even if we never can, in any sense at all, do anything else except what, in the end, we actually do do. But this view, if it is held, seems to me to be plainly a mere abuse of language. The statement that we have Free Will is certainly ordinarily understood to imply that we really sometimes have the power of acting differently from the way in which we actually do act; and hence, if anybody tells us that we have Free Will, while at the same time he means to deny that we ever have such a power, he is simply misleading us. We certainly have not got Free Will, in the ordinary sense of the word, if we never really could, in any sense at all, have done anything else than what we did do; so that, in this respect, the two questions certainly are connected. But, on the other hand, the mere fact (if it is a fact) that we sometimes can, in some sense, do what we don’t do, does not necessarily entitle us to say that we have Free Will. We certainly haven’t got it, unless we can; but it doesn’t follow that we have got it, even if we can. Whether we have or not will depend upon the precise sense in which it is true that we can. So that even if we do decide that
