1 BELIEF IN FREE WILL: WHAT WAS AT STAKE?

The nature of the human mind has to be investigated in the history of the successive forms of its social expression; the greater the concrete detail, and the greater the historical sense of its variety, the more adequate the philosophy will seem. (Stuart Hampshire)1

Critics of the scientific world view fling around the words determinist and materialist.2 The words drip with negative connotations. For Victorians, the words connoted a damnable philosophy which it was hardly necessary to spell out: usage pointed the finger at people who would constrain and diminish humanity, if not God, by declaring limits to what the human spirit can hope for and what it can do. In sharp contrast, the nineteenth-century promoters of science pointed to the control, the human benefit, which knowledge of causes and effects brings: subjection to the natural order is the condition of possibility for human order. Victorian fears and hopes have re-appeared a century later as the neurosciences take their self-proclaimed march across the continent of human self-understanding.3 Running through all this was, and is, the question of free will, which the Victorian psychologist Alexander Bain referred to as the jungle of Free-will and Necessity.4 The very notion of free will is problematic, and, I shall argue, it is necessary to understand the notion in context, intellectual and social, not to seek abstract definitions. Language of the will, with which we associate the word Victorian itself, was philosophical, moralistic and religious, but it was also language which differentiated a world split by class, by men and women, by elite education and ignorance and by an empire of civilized English people and colonized natives. If determinism were to triumph as a belief, many people felt, the vulgar and primitive would rule and social hierarchies and the claims of the ideal over the mundane would collapse together. There would be no true morality, no true purpose. In addition, public rhetoric, rightly or wrongly, associated the mechanistic explanatory form of the physical sciences with technology and its transformation of the face of life. Traditional community, the harmonious rural landscape, classical education, religious belief, sensitive response to the feelings and character of individuals all appeared threatened by mechanism. The educated Victorian elites saw their ideal, culture, threatened by anarchy, in Matthew Arnolds formulation.5 Against this threat they commonly set the moral will, the individual
1

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power to impose a life of reason and purpose. Then, in the Great War, mechanism appeared to triumph, to reach its apotheosis.6 For all this, for every critic who saw opposition between the sciences and humanistic or religious ideals, there was another who welcomed technological advance and modernization. The opposition to determinism had mythopoeic roots, roots in a dream age when the soul was one with the world, un-alienated, the age in Christian thought before the Fall of Man. In a famous expression, Max Weber, binding myth with a critical sensibility for the social and economic conditions of modern life, described disenchantment: The fate of our age, with its characteristic rationalization and intellectualization and above all the disenchantment of the world, is that the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life. We govern our modern world, Weber argued, to the degree that we are rational, in an instrumental manner; we address material purposes but provide no basis for, and have no conviction in, wider meaning. There is no public space for sensitivity, for romance and for the free act on behalf of the ideal; these qualities have withdrawn into the transcendental realm of mystical life or into the brotherhood of immediate personal relationships between individuals.7 At least since the romantic reaction against the eighteenth century, there has been a gnawing concern that causally active powers, whether originating in heaven or on earth, which might bring purpose to human life, are absent. In Kierkegaards words, from the 1840s: If the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as the wind through the desert then how empty and hopeless life would be!8 In this book, then, I study belief in free will both as sign, for those who believe, that life is not hopeless and as a performance in which people feel they do indeed act. The late Victorians set the will against the disenchantment of their world. It has been a temptation for religious believers or classically educated moralists to blame science for taking purpose out of the world. Articulate voices, however, have declared scientific knowledge and technological innovation the motor of progress, the moral basis of western authority as well as the source of material and economic well-being. From Francis Bacon to the present, proponents of science and technology have stressed the growth of freedom not constraint, the enrichment of humanity not its impoverishment. Science, they argue, grants freedom, freedom from the ruling power of nature; the freedom it takes away is the freedom to be ignorant or the freedom of prejudice. Critics remain, however, and they argue that natural scientists, by the way they understand the world, have already both determined the kinds of choices which become possible and removed the terms in which it might be meaningful to discuss the values choices presuppose. Critics will not allow science itself to dictate the terms on which argument about the implications of science should proceed. Thus, T. H. Green, the influential teacher of philosophy in Victorian Oxford, placed himself among those unwilling that what seem to him the deepest and truest views of life should

