To the extent that a man defaults on the responsibility of thinking, he is, in significant measure, "the product of his
environment." But such is not the nature of man. It is an instance of pathology.
The attempt of most psychologists to explain a man's behavior without reference to the degree of his thinking or
non-thinking—by attempting to reduce all of a man's behavior to causes either in his "conditioning" or in his
heredity—is profoundly indicative of the extent to which man is absent from and ignored by most current
psychological theories. According to the view prevalent today, man is only a walking recorder into which his
parents, teachers, and neighbors dictate what they please—such parents, teachers, and neighbors themselves being
only walking recorders carrying the dictations of other, earlier recorders, and so on. As to the question of where
new ideas, concepts, and values come from, it is left unanswered; the helpless chunk of putty, which allegedly is
man, produces them by virtue of some chance concatenation of unknown forces. It is interesting to consider the
personal confession contained in the social determinist's dismay, incredulity, and indignation at the suggestion that
original, self-generated thinking plays any significant role in a man's life.
The Contradiction of Determinism
"Free will"—in the widest meaning of the term—is the doctrine that man is capable of performing actions which
are not determined by forces outside his control; that man is capable of making choices which are not necessitated
by antecedent factors. As one writer formulates it: "In the case of an action that is free, it must be such that it is
caused by the agent who performs it, but such that no antecedent conditions were sufficient for performing just that
action."^2
The nature of these free choices, to what human faculty they pertain, how they operate and what are their limits—
are questions on which various theories of free will differ. Predominantly, theories of free will have attempted to
argue that certain desires or physical actions are "free," i.e., causally irreducible—a position that is flagrantly
insupportable.
Man's free will consists of a single action, a single basic choice: to think or not to think. It is a freedom entailed by
his unique