There is no doubt that the ascription to the Will of a certain moral character, and that a very lofty one, is characteristic of nearly all thinkers who accept its existence at all. “Ill for him,” writes Tennyson in lines of Sophoclean dignity,
“Who, bettering not with time Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,”
as though evil came from the corruption and slackness of Will, not from its wrong direction.
In the ethics of Plato it was a cardinal principle that men did evil only through ignorance. Make the soul conscious of goodness, and it could not fail to follow it. Yet it seems that this doctrine, strongly as it appeals to the moral sense of man, would, if held with philosophic rigour, really make the Will unfree. No man can truly choose the good who is unable to choose the evil. The Platonic doctrine may, however, be fully accounted for, and even put in a form in which it can, to a great extent, be justified, if we give weight to the following considerations. Moral action is usually recognized in the renunciation of a strong personal gratification for the sake of some social or other altruistic end. Now in such cases we are always sure that the two motives have been duly present, the moral motive, for otherwise it would not have been followed, and the personal motive, for these are common to all living things, they are at the base of our being, and our own experience tells us only too well how insistent and powerful such motives are. The volitional character of such an act is therefore manifest. But if the lower motive be followed, the significance of the event is more obscure. For we all understand these lower motives,[129] and they are fairly uniform over the whole of humanity. We can always take for granted that they are present in full force. The martyr undoubtedly hates the idea of being burnt. But we are not so sure of the other class of motives. We cannot in every case feel certain (unless the event has verified it) that _they_ were distinctly in view, for man’s moral nature is still only at the beginning of its development, we are still far from having evolved anything like a universal moral code, not to speak of the instincts for obeying it. We are inclined to assume, therefore, and I think we are perfectly right in assuming, that when the Will appears in human action it is far more often to good purpose than to evil. In order that it may be free to act on any ethical question, there must be a sufficient degree of ethical development; the character of moral worth must have been impressed upon the spirit. In the strength and stay which it affords to such a spirit, the faculty of Will is most clearly recognized and honoured.