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be retained merely on scientific sufferance.9 I shall explore these criticisms, which I think fundamental, by examining the place human purpose and the agency to implement it is thought to have in a scientific age. Agency, and the power which goes with it, is a particular concern of modern politics and its social analysis. The language originated in the characterization of legal subjects as agents who are by definition knowledgeable and responsible in law. In wider usage, agency now pertains to humans or humanity and, according to belief, to gods or spirits, but not to nature. The Victorians also used the word, though not as the analytic focus of political thought or social science, and they were much more prone than ourselves to talk about moral agency. In Victorian hands, reference to the will often signalled belief in such agency. It was common belief that the individual capacity to exercise will makes possible the organization of society on the basis of duty and responsibility. To question the will therefore appeared to question social order and arouse distinctive fears.10 This was, to be sure, an extremely individualist understanding of social structure. What did the Victorians think about the will as a power to effect change, to be free or not, to control the passions and to entail responsibility? How did science affect what they thought? The Victorians possessed a vibrant intellectual culture, evident in the periodical press as well as in books, the very existence of which was a sign of belief in the power of thought to have consequences. Even when they argued the case for determinism, it appeared a species of voluntarism: debate exhibited the will to persuade in full flood. And, as I shall argue, late Victorian thought has a long tail.

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Naturalism and its Critics

Naturalism denoted a view of the natural and human world which allowed only one kind of knowledge, knowledge of natural as opposed to supernatural laws and forces, and held that this kind of knowledge was, in fact, exemplified in the natural sciences.11 It was a normative belief. Thomas Henry Huxleys student and colleague, E. Ray Lankester, a leading Edwardian spokesman, in a characteristically blunt way made clear the moral drive:
Soon for very many, as now for only a few, the pursuit of Science will become a part of the Moral Law. It will be felt as an imperative that, in order to do that which is right, man must know that which is true.12

The 1860s was the pivotal decade for the standing of naturalist argument. In subsequent years, the onus of proof in questions concerning mans place in nature lay with those who would put forward super-naturalist explanations or a priori arguments.13 The experience of rational people, which science confirmed, enlarged and rendered precise, appeared authoritatively to establish the prin-

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ciple of the uniformity of nature and the continuity of natural law. For their advocates, these principles appeared constitutive of order in nature and human affairs alike. For many heirs to the Christian tradition, the most pointed implication was that there were not and could not be miracles. The philosophical criticism was that naturalists mistook or restricted experience and built knowledge on abstractions rather than on what is real. Real, living experience, critics believed, reveals poetic, moral and religious forms of knowledge, as well as knowledge based in passion, on the heart.14 There was also a critical feeling that naturalism, whatever its stated moral stance, had a subtly corrosive influence upon the ethical temper.15 Scientific naturalists like Huxley did not, it scarcely needs saying, deny living experience, as embodied in poetry, for instance, but they did deny that these forms of experience give knowledge. Huxleys declared agnosticism left open the possibility that there might be knowledge other than scientific knowledge, and he and other men of science indubitably had sensibilities like other people. For the critics, however, this was not enough. They were prone to borrow Hamlets lines: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.16 Ideals and hopes appeared to require something more than scientific knowledge, and this was knowledge of the purposes of existence and of the power of human agency to contribute to them. The future Prime Minister, A. J. Balfour, expressed the core of the conservative elites response to naturalism. In A Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879), his argument, directed against John Stuart Mill, was destructive: Has Science any claim to be thus set up as the standard of belief ? If there is, it cannot be drawn from the nature of the scientific system itself.17 Reason, he argued, must rest on a principle transcending reason. It is important for morality, Balfour thought, to protect this argument:
If, then, naturalism is to hold the field, the feelings and opinions inconsistent with naturalism must be foredoomed to suffer change; and how, when that change shall come about, it can do otherwise than eat all nobility out of our conception of conduct and all worth out of our conception of life, I am wholly unable to understand.18

He declared that any notion of a value requires belief in something beyond what naturalists can allow. As a politician he engaged the theory of knowledge in order to underpin ethical authority and, by implication, social order. Such writers feared the limitations of naturalism were not heeded or not sufficiently heeded. A perception of inexorable progress in natural science, with the unifying theories of conservation of energy and biological evolution in the vanguard, gave rise, late in the nineteenth century, to a literature of crisis a word which intellectuals and cultural critics have, to a greater or lesser extent, reiterated. If the language of crisis was most characteristic of the German-speaking

