FREE VERSE. No exact definition of this form of poetry has yet been reached. Indeed its very nature makes it difficult to define except by exclusion. Thus it is verse which discards tradi tional rhyme, metre, and form in favour of cadence. The theory. upon which it rests, is that poetry depends upon the substance rather than the form. The free-verse writer seeks to isolate the essential, and convey it to the reader stripped and absolute. The result will be differentiated from prose not so much by its quality of song as by reality captured in a lightning-flash.
In all European countries since the war free verse has found many adherents. In Great Britain and the United States it has achieved such a vogue that it has for the moment almost displaced the traditional. But it must not be supposed that it is in fact an innovation in the English tongue. The Song of Solomon, for example, is plainly free verse in the modern acceptation of the term, and many passages in Sir Thomas Browne are entitled to the same description. This may be accidental, but in the Victorian era Matthew Arnold deliberately, and with great success, wrote general poems that depended wholly on cadence.
Among the principal exponents of this form of verse in Great Britain have been the Imagists—F. S. Flint, Richard Aldington and T. S. Eliot. In the United States we have had Ezra Pound, H. D., Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg and Archibald Macleish. The movement at the moment is still increasing in strength and popu larity. But it has yet to prove that, when it succeeds, it succeeds by methods different from those used by Matthew Arnold.
(H. Wo.) The Scope of the Problem.—The problem of free-will, or of the freedom of the will, is complicated for various reasons. In the first place, the traditional formulation of the problem, its very name, is misleading. To ask whether the will is free seems to assume that there is such a thing as a will, which may or may not be free in its activities. This is a relic of the old, and now generally discredited, faculty psychology (q.v.). As Spinoza pointed out, will is a general concept derived from particular processes of volition, just as the concept of colour is derived from particular colours, blue, green, yellow, etc. And to think of will as exercising acts of volition is just like thinking of colour as the cause of blue, green, yellow, etc. Locke like wise ridiculed the conception, remarking that "we may as properly say that the singing faculty sings, and the dancing faculty dances, as that the will chooses" (Essay on the Human Understanding, book 2, chap. xxi., § 17). It would be best to avoid this hypostasis of an abstraction, and to speak of the freedom of the self, that is of the concrete personality, rather than of an abstract will. But the term, free-will, is too well established to be dislodged. Moreover, the expression, freedom of the self or of the person, might sug gest the problem of political freedom rather than the philosophical and psychological problems traditionally associated with the term free-will.
In the second place, the problem is unduly complicated by the fact that it can be, and has been, approached from very different points of view. The psychologist is mainly interested in the right explanation of the experience of freedom of choice, which seems to challenge the usual scientific assumption that all things, in cluding mental experiences, are subject to law and necessity. The moral philosopher is primarily interested in the free-will as a pos tulate of the moral life. For how can there be any significance in the moral "ought" or "ought not" if human life moves to the tune of an inevitable "must"? The jurist is concerned with the problem of free-will in its bearing on personal responsibility. For the whole penal system seems meaningless if people are not free agents in their actions, good and evil. Lastly, the theologian. has an interest in the problem, since it seems to involve either the denial of God's omniscience or of His justice. If man is truly free, then it would appear that God cannot fore-know his actions; if man is not free, then his prosperity or his suffering seem to be governed by caprice rather than by justice.
Such are the chief ways of approaching, the problem of free will. The discussion of the problem is also beset by the peculiar difficulty involved in having to use terms which have rather dif ferent meanings in different antithesis, such as there are bound to be when a question is approached from several different points of view. This applies especially to the terms freedom and neces sity, round which the whole problem turns. How serious this last difficulty is, may be indicated briefly by pointing out that whereas most people regard freedom and necessity as opposed terms, Spinoza (one of the greatest thinkers) actually identified them! And he did so for good reasons, as will be shown later.
