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The attempt of Edwards to establish free and accountable agency on the basis of necessity—The views of the younger Edwards, Day, Chalmers, Dick, D’Aubigne, Hill, Shaw, and M’Cosh, concerning the agreement of liberty and necessity. The great metaphysician of New-England insists, that his scheme, and his scheme alone, is consistent with the free-agency and accountability of man.
If this be so, then it must be conceded that the Calvinistic definition of the freedom of the will is perfectly consistent with the most absolute scheme of fatality which ever entered into the heart of man to conceive. The views of M’Cosh respecting the freedom of the will, seem, at first sight, widely different from those of other Calvinists and necessitarians.
Or, in fewer words, that he does not, because he does not? Since sin exists, says the sceptic, it follows that God is either unable or unwilling to prevent it. “Able, but unwilling,” replies the theist. Such is the answer which has come down to us from the earliest times; from a Lactantius to a Leibnitz, and from a Leibnitz to a M’Cosh.
M’Cosh trembles at the idea of “removing the creature from under the control of God;” and hence, he insists as strenuously as any other necessitarian, that the mind, and all its volitions, are subjected to the dominion of causes. “We are led by an intuition of our nature,” says he, “to a belief in the invariable connexion between cause and effect; and we see numerous proofs of this law of cause and effect reigning in the human mind as it does in the external world, and reigning in the will as it does in every other department of the mind.” Again: “It is by an intuition of our nature that we believe this thought or feeling could not have been produced without a cause; and that this same cause will again and forever produce the same effects.
M’Cosh, nevertheless, falls back upon the old Calvinistic definition of liberty, as consisting in a freedom from external co-action, in order to find a basis for human responsibility.
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