NECESSITY
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NECESSITY
there is any holy activity, the motion or determination of the will from the very beginning is conditioned upon the grace of God working in the soul in some wonderful hidden way ("interna et occulta, mirabili ac ineffabili potestate'") to produce voluntary action in holiness. Tliis is the truest freedom, and its highest develop- ment consists in the non posse peccare, the J'elix 7iecessi- tas boni. This grace Augustine designates as irresisti- ble. '• By this he meant, not that the human will is con- verted uiiw illiiii;ly or by compulsion, but that the di- vine grare is able to nvercome the utmost obstinacy of the human spirit" (Shedd, Hist, of Doct. i, 73). Augus- tine's idea and explanation of the activity of the will are from the theological point of view rather than the psy- chological.
In the scholastic period, as two representatives of its views, we may mention Thomas Aquinas on the one hand, and Duns Scotus on the other. Aquinas held that "the will depends upon the understanding; that which appears good is necessarily sought after; but necessity arising from internal causes, and reposing on knowledge, is freedom." The will is not subject to the necessity of compulsion, but to that necessity which does not destroy freedom — the necessity of striving after ends. Duns Scotus maintained, on tlie contrary, that " the human will is not determined by the understand- ing, but has power to choose with no determining ground."
In the German mysticism, which grew up in the 13th and 14th centuries out of scholasticism, the will was treated as subordinate to the knowing faculty, and ex- treme emphasis ^vas laiil on the presence in the divine nature of the element of natural necessity. " True iniion with God takes place in cognition ; knowledge, which is God's action in man, is the foundation of all essence, the ground of love, the dttermiiiing power of the will."
o. With the decline of scholasticism, and the rise of the spirit of the Keformation, the views of the phenom- ena of volition are moditied bj^the fact that philosophy becomes more independent of the current tlieology in its interpretation of the universe of nature and mind. But in their views and methods they largely influence each other. Des Cartes emphasized human freedom ; but, as according to his theory the will has no power of itself over the body, his disciples, as Malebranche, introikiced the doctrine of Occasionalism — that God by liis direct agency moves the body in accordance with our Avill. Spinoza, developing and transforming the Cartesian dualism into a pantheism, making (Jod the immanent cause of the totality of finite things, holds that God works according to the inner necessity of his nature, in which consists his freedom ; that he produces all finite effects only indirectly through finite causes; tliat there is no such thing as human freedom indepen- dent of causality, but that all events, including all acts of volition, are determined by God, though through finite causes, and not immediately. In the seventh definition of his Ethics he defines freedom and necessity as follows : "That thing is called free which exists by the sole necessity of its nature, and the determining cause of whose activity is in itself alone. But that is called necessary, or rather constrained, which owes its existence to another, and whose activity is the result of fixed and determinable causes." Spinoza's idea of free agency dif- fers but little from that of Augustine, as being self-de- termination ; and he " rightly seeks for the proper oppo- site of freedom, not in necessity taken generally, but in a distinct kind of necessity, namely, constraint, which is to be defined as necessity having its source, not in the nature of the subject of constraint, but in something foreign to that nature (whether in the internal or exter- nal world), and overruling the endeavors to which that nature itself gives rise" (Ueberweg, Hist, of Phil. ii,68). Leibnitz, whose philosophy, like that of Des Cartes and Spinoza, was fundamentally theistic, maintained the power of self-determination in the soul ; that " freedom, not as an exemption from law, but as the power of de-