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The associations derived from the ordinary sense of the term will adhere to it in spite of all we can do; and though the doctrine of Necessity, as stated by most who hold it, is very remote from fatalism, it is probable that most necessitarians are fatalists, more or less, in their feelings.
It was a principle with them, says Ritter, “that the will and the desire are one with thought, and may be resolved into it.” Thus, by the ancient Stoics, as well as by Hobbes, and Spinoza, and Collins, and Edwards, the will is merged in one of the passive elements of the mind, and its real characteristic lost sight of. “By the freedom of the soul,” says Ritter, “the Stoics understood simply that assent which it gives to certain ideas.” Thus the ancient Stoics endeavoured to find the freedom of the soul, where Spinoza and so many modern necessitarians have sought to find it, in the passive, necessitated states of the intelligence.
Yet this definition of the freedom of the will, though so superficially false, is precisely that which has found the most general acceptance among necessitarians. Though vehemently condemned by Calvin himself, unanswerably refuted by Leibnitz, sneered at by Edwards the younger, and pronounced utterly inadequate by Dr.
The freedom and independence of the will is certainly pushed as far by him as it is carried by Cousin, Coleridge, Clarke, or any of its advocates in modern times. “True necessitarians,” says he, “should learn in what way to hold and defend their doctrine.
Brown, and omit to notice its true atheistical paternity and origin. The defenders of this doctrine are directly opposed, in regard to a fundamental point, to all other necessitarians.
How, then, being thus as much the creatures of necessity as the denizens of the wild and forest as thoroughly under the agency of fixed, unalterable causes, as the dead matter around us why are we yet the subjects of a retributive system, and accountable for all our actions?" "You quarrel with Calvinism," I said; "and seem one of the most thorough-going necessitarians I ever knew."
Outstanding philosophical and theological schools have been formed around the will, and both able and learned and earnest men have taken opposite sides on the subject of the will under the party names of Necessitarians and Libertarians.
But let the same murder be done with the thorough consent of the will, the conscience stops not to inquire whether this consent has been caused or no.” Thus, after all his dissent from Edwards, he returns precisely to Edwards’s definition of the freedom of the will as the ground of human responsibility; after all his strictures upon “necessitarians of the first order,” he falls back upon precisely that notion of free-will which was so long ago condemned by Calvin, and exploded by Leibnitz, and which relates, as we have so often seen, not to acts of the will at all, but only to the external movements of the body.
The very same misconception of the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity, which prevents the opposite party from recognizing its truth, I believe to exist more or less obscurely in the minds of most necessitarians, however they may in words disavow it.
Thus says Reid, for example: “By the liberty of a moral agent, I understand a power over the determinations of his own will.” Now, it is not at all strange that this language should be conceived by necessitarians in such a manner as to involve the doctrine of liberty in the absurd consequence of an infinite series of acts, since it is so understood by some of the most enlightened advocates of free-agency themselves. “A power over the determinations of our will,” says Sir William Hamilton, “supposes an act of the will that our will should determine so and so; for we can only exert power through a rational determination or volition.
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