Free Will and Four English Philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Mill (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from Free Will and Four English Philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Mill

This explanation may not account for free will in G01) and in His holy angels; but in so difficult a matter it is much if we can form some theory which a philo sopher may debate, and a sound theologian will not bar as heretical, erroneous, or temerarious.

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Since then they have been submitted to much castigation and amendment, less perhaps than they deserve, at the hands of the writer, then youthful, now an elderly man. This fact may account for some inequalities of style. Certain tender memories of the past have stayed my hand from pruning away all traces of the exuberance of youth. Meanwhile the importance of the subject has grown rather than diminished, chiefly, I think, owing to the prevalence of the Kantian philosophy. I may as well forewarn the reader that Kant is not discussed here, except indirectly, in so far as the phenomenalism of Hume may be considered to have prepared the way for Kant. I have written elsewhere: Though men are slow to see it and loth to own it, from reminiscences I think of the odium theologicum hanging about the question, free will still remains the hub and centre of philosophical speculation. In this work the subject is treated entirely on philosophical grounds: that is to say, there is no reference to grace, predesti nation, or the Fall. Thus St Augustine stands out of the controversy: so too Calvin and Jansenius. My Free Will in God and Man, pp. 142-155, in the Second Series of my Oxford and Cambridge Conferences, 1900-1901: see also in my Politicaland Moral Essays, 1902, an Essay on Morality with out Free Will.
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