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world, in Britain too there was a painful sense that science had called into question the basis of the ideal.19 The historian G. M. Trevelyan, opposing human aims to the nature which science reveals, once referred to the vast Siberian despotism of matter.20 Sometimes the crisis was in culture, sometimes in philosophy, sometimes in western civilization, sometimes in values, sometimes in modernity, but always the stated cause was science. (Science, as then understood, included history and other fields of knowledge which were not natural sciences.) Critics associated naturalism and materialism. The latter word expressed fears, of those in a position to lift their eyes above material necessity, for loss of refinement and ideals and of subordination to duty and religion. The class connotations of the word, which invoked vulgarity and even immorality, were unmistakable. If the word was imprecise and often merely a derogatory epithet Gowan Dawson appropriately called it a slippery signifier it did signal the central place which the educated classes (to use a Victorian expression) had begun to accord to science in the national culture.21 The material engagement of science as knowledge and as technology appeared to question older ways of life. A reviewer of books on the interaction of mind and body, noting the impossibility of seeking knowledge of the one independent of the other, commented: What makes philosophers shrink from this obvious truth is the dread of being landed in Materialism.22 Moreover, if determinism and materialism were not exactly the same thing, critics thought one flowed from the other. There was a noticeable preoccupation with materialism in the thick journals in the years around 1870.23 Argument about the material basis of life, the dependency of mind on brain and the place of humankind in nature all seemed to be dragged back to this one epithet. Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, and in 1874 the physicist John Tyndall delivered perhaps the most discussed of all scientific polemics in the period, the Belfast Address, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). Enraged by the Catholic Churchs opposition to modernity in all its forms, exasperated by the politics of Ireland and contemptuous of the Anglican Churchs vacillations over the relations of scripture and prayer to natural processes, Tyndall memorably colonized the entire domain of knowledge for science. As the historian Bernard Lightman commented, the men of science believed that the resources of the academic profession were organized to suit the interests of the Anglican Church and the Tory party, and they were going to change all that.24 If Anglicans, in order to retain the authority of Revelation, argued that there are limits to reason, scientific naturalists portrayed themselves as defending the absolute claim of reason. Just at this time, the Second Reform Bill (1867), which somewhat extended the male franchise, raised the prospect of an egalitarian polity and put a question mark over the dominance of educated reason, as opposed to majority feeling, in running the country. In this situation, the promoters of science turned to the authority,

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Nature (with capital N), to which, they believed, all parties in a fractured society must conform. Scientific knowledge began to appear the distinctive source of rational order for a democracy. British intellectual life, though cultural clich still sometimes asserts the contrary, was not less lively than on the Continent; nor, in spite of aversion in some quarters to anything going beyond empirical discourse, was it necessarily less abstract in its terms.25 There was an intense, extensive, multi-levelled and articulate critical response to the scientific world view, and not just to its now best known dimension, Darwinism. Belief that there was a scientific world view, it is necessary to note, was more a product of critics perceptions than of unity among scientists. The point has weight especially if we include historians, philosophers and their ilk among the men of science. All the same, the late Victorians sometimes argued as if there was a unified outlook, naturalism, at stake. Moreover, many intellectuals spoke and wrote for what they conceived to be a single public, though in fact the public included some sharp dissenting voices coming from the lower classes, from the regions of Britain and Ireland and from women. Intellectuals presumed to contribute to an organic, shared debate, even when basic claims about knowledge were not shared. Rapid publication in the many periodicals then in circulation made for a feeling of live controversy, and contributors to the journals certainly wrote as if their words mattered. If there had been a common context which held together scientific and Christian views of nature until upset in the 1860s, it can be said that in the last three decades of the century there was a common debate which sustained, if among people of a certain class, a sense of a national culture even when views differed.26 One significantly shared aspect was an intense concern with individual morality and with the contribution of the personal will to the moral life, not least the will of the intellectual writer himself.27 As Stefan Collini wrote: Victorian intellectuals persuaded themselves they had a special duty to remind their more self-interested contemporaries of the strenuous commitments entailed by the moral values embedded in the public discourse of their society.28 What changed over the next century, I suggest, and gave the arguments about the scientific world view at the beginning of the twenty-first century a different character, was, first, specialization and the pursuit of knowledge through expert occupations, and second, relations between academic and so-called popular culture. Specialization made it possible to side-step and even to reward avoidance of large questions. In addition, specialization frequently led academics to substitute the thought of the field in which they happened to work for thought in general. At the same time, the spread of egalitarian politics was to deny to those who were most educated the kind of public privileges and dominance in debate which the late Victorian intellectuals had taken for granted, not doubting that they themselves were the authors of the best in their societys thought.

