opposition between his doctrine in this point, and the common doctrine, which he seems to represent in two whole sections." Like Edwards, Watts contends that he has included in the other principles what Locke says motivates the will. Watts, however, takes precisely the wrong turn in interpreting Locke when he asks "Does it not then follow, that uneasiness is the remote mover of the will, and desire of good the proxime mover of it?" An Essay on the Freedom of Will in God and in Creatures (1732), in The Works of the Reverend and Learned Isaac Watts, D.D., selected and compiled by David Jennings and Philip Doddridge in 1753, 6 vols. (London, 1811), 6:
4. It was his making a distinction between things or objects chosen and acts of choice which led Locke to a radical reconstruction of his views on the liberty of the will. He writes, "A very judicious friend of mine, since the publication, suspecting some mistake in it, though he could not particularly show it me, I was put upon a stricter review of this chapter. Wherein lighting upon a very easy and scarce observable slip I had made, in putting one seemingly indifferent word for another, that discovery opened to me this present view, which here in this second edition, I submit to the learned world" (no. 73). What this slip was, of one seemingly indifferent word for another, is shown by Locke's correspondence with Molyneaux, July 15, 1693: "By observing only the mistake of one word (viz. having put things -- 59 -- for actions) which was very easy to be done in the place where it is, First edition, ch. 21, no. 28 (ed. Fraser, 1:375): "We must remember that volition or willing, regarding only what is in our power, is nothing but the preferring the doing of anything to the not doing of it; action to rest, and contra. Well, but what is this preferring? It is nothing but the being pleased more with one than the other. Is then a man indifferent to be pleased, or not pleased, more with one thing than another? Is it in his choice, whether he will or will not be better pleased with one thing than another? And to this I think every one's experience is ready to make answer, No." (The italics in this passage have been altered to indicate how Locke slips from "preferring the doing" to being "better pleased with one thing" across the words at the midpoint of the passage which, in respect to this distinction, are indeterminate; "the being pleased more with one than the other.") I got into a new view of things, which, if I mistake not, will satisfy you and give a clearer account of human freedom than hitherto I have done." See Fraser's note to no. 73 of bk. II, ch. 21 (1, 366). Observing this distinction led Locke to abandon his former view that the will is determined by the greater good, while Edwards employs exactly the same distinction in the course of his argument to the opposite consequence of strengthening his contention that in the moment of the action the will is as the greatest apparent good is. "The very act of volition itself is doubtless a determination of the mind . . . coming to a choice between two things, or more, proposed to it. But determining among external objects of choice, is not the same with determining the act of choice itself, among various possible acts of choice" (p. 178). This is Edwards' typical reply to writers like Watts who, beyond the inclination of the will according to the last dictate of the understanding apprehending the greater good in one object rather than another, endeavor to produce concrete illustration of cases in which the will determines itself to choose between two or more perfectly indifferent things, between two pieces of cake exactly alike, or touching one spot rather than another on a chessboard.
Indeed the man chooses to take or touch one rather than another; but not because it chooses the thing taken, or touched. . . . The case may be so, that of two things offered, a man may, for certain reasons, choose and prefer the taking of that which he undervalues, and choose to neglect to take that which his mind prefers. In such a case, choosing the thing taken, and choosing to take, are diverse. . . . And therefore the arguments which they -- 60 -- bring, in order to be to their purpose, ought to be to prove that the mind chooses the action in perfect indifference, with respect to that action; and not to prove that the mind chooses the action in perfect indifference with respect to the object. P. 201. Notice also that in the language and thought of this passage precisely the same lines of opposite development insist on emerging which Locke followed out, namely, the use of the word "prefer" with exactly the same meaning (diverse from "will" or "choice") which Edwards rejected in Locke at the outset, and the use of the word "undervalue" which implies a possible opposition between the judgment of the understanding concerning the greatest apparent good (which attaches the more to choice worthy objects) and motives to action from felt uneasiness or some other motive. Edwards manages to suppress the tendency of thought to move in this direction from his own and Locke's first position, while Locke commits himself to this inherent development. Although Locke would have agreed with Edwards that there is an important distinction between whether the will be "conversant about the objects presented" or "the acts to be done" (p. 201), he came to the quite opposite conclusion that in being conversant about acts to be done, the will is mainly conversant about felt uneasiness and not primarily "nextly" or immediately about the mind's apprehension of the greater good (which has more to do with the thing presented).
5. He judged also that in being conversant about actions, the will is conversant about the possibility of suspending action. This brings us to the other outstanding aspect of Locke's revised viewpoint, and to the question of Edwards' relation to Locke's new view of freedom. The mind, Locke believed, has in most cases "a power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires; and so all, one after another" (no. 48). "This is the hinge on which turns the liberty of intellectual beings," this is "the great inlet and exercise of all the liberty men have": "that they can suspend their desires, and stop them from determining their wills to any action, till they have duly and fairly examined the good and evil of it." We can "hold our wills undetermined" (no. 53).
