in the freedom of the will.

When in common life we speak of a man as free, what do we understand by
the word? Usually we mean that he is free from external compulsion. If
my finger is held by another, I am not free to raise it. But I may be
free in this sense, and yet one may demur to the statement that I am a
free man. If a pistol be held to my head with the remark, "Hands up!" my
finger will mount very quickly, and the bystanders will maintain that I
had no choice.

We speak in somewhat the same way of men under the influence of
intoxicants, of men crazed by some passion and unable to take into
consideration the consequences of their acts, and of men bound by the
spell of hypnotic suggestion. Indeed, whenever a man is in such a
condition that he is glaringly incapable of leading a normal human life
and of being influenced by the motives that commonly move men, we are
inclined to say that he is not free.

But does it ever occur to us to maintain that, in general, the possession
of a character and the capacity of being influenced by considerations
make it impossible for a man to be free? Surely not. If I am a prudent
man, I will invest my money in good securities. Is it sensible to say
that I cannot have been free in refusing a twenty per cent investment,
_because I am by nature prudent_? Am I a slave _because I eat when I am
hungry_, and can I partake of a meal freely, only when there is no reason
why I should eat at all?

He who calls me free only when my acts do violence to my nature or cannot
be justified by a reference to anything whatever has strange notions of
freedom. Patriots, poets, moralists, have had much to say of freedom;
men have lived for it, and have died for it; men love it as they love
their own souls. Is the object of all this adoration the metaphysical
absurdity indicated above?

To insist that a man is free only in so far as his actions are
unaccountable is to do violence to the meaning of a word in very common
use, and to mislead men by perverting it to strange and unwholesome uses.
Yet this is done by the "free-willist." He keeps insisting that man is
free, and then goes on to maintain that he cannot be free unless he is
"free." He does not, unfortunately, supply the quotation marks, and he
profits by the natural mistake in identity. As he defines freedom it
becomes "freedom," which is a very different thing.

What is this "freedom"? It is not freedom from external constrain