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The Victorians promiscuously referred to individual will, so much so that the word Victorian is now almost synonymous with a moralistic emphasis on the power of will.29 At times, language pictured the will, as in the King James version of the Lords prayer, Thy will be done in earth, as a concrete entity or power.30 At other times, will meant volition, a psychological capacity or process, the precise description of which prompted a lot of dense specialist writing at the end of the nineteenth century.31 Then, at the end of the century and in the opening decade of the new one, a literature on unconscious will brought to the forefront questions about the underlying causes of apparently willful action. Psychological and moral understandings of will were intimately related. The word agency was current but informal: it was then common to refer to the agency of nature or to causal agency as well as to government or moral agency. Whether or not it was thought right to say that there is agency in nature and that causation involves agency, I shall examine closely. There were those who argued that to specify a cause is to identify a power (for example, will power), as everyday language seemed to imply; but the scientific view was increasingly that reference to a cause simply identifies a condition (or the principal condition) necessary for bringing about a state or change. This was debated. If agency is an entirely naturalistic concept for modern social scientists, there were numerous Victorians who attributed ultimate agency, the vera causa, to spirit or to God. Discussion of the will was ineluctably political as it mapped and ordered the distribution of power and freedom. Indeed, debate about free will had roots in political life where the notion of freedom originated alongside the thorny matter of how there can be human freedom in an ordered, created world, debate about which went back to the late Stoic philosophers and Augustine.32 Writers had long attempted to redeem sin with a vision of Gods gift of the dignity of freedom to Man. Sometimes their subject was more specifically the control of the passions, for which, again, they turned to the will. Descartes, for one, had likened self-mastership to divine action: free will renders us in a certain way like God by making us masters of ourselves.33 Sometimes, as in much modern analytic literature, the question of the will was subordinate to a theory of the self.34 There was no free will debate as a delimited social phenomenon: debate ramified. In whichever direction the Victorians turned, from disputing international relations to considering the upbringing of children, they implied something about the nature and scope of the will and its freedom. The advance of what were thought to be mechanistic and deterministic ways of thought, from cosmology through evolutionary theory to political economy, made a great deal of difference to debate about the nature of mind. Reflecting on the advance of science, the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick wrote:

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Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 18701910 The belief that events are determinately related to the state of things immediately preceding them is now held by all competent thinkers in respect of all kinds of occurrences except human volitions Step by step in successive departments of fact conflicting modes of thought have receded and faded, until at length they have vanished everywhere, except from this mysterious citadel of Will.35

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The Argument of the Book

The late Victorians were agitated by science apparently reducing the will to an impossible anomaly in the universe; and they were also agitated by the loss of will power which, they feared, scientific belief might foster.36 Many people, whether spiritualists, Christian idealists or moralists, still looked to spiritual agency, but in public, on this issue, they had to take a defensive stance. Knowledge of the laws of nature, extended to the human sphere, implicated necessity in what people do. It was all too easy to think that men of science had removed the grounds for belief in freedom of action. Green rather bitterly predicted that when the moral sentiment has been explained on the principles of natural science, free-will is not likely to be regarded as presenting any serious obstacle to the same mode of treatment.37 Rather than attempting to answer the question, Is the will free?, this book interprets the will and its imputed freedom as a cultural, historical field. We will know better what we are talking about in the light of knowledge of what people have thought will and free will to be. In mapping late Victorian debate I certainly wish to write history; but I also assert that this knowledge is knowledge of the will and of free will.38

Victorian culture placed the will, understood as an individual capacity, at the centre of human distinctiveness. The will was at the base of character, and character was the pivot of personal relations and politics. The philosophy and psychology of will was pierced with hopes for purposive action in the world and fears that it was all an illusion. I shall argue that the anthropomorphism, reading into nature what is proper to humanity, which critics, then and now, have discerned in views of purposeful activity, was not a superficial mistake. No sense can be made of agency unless the world be a world understood in human terms. This is the central insight. The interpretation with which I conclude, no doubt influenced by the writers who appear in this book and thus pointing to a positive Victorian legacy, is that causal, mechanistic natural science knowledge is abstract knowledge. Nobody will question its power for certain purposes. Yet we may question, in the spirit of William James, its capacity to articulate values and to shape the sort of life in which we wish those values to take effect. Before I reach this conclusion, however, I build up a large picture of the rich late nineteenthcentury discussions themselves.