Strictly speaking, however, all this was a violation of the real spirit of science, inasmuch as it did violence to actual observation. Except in the very last resort, observations should not be repu diated, or dismissed as deceptive, merely because they cannot as yet be explained in a way analogous to the explanations in vogue in sciences dealing with other phenomena. Now, the evidence of observation is clear enough. There certainly are cases in which we appear to have the experiences of deliberately or freely choosing one course of action in preference to others. Moreover we also have other experiences in which we appear to be coerced in de ciding or doing as we then do. If all our experiences were really of a quasi-mechanical character, it would be necessary to account for this difference between some of our mental experiences and others. As a matter of fact, recent psychology, indeed recent biology, has found it necessary to abandon the mechanistic model, and to assume an element of spontaneity or freedom in all living organisms in order to account for facts of observation. And some have gone so far as to repudiate the possibility of purely mechan istic explanation even in some of the purely physical sciences, such as chemistry. This revolt has found expression in the now familiar conceptions of "emergence" (q.v.) and "creative evolution" (q.v.). It seems to be an entirely unwarranted assumption to suppose that the kind of order studied in mechanics is the only kind of order applicable to all phenomena, organic and inorganic, mental and physical. And it seems to be equally unwarranted to suppose that mechanical energy is the sole producer of all kinds of events, living and lifeless, mental and physical. Granted that the principle of the conservation of energy has its perfectly legiti mate and extensive domain, there is no reason for doing violence to prima facie facts of observation merely for the sake of apply ing the principle universally. As Bergson has pointed out "no one can tell whether the study of physiological phenomena in general, and of neural phenomena in particular, will not reveal to us, besides the vis viva or kinetic energy of which Leibniz spoke and the potential energy which was a later and necessary adjunct, some new kind of energy which may differ from them (Time and Free Will, pp. 151, seq.) . Moreover, the principle of conservation of energy really affects the whole question of the relation between body and mind, and has no more a special bear ing on the problem of free-will than on that, say, of the expression of the emotions (q.v.).
Nay, more. It may be urged not only that science has no prima facie justification for dismissing the possibility of a measure of human freedom, but that science itself really postulates such freedom. In a world of thorough-going determinism, in which all things were mechanically or quasi-mechanically pre-determined, in which even men of science were not free to think as they thought fit in the light of the evidence before them, how could science lay any claim to truth, universally valid truth? There could be nothing but individual opinion, the opinion of each in dividual being as necessary, and probably as far from the truth, as that of any other. It may be, of course, that our world is such a world. But in such a world there could be no science. And to insist upon maintaining such a deterministic view of the world in the name, and on behalf of, science, is simply to stultify oneself. The real question, from the point of view of science in general and psychology in particular, is not whether there is such a thing as human freedom, but rather how much of it there is, and wherein it consists.
It would seem, then, that in the absence of cogent reasons to the contrary, such as have not been made out hitherto, we are justified in maintaining that there are elements of spontaneity or self assertion in human life. And if by freedom or free-will we mean, as we usually do mean, these elements of spontaneity and self-expression, then it may be said that a case has been made out for the view that man normally enjoys a measure of free dom or free-will.
This admission or contention is, however, a long way from the extreme claims of what is commonly known as libertarianism, the opposite extreme to the thorough-going determinism or mechan ism dealt with above. According to extreme libertarians, every human being, no matter what his past may have been, no matter what his present character may be, is at every moment of his life absolutely free to choose any one of the alternative courses of conduct that may confront him. If this view were true, then there would be no connection between an individual's choice at any moment and the rest of his mental life and being. Mental life would have to be conceived as something essentially discon tinuous, a mere sequence of discrete experiences. Such a view is entirely inconsistent with the evidence, to say nothing about the fact that, if true, it would make a science of psychology, or indeed any science, impossible. The accumulation of evidence which has led to the theory of evolution in biology prima facie tends all the other way, namely, in the direction of supporting a view of a con tinuity of influences that extend even beyond the life of the in dividual. And in psychology it has similarly been found increas ingly ne,cessary to take into account not only the whole past life and education of the individual but also various inherited char acters. The libertarian position would reduce life to, it may be a miraculous, but at the same time a lawless and disorderly se quence of events such as would render impossible a science of mental life. For it is the function of science as such, and of psy chology as a science, to discover law and order in its investigated facts.
If, now, we dismiss the two extremes, namely, absolute deter minism and absolute libertarianism, we are left with a view which may commend itself as a compromise, that is to say, the view that man is partly free and partly determined. This is the view actutlly adopted by most thinkers, because all the evidence is in favour of it, as we shall now indicate briefly.