Locke explains this view of freedom in explicit contrast with his earlier (and Edwards') viewpoint in a paragraph (no. 57) that was introduced into Coste's French edition and thence into the posthumous editions, including the seventh Edwards used. The passage -- 61 -- opens with a definition of the freedom of will which was Locke's and is Edwards': "Liberty, it is plain, consists in a power to do, or not to do; to do, or forbear doing, as we will." This cannot be denied, yet it is inadequate. For, says Locke, this definition of freedom seems "to comprehend only the actions of a man consecutive to volition" (italics mine); and it must always be inquired further, "Whether he be at liberty to will or no?" In other words, in being conversant about actions, is not a man conversant about acts of willing as well as about acts of doing as he wills?
In answering this, Locke still allows that "in most cases, a man is not at liberty to forbear the act of volition."
But yet there is a case wherein a man is at liberty in respect of willing; and that is the choosing of a remote good as an end to be pursued. Here a man may suspend the act of his choice from being determined for or against the thing proposed, till he has examined whether it be really of a nature, in itself and consequences, to make him happy or not. For, when he has once chosen it, and thereby it is become a part of his happiness, it raises desire, and that proportionably gives him uneasiness; which determines his will, and sets him at work in pursuit of his choice on all occasions that offer no. 57. As for the question which greatly exercised the Arminians, and Edwards in his answer to them, namely the question what condition of the will warrants praise or blame, reward or punishment, Locke's blunt retort is: "He had a power to suspend his determination."
Now, the striking and puzzling thing about Edwards' Inquiry is that, with all this before him in Locke, he nevertheless introduces the theory of suspension quite anonymously, or as if it were a formulation or possible objection he himself has made up, in the fashion of philosophical and theological writings at that time, in order to assist and complete his own argument. Why does Edwards not single out John Locke for refutation? He had in him an opponent worthy of his polemical powers, and moreover a proponent of the freedom to suspend whose philosophical outlook had largely become Edwards' own. Instead, he opens the matter with the words, "If any should suppose, that these difficulties and absurdities may be avoided, by saying, that the liberty of the mind consists in a power to suspend the act of the will, and so to keep it in a state of indifference, till there has been opportunity for consideration . . . I say, if anyone imagines -- 62 -- that this helps the matter, it is a great mistake" (pp. 209–10; italics mine). Is this not an extraordinary reticence? If Edwards' argument from this point on to the end of sec. 7 of pt. II be valid, it has the power to force Locke into "gross inconsistencies" and "impertinence"—more effectively, it may be suggested, than the largely verbal fashion in which Whitby's statements See below, pt. 5, no. 11 of this Introduction. are made to bear witness against themselves in sec. 5 of this part, where they are flanked by essentially the same argument. For however naive Whitby may be in not distinguishing between "willing what we will" and "acting what we will or please," precisely because he has not done so his language in defining liberty as "doing what we will" cannot be construed to mean "acting" in distinction from "willing" what we please, or be made to bear witness against itself and in behalf of Edwards. Because Locke probes so deeply as to make this distinction, it occurs to him to say that the will is conversant with itself in suspending the act of willing; and herein he opens himself to Edwards' reply.
Toward the end of the Inquiry (pt. IV, sec. 7, n. 2) Edwards quotes at length from Locke's Essay in support of his view that a perfect moral being, such as we suppose God to be, will always be determined by the highest good. The opening words are, "'Tis not a fault, but a perfection of our nature, to desire, will and act, according to the last result of a fair examination." It should be pointed out that this is the concluding sentence of no. 48, in which Locke has just introduced for the first time, against the background of an analysis of uneasiness as the motive for action, his notion that the power to suspend action is "the great inlet and exercise of all the liberty men have" (no. 53). Edwards completely ignores the significance of the expression "the last result of a fair examination" in the context of the idea of suspension, and instead moves on to the following passages that were taken over by Locke largely unrevised from his first edition. Was it only a slip of the pen when, later on in this footnote, Edwards copied "wise determinations" instead of Locke's words "wise considerations"? This is not to suggest that Locke's reformulation ought to have been more thorough, depicting God holding his will undetermined between a higher and a lesser good, or that Edwards' citation on the whole is mistaken or irrelevant. It simply shows how Edwards looks the other way rather than find the notion of suspension in Locke, and face up to it there in the context of a -- 63 -- philosophy more sophisticated than many of the Arminian theologians, and more like his own.