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Intellectual and cultural historians of Britain still sometimes relate to science as if it were a world apart, which in practice means leaving out natural science (with the partial exception of Darwinism) from history.39 Natural science, however, was part of a shared Victorian intellectual culture, and where it was not, there was still warm hope that it could be. George Henry Lewes, writing in the 1870s, concluded:
The great desire of this age is for a Doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that Conduct may really be the consequence of Belief In consequence of this desire, while thinking men appear, on a superficial view, to be daily separating wider and wider from each other, they are, on a deeper view, seen to be drawing closer together - differing in opinion, they are approximating in spirit and purpose.40

Lewes was a generous man, and this was an overly optimistic view, but few people then questioned the ideal of a synthesis of conduct and belief. Reference to the will was utterly pervasive in Victorian writing in the novel, moral tracts, philosophy, political debate, theology, policy questions about education, crime and poverty everywhere, in everyday and intellectual life alike. There is not the slightest possibility of writing history about this as the history of an idea. Nor, since the pervasive reference had a long history, is it possible, in the manner of Thomas Dixons history of altruism, to focus on the spread and cultural connotations of a word or concept.41 I have therefore shaped this history around a set of inter-linked intellectual debates. It is striking how a number of relevant issues conceptualizing psychology as science, debating automatism, understanding causality, asserting ethical purposes, advocating social science ran together in the Victorian period. We will also find a number of key authors, such as Huxley, James and Sidgwick, contributing across a broad front. This book is an intellectual and cultural history, in the sense that its subject matter is self-conscious debate among people who themselves signified the value of their exchanges, their culture, in intellectual terms. I do justice to Victorian concerns, which were extremely wide, from the psychology of crowds to ontology, from moral exhortation to the muscular sense. At the same time, I wish to be philosophical: my authors sought coherent, consistent and agreed belief, and we can judge them by these standards. As the meaning of the word science was itself in the melting pot, I do not prejudge what properly belongs to the history of science and what not. This is especially important for the large and largely original discussion which follows of concepts of mental activity, culminating in the concluding chapter on the phenomenology of will. I would identify two significant ways in which this history relates to modern debate (and these issues inform the final chapter). Firstly, there was almost unanimous Victorian agreement to continue to use an everyday notion of free will,

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whatever the deterministic implications of natural science. A number of authors, most clearly James, thought this involved separating natural science knowledge about the brain from moral knowledge about the will. In modern terms, there began to be argument that it is a category mistake to talk about free will in the context of natural science: scientific knowledge concerns uniform sequences of events in nature and it is meaningless to talk about such events as free acts. The Victorians lived, as we still live, however, in a society in which there were everyday, moral, legal or other kinds of knowledge in the context of which reference to free will was and is meaningful. Nineteenth-century writers, though, did not have sociological insight into the ways of life or linguistic usages in which people come to attribute events to supposed entities like brain or mind, or in which they find freedom or constraint in action. They did not theorize social agency. The second manner in which this history relates to the present will interest those who, like the late Victorians themselves, expect philosophy to answer the question, Is there free will? The intellectuals I discuss pursued a philosophical unity of view, and they accordingly sought a place for free will in a universe understood scientifically. The goal, they perceived, required critical examination of the foundations of scientific knowledge. Their explorations are still of great interest because they involved understanding people as the active world rather than as observers of the world. In late Victorian debate there was no key text to focus discussion, no single hub around which argument turned. The social geography of intellectual life in high-brow journals and other publications must lead the historian to attend to public debate rather than one or two sources, authors or archives.42 The scientific world view developed in the middle years of the nineteenth century, but I concentrate on the decades when the spread of specialist occupations gradually underwrote the world view and its naturalist philosophy with institutional support. Further, I mean something special by late Victorian (besides a mild pun, since I think these Victorians are not so far distant in time). The terms of debate about mans place in nature in the last three decades of the nineteenth century continued in important respects to underlie discussion into the inter-war years in the twentieth century.43 I use late Victorian to denote a style and subject matter of debate about the will which lasted well beyond the Victorian era literally understood. The metaphysical studies of the foundations of modern physical science (to use the phrase of E. A. Burtt) characteristic of the 1920s, were, I argue, a direct continuation of the debate over naturalism of the late nineteenth century, when, indeed, many writers of the 1920s were educated.44 I will add that though this is a study of British intellectual culture, I trust it is not parochial. Many educated Victorians had an admirable command of European literature, at least in French, German and Italian, as well as a background in classics. There was also a continuous and at times seamless connection with the English-language North-American world. British writers like Mill and Herbert