In its primary and most usual meaning the term freedom is contrasted with coercion. If a man feels hungry and takes food of his own accord, his eating is spontaneous, voluntary or free; if his food is forcibly taken from him so that he goes hungry, then his hunger is involuntary or forced upon him. If, on the other hand, he adopts the hunger-strike and is forcibly fed, then the cases are reversed—his hunger is voluntary or free, whereas his feeding is involuntary or forced upon him. This is the primary contrast, which it is well to observe if one is to avoid the con fusion common in discussions about free-will. Human actions have, of course, a great range of complexity into which all sorts of considerations enter. Take, for example, the case of a move in a game of chess. The chess-player, under normal conditions, is free to make any move he thinks fit. In a sense he is more free when he makes the first move in the game than later on when the game has developed and his permissible movements are restricted by the position of the various pieces; and he is never entirely free, because there are rules to be observed which restrict his movements in various ways. But he is free to a very large extent, for there is nearly always a choice of movements (good and bad) from which he may select, at least until he is checkmate or stale mate. But now suppose we consider differences in the degree of different people's skill in the game. It is clear that a good player will often see possible movements which the inferior player, confronted by the same position, does not see. When comparing the two players one is tempted to say that the inferior player was forced to make a bad move, or at least an inferior move, because he could not see the better move. His ignorance, or insufficient skill, thus comes to be regarded as a hindrance to a better move, indeed, as a coercion to an inferior move, and one is inclined to say that the more skilled player has greater freedom than the less skilled player. But to do so is really to confuse the issue; it con fuses better play with freer play. In reality the two players are equally free, inasmuch as each plays of his own accord, and in conformity with the same rules. The fact that one of them plays better than the other is irrelevant to the question of freedom. One might play better and yet not so freely, e.g., when he simply carries out the instructions of another person. In the same kind of way the conduct of one person may be morally or artistically more valuable than that of another, yet both are equally free, so long as they act of their own accord, and each according to his light, under the same circumstances. It is a widespread view among moral philosophers that only good conduct is really free.
But this view is based on the very confusion between the value and the freedom of conduct to which attention has just been drawn. One curious consequence of the view under con sideration is that wicked actions are never free. This is unwar ranted psychologically, and contrary to common sense. There are plenty of people who of their own accord behave immorally under circumstances in which others act morally. Both are equally free, and the moral difference in their conduct is not relevant to the question of their freedom. Freedom consists essentially in self determination, as distinguished from external coercion or re straint ; and the value of the resulting conduct, however important it may be in various other respects, does not affect the psychologi cal question of its freedom.
Degrees of freedom, of course, there are, and have to be recog nized on purely psychological grounds. Only God (in Spinoza's sense) is free. Human conduct is always influenced to some ex tent by external factors which are beyond control. And the relative weight of these external influences varies from case to case. A precise estimate of the proportion of freedom is impos sible ; but in practical life common sense allows for differences in the degree of freedom in its own rough and ready way.
Perhaps the most serious difficulty in this connection is caused by the fact that the relative effect of external circumstances varies with the general condition of the person who has to face them, and no one is always at the height of his powers, or at his best. The degree of external coercion may thus vary very con siderably although the circumstances are the same, or essentially similar, and although the agent concerned is to all appearances also the same. One way of dealing with such cases is to say that even a normal individual is to some extent a multiple personality, consisting of selves of different orders of merit and power. There is the habitual self ; there is the highest self to which a man rises at his best; and there is the sub-normal self to which he sometimes sinks. The same, or essentially similar circumstances will coerce these several selves to a very different extent, and the same individual may in each case be said to have a different degree of freedom, the freedom being greatest for the highest self, and lowest for the sub-normal self. There is no great harm in expressing the facts in this way, except that it may tend to encourage the above-mentioned confusion between value and freedom. Another way of describing the facts is to say that each of these selves is as free as it can be, but that in judging an individual we rightly take into account his whole personality rather than a fragmentary self, and that we have special regard for what is best in him. And to that extent whatever is done by the sub-normal self is not judged as typical of the real per sonality (the habitual or even the highest self) of the agent. It is true, of course, that assuming circumstances to remain con stant, an individual's freedom will increase as his powers develop. But this is not to say that his greater freedom will necessarily make him morally better; it may make him more wicked, as appears from the cases of better educated crooks. Those who entertain the metaphysical faith in a moral world-order may urge that with still further self-development, and therefore with still greater freedom, there will eventually come greater moral good ness. That may be so ; but this consideration of it falls outside the psychological consideration of the problem of free-will.
