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I shall now advert to a very serious misapprehension of the principles of the subject, which has been committed by some of the writers against Hume’s Essay on Miracles, and by Bishop Butler before them, in their anxiety to destroy what appeared to them a formidable weapon of assault against the Christian religion; and the effect of which is entirely to confound the doctrine of the Grounds of Disbelief.
Hume had closely looked into the great productions of his own school, he would have seen the utter improbability, that necessitarians themselves would ever concur in such a notion of liberty. If Mr. Hume’s scheme were correct, it would seem that nothing could be stable or fixed; mind would be destitute of energy to move within its own sphere, or to bind matter in its orbit.
Hume’s theory of causation, has likewise ranked the preëstablished harmony of Leibnitz, as well as the system of occasional causes peculiar to Malebranche, among the fallacies of the human mind. Thus they are at war with themselves, as well as with their great coadjutors in the cause of necessity.
Hume’s notion about cause and effect has been greatly extended by its distinguished advocate, Dr. Thomas Brown; whose acuteness, eloquence, and elevation of character, have given it a circulation which it could never have received from the influence of its author. Almost as often as divines have occasion to use this notion, they call it the doctrine of Dr.
That the free-will metaphysicians, being mostly of the school which rejects Hume’s and Brown’s analysis of Cause and Effect, should miss their way for want of the light which that analysis affords, can not surprise us. The wonder is, that the necessitarians, who usually admit that philosophical theory, should in practice equally lose sight of it.
Hume’s celebrated doctrine, that nothing is credible which is contradictory to experience, or at variance with laws of nature, is merely this very plain and harmless proposition, that whatever is contradictory to a complete induction is incredible.
If it were necessary we might easily show, that if we abstract “the common prejudice,” in regard to causation, it will be as impossible to read Mr. Mill’s work on logic, as to read Mr. Hume’s writings themselves, without perceiving that many of its passages have been stripped of all logical coherency of thought.
Hume’s theory, are not habitually influenced by it, but frequently relapse into the old error which conflicts with the free-agency and accountability of man, and hence an advantage which their opponents have had over them. These remarks are undoubtedly just. There is not a single writer, from Mr.
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