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Spencer had a significant audience in Europe. And it was Kant, after all, whose work became more widely appreciated in late nineteenth-century Britain, who had posed the antimony of freedom and necessity, approached through the relation of practical and critical reason, as the great problem of modern thought.45 I refer to the human sciences. This, of course, is an anachronism, but the phrase serves in the absence of an alternative as a family name for knowledge about being human in the domains we would now call the psychological and social sciences and the humanities.46 It denotes an area where the possibilities for and the nature of science were intensely debated. The family name has the advantage of neither including nor excluding any domain from being a science on a priori grounds, and it frees up enquiry into the social process of classifying knowledge. In this book, in fact, I discuss human nervous physiology, aspects of medicine, psychology, different areas of philosophy (epistemology of science, ethics and metaphysics), social science and history; more especially, I discuss relations between these, not always clearly separate, spheres. Belief about the will hung on all of this. In Europe and North America, the years from about 1870 to World War I saw the irreversible transition to social modernity and cultural modernism. One feature of modernity was academic disciplinarity and the consolidation of the authority of specialist, expert research. Beyond the natural sciences, the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, history, economics, social science, political science and English literature, as they were to be known over the next century, developed. Discipline formation to some extent also occurred in psychology, though there were wide divergences of view about the fields subject matter, divergences in which the question of the will played a large part. I shall examine this, since whatever attention historians of psychology have given to the rise of scientific psychologies in this period, they have hardly done justice to the diverse field in Britain.47 If the late nineteenth century was a period of discipline formation, with concurrent specialization, usage did not restrict science to the natural sciences (or to fields adopting their methods and concepts). Thus, to consider the impact of the sciences on notions of the will, we should take account of social science and history. Their standing as science was much discussed. Examining this, I strongly question any assumption of the naturalness of a sciencehumanities divide. Mill, in famous essays on Bentham (1838) and Coleridge (1840) as well as elsewhere, established a picture of intellectual life as divided between two camps, the one, which he promoted, linked to political reform, and the other, which he attacked philosophically in the persons of William Whewell and William Hamilton, linked to political conservatism. The philosophical division in epistemology and ethics continued after Mills death in 1873 in the form of argument between naturalists and idealists. Many Victorians perceived intellectual life to be divided in this way, and quick publication in the journals fostered a sense of

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polarity. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that the opposed positions were more sharply delineated or each more unified than they really were. Moreover, by 1900, when people with different philosophical views had begun to look to the state to take action in social affairs, the linkage between reform and empiricism and conservatism and idealism broke down. Chapter 2 describes the impact of scientific advance in the physiology of the nervous system, advance thought to establish knowledge of mental life, including voluntary action, as the outcome of bodily processes. Argument was well underway by the mid-nineteenth century. Rather like the later neurosciences, Victorian mental physiology, as the London physiologist W. B. Carpenter called the field, questioned conventional notions of the will and, crucially, its socio-legal correlate, responsibility.48 Indeed, medical and public fascination with apparent loss of will in mental disease, during sleep, in bad habits (like drinking) and in mesmerist and spiritualist sances, had led to the development of mental physiology in the first place. New knowledge appeared to transfer agency from action of the mind to cause within the body, which raised puzzles for both philosophy and social and legal policy. In the 1870s, and then periodically thereafter, there was focused argument about automatism and the relation of consciousness to the brain. Discussion of unconscious mental life (long preceding Freud) raised its own distinctive conundrums, nicely encapsulated in the phrase the unconscious will. I describe the automatism debate of the 1870s and then the most interesting and original intervention in that, from James. Jamess argument was to detach accounts of free will from science and place them in the domain of moral philosophy. Mental physiology made a large contribution to interests which, since the 1830s or so, British writers had generally called psychology, though the word denoted no clearly defined field. In the last two decades of the century, there was ubiquitous reference to the new psychology. This rather deceived people at the time, as it has deceived historians since, into thinking that there was a single new science of psychology in opposition to an old psychology understood as knowledge of the faculties of the soul. In fact there was no one new psychology (nor old psychology for that matter): there were a number of competing views, all of them in flux, about the direction a science of psychology should take. The term caught on, perhaps, after its use by Thodule Ribot, who (writing in French, but soon translated) contrasted new German experimental approaches to the philosophical, introspective study of the mind, or soul, then institutionally dominant in France.49 In Britain, there were strong voices committed to a new science of psychology founded on the analysis of mental processes, alongside those writers turning to physiology. This analytic psychology (to use G. F. Stouts term) significantly shaped the direction taken by psychology as a discipline in Britain and provided a home for discussion of volition. Because this work is little appre-