Thus partial self-determination is the only kind of free-will that ethics really postulates; and that much, as has already been shown, psychology justifies us in assuming. On the assumption of either thorough-going determinism or extreme libertarianism the only kind of ethics that would be possible would be a merely descriptive, natural-history ethics, as contrasted with a norma tive, philosophical ethics, which strictly speaking is the only real ethics, to which the other kinds of ethical studies are only subordinate. (See ETHICS.) The Juridical Problem.—Law and morals are so closely connected that one need not be surprised to find that philosophi cal lawyers as well as moral philosophers are interested in the problem of free-will. The juridical problem turns mainly round the justification of punishment—the penal side or sanction of law. In a civilized society unmerited punishment (to a lesser extent also undeserved reward) offends the general sense of justice, in the interests of which law is assumed to exist. Yet punishment cannot, it is felt, be merited unless the offender com mitted the offence freely, of his own accord. And so the whole penal system would appear to be based on the assumption that man is free in his actions, and therefore responsible for them.
In the case of the philosophy of law, however, as in the case of moral philosophy, what is required is not the "freedom of indifference" urged by extreme libertarianism. Such freedom would be as fatal to law as to ethics, and partly for the same reasons, which therefore need not be repeated. In the case of law there is the additional objection that, on the extreme libertarian view, punishment could only be regarded as vindictive, for it could not possibly help to improve the future conduct of the offender or deter others, since past experience is assumed not to influence future conduct. Again, in law and in ethics the conception of freedom as partial self-determination furnishes an equally satis factory basis, and for the same reasons, which also need not be repeated. But there is a great difference between legal and ethical requirements in relation to the theory of thorough-going determinism. It has already been shown above that thorough going determinism would be fatal to the moral life. But it could be made a more or less satisfactory basis of the penal code. For the needs of social security may be regarded as justi fying the "punishment" of those who endanger it, even if the offenders do not deserve punishment, because they are not really responsible for their "offences." A mad dog may have to be killed, and a person suffering from a communicable disease may have to be isolated and virtually imprisoned, even if neither is responsible for his condition. Nevertheless the view of thorough going determinism, though possible, is not altogether satisfactory. And the view of freedom as partial self-determination offers a sound basis both for the deterrent and the corrective theory of punishment, as well as for that humane conception of the partly preventive and partly curative treatment of offenders which advancing civilization increasingly favours.
Another solution of this problem is to abandon the belief in Divine omniscience in order to save human freedom, just as some theologians are ready to forego their belief in Divine om nipotence in order to save His goodness in the face of so much apparent evil in the world.
Generally speaking, one may distinguish two main types of theological thought ; one which lays the greatest stress on the goodness of God, the other on the power (including the omni science) of God. The former type of religious philosophy tends to regard morality as autonomous. It holds that God does what He does, or decrees what He decrees, because it is good ; not that it is good merely because he does or decrees it. And con sequently it attaches such value to the moral life of man (which as we have seen, postulates a measure of free-will) that it is ready to forgo the belief in the omnipotence (including the om niscience) of God. On the other hand, the second type of theology is mainly obsessed with the omnipotence of God, and is so jealous on behalf of God (so conceived) that it tends to deny every sort of independence of Him, even such as free-will would appear to suggest, or the autonomy of goodness. According to this type what God does or decrees is good just because He does or de crees it ; He does not do or decree it because it is good. And rather than conceive of man as sufficiently free and independent to pursue an autonomous morality, it prefers a doctrine of thorough-going determinism, or predestination, in spite of its apparent reduction of human life and endeavour to a mere puppet show.
The present-day theological tendency is predominantly in fa vour of an autonomous morality, and consequently of such a mea sure of human freedom as this postulates. And incidentally the conception of free-will as being essentially a measure of self determination by the agent also helps to mitigate to some ex tent the difficulty of reconciling human freedom with Divine foreknowledge as based on a knowledge of the character of the agent.
The problem of free-will received fuller attention from the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics believed in a world-soul which they regarded as controlling everything, and this belief naturally led to a thorough-going determinism. The Epicureans, on the other hand, were materialists; but as they did not believe in any kind of cosmic order, and attributed everything to chance, they inclined to the belief in free-will. Cjirysippus, the Stoic, is noteworthy for his endeavour to reconcile determinism with moral responsi bility. He distinguished between the principal causes of human conduct and its contributory causes. By identifying character with the principal cause of conduct he upheld the view that man is responsible for his actions.