The argument between whose jaws Locke might have fallen, had he been a living Arminian rather than a dead mentor, is that the suspending of volition is but another act of volition. This willing to suspend is, then, subjected by Edwards to the same analysis as any other act of volition. Anthony Collins, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1717; 3rd ed., 1735; republished with a preface by Joseph Priestley, Birmingham, 1790), in contrast to JE, refers to Locke when dealing with the theory of suspension (p. 26), and his reply is the same as JE's: ". . . He is not less determined to will, because he does often suspend willing or choosing in certain cases: for suspending to will, is itself an act of willing; it is willing to defer willing about the matter proposed. . . . A man, who suspends a will about any matter, wills doing nothing in it at present, or rejects for a time willing about it. . . . So that willing, or choosing, suspension, is like all other choices or wills that we have" (p. 27). In willing to suspend, are we free simply in the sense that, consecutive to this volition, we are able to do what we will, or is there a prior freedom or power to fetch forth this very will to suspend, without already, in the time of volition, a preponderation that way? The search for a will behind every act of willing "drives the exercise of freedom back in infinitum; and that is to drive it out of the world" (p. 211); nor in any case is it a proper explanation of the original freedom of the will to suspend, from which we have actually departed in the course of this reasoning. In thus running the will "out of the world," Edwards really asks and answers the question whether the will—and not whether the man—be free.
6. The form and substance of the above contention recur throughout Edwards' Inquiry. It is logically undeniable, and moreover set forth the more effectively in Edwards' rhetorical style with its piling up of long yet perfectly clear sentences with punctuation apparently only, as it were, for breath. A final aspect of the relationship of Edwards to Locke which should be noted is that the germ, and more than a germ, of this argument he might have found in Locke. Especially was this true of the first edition, if this was one of the editions Edwards studied at Yale, Puritanism in him being thereby awakened from its scholastic slumber; but it is still there in the edition Edwards had by him when writing.
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Besides to make a man free after this manner by making the action of willing depend on his will, there must be another antecedent will, to determine the acts of this will, and another to determine that, and so in infinitum: for wherever one stops, the actions of the last will cannot be free. No. 23. The foregoing passage of the first edition, which may have been studied by Edwards at Yale, was retained by Locke in the three other editions published during his life. It was, however, stricken from the French, and the hand of Locke may have been in this; nor does it appear in the posthumous editions, i.e. in the seventh, which Edwards used—perhaps because of the sound judgment of the editor that it could not be assimilated by Locke's "second thoughts" concerning liberty. Yet an equally forceful passage was allowed to remain:
To ask whether a man be at liberty to will either motion or rest, speaking or silence, which he pleases, is to ask whether a man can will what he wills, or be pleased with what he is pleased with? A question which, I think, needs no answer: and they who can make a question of it must suppose one will to determine the acts of another, and another to determine that, and so in infinitum. No. 25.
Here only the concluding words "an absurdity before taken notice of" were eliminated, for editorial consistency with no. 23 which, as we have noted, was posthumously altered. So the foregoing could have been read by Edwards at the time of his writing. And in all editions, i.e. both the first and the seventh, Locke writes:
It is plain that a man that is walking, to whom it is proposed to give off walking, is not at liberty, whether he will determine himself In the French edition: "n'est plus en liberté de vouloir vouloir (permittez moi cette expression)," on which Leibniz comments, "Si nous voulions vouloir, nous voudrions vouloir voiloir, et cela irait à l'infini." Bk. II, ch. 21, no. 24 (ed. Fraser, 1:327). Essentially the same argument might, of course, occur to anyone without the assistance of Locke, as it did to Luther: "But may we suppose, that this power is a kind of medium, between the will itself and the action itself; such as, that by which the will itself allurs forth the action itself of willing or not willing, or by which the action itself of willing or not willing is allured forth?" The Bondage of the Will (1525), trans. Cole, sec. XLII. to walk, or give off walking or not: he must necessarily prefer one or the other of them; walking or not walking. . . . The -- 65 -- mind, in that case, has not a power to forbear willing: it cannot avoid some determination concerning them, let the consideration be as short, the thought as quick as it will, it either leaves the man in the state he was before thinking, or changes it; continues the action, or puts an end to it … thereby either the continuation or change becomes unavoidably voluntary. No. 24. This is enough to make abundantly clear not only the possible source in Locke for one of Jonathan Edwards' main arguments but also the fact that statements of Locke concerning liberty of will might have been made to testify against themselves much more readily than the statements of some of the Arminians that Edwards selects for this purpose.
Jonathan Edwards [ 1754], Freedom of the Will (WJE Online Vol. 1) , Ed. Paul Ramsey [ word count] [ jec-wjeo01].
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