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ciated and, it must be said, much Victorian writing in this area is verbose and forbidding I devote chapter 3 to what I call the shaping of psychology. I discuss psychology as an elaboration, in the light of mental physiology, of everyday understandings of what people do, the continuing relations of psychology to philosophy and, distinctive of the years from 1870 to 1910, the strong influence of idealist theories of knowledge. The analytic psychologists large achievement was to make accounts of mental activity central in philosophical psychology. This, the subject of chapter 4, provided terms for rethinking the place of volition in nature. The history of these views of mental activity shows how necessary it is to modulate any claim about opposition between new psychology and old views of the will. The discussion here leads naturally into the literature on freedom of the will. There was a plethora of individual declarations rather than a few clearly defined positions. But contemporaries recognized once again the presence, in Mills terms, of two camps, empiricist and idealist, and the chapter clarifies their respective stances on free will. There was also a considerable literature on the psychology of attention, the result, I suggest, of it appearing to be a researchable phenomenon, knowledge of which could mediate between discussion of mental actions and of physical causes. The nature and relations of mental activity and physical causation had long been topics in moral and natural philosophy. As chapter 5 discusses, this continued in the late nineteenth century. This is the only chapter where, because of the unfamiliarity of the material, I give a sketch of earlier history. There was a tradition of thinking about change in nature as the outcome of real causal powers or forces, to use the fuzzy but pervasive Victorian term. Historians of natural philosophy have written a good deal about the striking British zeal for natural theology, for demonstrating through knowledge of the creation the Christian Gods purposes for nature and for humankind. Natural theology was a mission to vindicate and uphold Gods agency. In critical reaction, however, David Hume began, Mill restated and many late nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists confirmed a nominalist view: reference to a cause denotes knowledge, based on the observed constant conjunction of phenomena in experience, that a known sequence has occurred or will occur. A cause is not an essence but a name. Debate about the presence or absence of causal powers had implications at every level of representations of reality God, nature, history, society and individual choice. An analogy, with a long history, between the Christian Gods power and human power was critically examined, and denial of knowledge of efficient causation (causal powers) had damaging implications for claims about the individual will and Gods will alike. Argument drew on research into the physiology and psychology of how people sense effort or force, and into the part this plays in knowledge generally and of knowledge of will in particular. There was much interest in the subjective sense of agency, the feeling of attend-

