Humans Are Determined

Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789)

 Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789)

• Determinism: is the belief that all acts are caused by past events, and given enough knowledge, one could predict what a person will do.

Humans Are Determined

• Man's life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant.
• Man is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control.
• Society rejects the idea that all of the actions of humans are necessary, because if all the actions of man were to be contemplated as necessary, the right of punishing those who injure their associates would no longer exist.

• The will is a modification of the brain, by which it is disposed to action, or prepared to give play to the organs. In consequence, he acts necessarily, his action is the result of the impulse he receives  either from the motive, from the object, or from the idea that has modified his brain, or disposed his will (p.383)

• The errors of philosophers on the free agency of man, have risen from their regarding his will as the primum mobile,  the original motive of his actions.

• Man, in performing some action which he is resolved on doing, does not, by any means, prove his free agency. Motives will determine his actions and decide his will.

• Side note: Madness is a state, that depends upon the heat of the blood, not upon the will.

• It is said that free agency is the absence of those obstacles competent to oppose themselves to the actions of man, or the exercise of his faculties. The motive that causes his action is no more in his own power than the obstacle that impedes him, whether this obstacle or motive be within his own machine or exterior of his person (p 388)

• He is not more master of obstacles; they are the necessary effects of either interior or exterior causes, which always act according to their given properties.

• All that passes a person; all that is done by a person; as well as all that happens in nature, or that is attributed to nature, is derived from necessary causes, which act according to necessary laws, and which produce necessary effects from whence necessarily flow others.