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Updated: July 26, 2025
The requisites of Practical Morality are Liberty, or Free-will, on which he takes the side of free-agency. Intelligence, without which there can be no perception of good and evil, and no moral agency. The Consciousness of Rectitude, or Righteous Intention. On this he dwells at some length. No action is properly the action of a moral agent unless designed by him.
But the circumstance which this flowery poet deems an imperfection in the mathematics, every enlightened friend of free-agency will regard as their chief excellency and glory.
From whatever source his actions may arise, therefore, whether they are the result of free-agency, or whether they are the offspring of necessity, society coerces him if, after having furnished him with motives, sufficiently powerful to act upon reasonable beings, it perceives that these motives have not been competent to vanquish his depraved nature.
Must I harden my heart against all the evidence of the benevolence of God, which streams upon me in a flood of light from all his works, because I may not know how to reconcile that benevolence with the existence of evil? Must I deny my free-agency, the most intimate of all convictions, because I cannot see the consistency between the freeness of an act and the frequency of its occurrence?
Now, if the necessitarian has not been deceived by an unwarrantable ambiguity on the part of his adversary, he has clearly reduced his doctrine to the absurdity of an infinite series of acts: that is to say, if the advocate of free-agency does not depart from the ordinary meaning of words, when he affirms that mind is the efficient cause of volition; and if he does not use these terms “efficient cause,” in different senses in the same sentence, then we feel bound to say that he is fairly caught in the toils of his adversary.
Dr. Dick is guilty of the same inconsistency. Though he admits, as we have seen, that this definition of liberty does not get rid of every difficulty, but seems to leave us mere “machines;” yet he has recourse to it, in order to reconcile the Calvinistic view of divine grace with the free-agency of man. “The great objection,” says he, “against the invincibility of divine grace, is, that it is subversive of the liberty of the will.” But, he replies, “True liberty consists in doing what we do with knowledge and from choice.”
The scheme of necessity, as we have already said, presents two phases in relation to the existence of moral evil; one relating to the agency of man, and the other to the agency of God. In the preceding chapter, we examined the attempts of the most learned and skilful advocates of this scheme to reconcile it with the free-agency and accountability of man.
In despite of these proofs of the want of free-agency in man, so clear to unprejudiced minds, it will, perhaps, be insisted upon with no small feeling of triumph, that if it be proposed to any one to move or not to move his hand, an action in the number of those called indifferent, he evidently appears to be the master of choosing; from which it is concluded, evidence has been offered of his free-agency.
The errors of philosophers on the free-agency of man, have arisen from their regarding his will as the primum mobile, the original motive of his actions; for want of recurring back, they have not perceived the multiplied, the complicated causes, which, independently of him, give motion to the will itself, or which dispose and modify his brain, whilst he himself is purely passive in the motion he receives.
The voluntary phase of it was seen by Pelagius, and hence he became an exclusive and one-sided advocate of free-agency; the passive side was beheld by Augustine, and hence he became a one-sided and exclusive advocate of divine grace.
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