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ing to or willing something, or of making an effort, and in what the Victorians called the muscular sense. In the late nineteenth century, belief in causal powers unravelled, contributing in a significant way, I suggest, to a disenchantment of belief in purpose and direction in the world. In this chapter I describe a largely unknown dimension of the history of the will. The literature on activity, will and causation passed without a discernible boundary into moral discourse (chapter 6). Though there was familiarity with the distinction between is and ought statements, it was not a distinction which did much work in the human sciences, precisely because of the assumption that the human subject is a moral subject. What grounds, the Victorians asked and we echo, are there for prescribing one course of action rather than another if all our capacities are, as evolutionary theory and physiological psychology between them would seem to have established, the outcome of natural causes? For late Victorians, self-consciously living in an age of evolutionary belief, fear that the scientific world view attributed human action either to blind chance or to inescapable causes damaged hope that there is purpose in the world. Thomas Hardys novels bore witness. As historians of biology and social thought have shown, much evolutionary thinking in the fin de sicle sustained, or brought back, explanation in terms of purposes into the world view. In order to discuss this, I examine closely Huxleys lecture, Evolution and Ethics, given in Oxford in 1893. The reason for returning to this much discussed, though not always understood, source is that Huxley staunchly defended both an evolutionary account of mans place in nature and belief in human ethical agency. Bluntly, he denied the will and asserted the will in one breath. How he did this, and why his contemporaries perceived inconsistency, reveals much about the difficulties facing claims for human agency in a scientific age. I interpret the lecture as a personal, but at the same time socially resonant, meditation on human agency in the face of inevitable suffering. Huxleys apparent inconsistency was a general feature of Enlightenment discourse about knowledge making people free. On the basis of this discussion, I move outwards, via Victorian literature on the fact/value distinction, to more general debate about the will and ethics. Simplification may be an inescapable hazard of cultural criticism, but C. P. Snows 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures, and associated discussion went further than most.50 Not the least of the problems about locating the arts and the sciences in different social and intellectual worlds was knowing where to place the psychological and social sciences, and also history. This led Wolf Lepenies to refer to die Drei Kulturen (the three cultures).51 It is obvious that the social science and history disciplines have had as thorough-going a commitment to empirical knowledge as any natural science, and it is also obvious that sociological and historical writing has been full of causal claims. It is not self-evident that history and sociology are not sciences, and indeed Victorians often simply

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called history a science. In chapter 7, I examine relations between the natural sciences, social philosophy and history for the contrast, if such there was, between knowledge focused on physical causation and knowledge focused on human action.52 Scholars at least since Vico in the early eighteenth century had compared the forms of knowledge in what we would now differentiate as the natural sciences and the humanities. The earlier pertinent division was between natural and moral philosophy. I trace something of the fate of that division in the late nineteenth century in order to examine belief about human agency. In Germanlanguage culture at this time, there was a debate about the identity and relations of Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft (literally, the science of nature and the science of spirit), but neither the debate nor the words had strict parallels in Britain.53 There were, however, strongly held views about the place of human volition and purposes in history and about the objectivity of history as a science in contrast to literature. This chapter therefore relates the roots of debate about the two cultures to the identification of the natural sciences with the study of physical causes and the humanities with the study of human agency. As earlier chapters show, this left psychology awkwardly, but revealingly, right in the middle and the psychology of volition most awkwardly placed of all. In chapter 8, in a substantial conclusion, I draw the threads together by looking again at the re-assessment of the scientific world view in my period. The re-assessment continued, with whatever changes in response to analytic philosophy, the specialization of disciplines, world war, literary modernism and so on, well into the twentieth century. Innovative arguments, for example by James and by Stout, were not so much anti-naturalist as attempts to re-think nature in a way which did justice to the claimed phenomenal reality or awareness of human agency. This led a number of philosophers, notably Alfred North Whitehead, to full-scale rewritings of the metaphysics underpinning the natural science critique of the will as a power. This work, perhaps provocatively, I call late Victorian, since, as John Dewey observed in 1930, modern philosophies have been dominated by the problem of reconciling the conclusions of natural science with the objective validity of the values by which men live and regulate their conduct.54 This could almost have been said in 1870. If Victorian references to the will had perpetuated the mindbody dualism formulated along with modern science in the seventeenth century, Dewey, among others, thought that it is the notion of science which must change rather than the belief about agency. If, as he suggested, we understand that we observers are the world, not separate from it, then the notion that our will is active in the world may not be incompatible with what we otherwise know. I describe the historical background to this conclusion. In the process, it is necessary to clarify the senses in which my late Victorians did consider the will as a non-natural science category and the degree to which they did not reflect on their own intellectual moves in sociological terms.

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Free Will and the Human Sciences in Britain, 18701910

In this final chapter, I reach conclusions about the British tradition of thought linking human agency to the presence of real purpose in the world. This tradition sought a metaphysics in which agency was not an anomaly but the pattern of things. It was a high hope, and the loss of this hope in the course of the twentieth century was no small matter. And the desire to act and make a difference remains, and remains to be understood. For this to be possible, our understanding of the world must be an understanding of a human world.

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