Christianity, from the beginning, was faced with the problem of reconciling human freedom with Divine government—the old Stoic problem in fact. St. Augustine was not particularly con sistent in his views concerning our problem. He professed to see no inconsistency between the belief in Divine foreknowledge and that in human freedom, and tended to restrict human freedom to the solitary case of Adam, whose fall has condemned to necessary evil the rest of mankind, except those who by Divine grace are predestined to good. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus see no difficulty in reconciling the free-will of man with the foreknow ledge of God, and the latter emphasizes the will's complete power of self-determination, even when guided by the intellect.
Turning to modern philosophy, we find the three principal answers to the problem of free-will given by the three more or less contemporary philosophers, Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza. Hobbes' thorough-going determinism was the logical consequence of his materialism. Mental experiences, according to him are in the last resort merely motions of brain particles, and all human conduct is determined partly by such brain motions and partly by external material causes. Descartes, on the other hand, endowed the human will with absolute power of self-determination. All evil and all error can be avoided by withholding our consent by a sheer act of will. So far is knowledge or belief from determining our will that it is really our will that determines what wg shall believe. Spinoza is commonly described as a thorough-going determinist; but that is only one of the many injustices done to him by incom petent interpreters. In reality he was the first to identify freedom with self-determination, and to attribute to man partial freedom. The confusion has arisen from his somewhat peculiar use of the term "necessity"; Spinoza distinguished between (external) co ercion and (inner) necessity. What is coerced, of course, is not free—the two terms are opposed to each other. The term "neces sary" however, is not used by Spinoza as synonymous with "coerced" or as the contradictory of "free," but as synonymous with "what is in accordance with law and order" (in the scientific sense), as the contradictory of what is merely "accidental" or "a matter of chance." If, as has been maintained above, human freedom is partial self-determination, and human conduct is not a matter of mere chance, but is determined by the whole character and mentality of the agent, then human conduct is at once "free" and "necessary" in Spinoza's sense, and only partly "coerced." Leibniz, in consequence of his doctrine of a pre-established harmony among the windowless monads which are controlled by God, was to all intents and purposes a thorough-going determinist. Locke, like Spinoza, corrected the misconception underlying the expression "freedom of the will," which should really be "freedom of man" and he supported the theory of free-will in that sense. Hume in so far as he was a consistent opponent of the objective reality of the causal nexus (which he was not) could of course attach no real meaning to determinism in conduct. Consistently with his radical scepticism he could neither hold a definite view on one problem nor regard human conduct as merely accidental. Kant is no doubt the best known philosopher in relation to the problem of free-will. He was the first to insist on freedom as a postulate of morality. "I ought, therefore I can." His next prob lem was to reconcile this postulated freedom with the thorough going determinism which the scientific explanation of all phe nomena seemed to demand, as he thought. He solved this difficulty in a characteristic way. He distinguished between phenomena and noumena, that is, between the world as it appears to us and the world as it is in itself. Human experiences as parts of the world of appearances are subject to the thorough-going determinism that characterizes all natural phenomena. But man is also part of the world of noumena, and as such he is free to obey the categorical imperative, or highest moral law, which is really only an expression of his noumenal self.
This brief and inadequate historic note only indicates the origin of the leading ideas in the history of the problem of free will. For an adequate study of the history of the subject it is necessary to study carefully the works of the philosophers named, as well as those of many post-Kantians, who have not even been mentioned here.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, edit. A. C. Bibliography.-T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, edit. A. C. Bradley (1883) ; H. Sidgwick, Outlines of the History of Ethics (i886, 2nd ed. 1892) ; J. Martineau, A Study of Religion, 2 vols. (i888) ; W. James, The Will to Believe (1897) ; J. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosti cism, 2 vols. (1899, 4th ed., 1915) , The Realm of Ends (1911) ; W. R. B. Gibson, "The Problem of Freedom" in Personal Idealism, edit. H. Sturt (1902) ; A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics (1903, 7th ed. 1924) ; J. E. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (1906) ; H. Rash dall, The Theory of Good and Evil, 2 vols. (1907, 2nd ed., 1924) ; H. L. Bergson, Time and Free-Will (Eng. trans., F. L. Pogson, 1 g i o) ; E. Boutroux, The Contingency of the Laws of Nature (Eng. trans., F. Rothwell, 1916) ; J. S. Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics (1924) ; A. Wolf, The Correspondence of Spinoza (1928). (A. Wo.)