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If the sceptic could see what the necessitarian affirms, he might proceed from what he knows, by a direct and irresistible process, to a denial of the foreknowledge of God, in relation to human volitions. But fortunately the assumption of the necessitarian is not true.

These are but passive impressions made upon the sensibility; and hence, “it is to philosophize very crudely concerning mind, and to image everything in a corporeal manner,” to conceive that they act upon the will and control its determinations, just as the motions of body are caused and controlled by the action of mind. This conception, however, is not peculiar to the necessitarian.

The great service which a false psychology has rendered to the cause of necessity is easily seen. For having identified an act of the will with a state of the sensibility, which is universally conceived to be necessitated, the necessitarian is delivered from more than half his labours.

The better we know, the better we act; and the fallacy of all common arguments against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room for self-direction: it merely insists, in exact conformity with experience, on the conditions under which self-determination is possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.

The author replies, We are not bound to answer such a questionnor are we. As we understand it, the very idea of liberty, as above set forth by the author, is a direct negative of his doctrine of necessity. But although he has taken so much pains to dissent from his necessitarian brethren, and to advocate the Arminian notion of free-will, Mr.

Is it not evident, that by such a use of language the cause of necessity gains great apparent strength? There is another way in which the language of the necessitarian deceives. The language he employs often represents the facts of nature, but not facts as they would be, if his system were true.

Need I say that, upon receiving this letter, I resolved, without any delay, to set out for Devereux Court? I summoned Desmarais to me; he answered not my call: he was from home, an unfrequent occurrence with the necessitarian valet. I waited his return, which was not for some hours, in order to give him sundry orders for my departure.

He is very clearly involved in an absurdity; and if he can read the three hundred pages of the Inquiry, without being convinced of his error, his case must indeed be truly hopeless. Edwards is far from being the only necessitarian who has fallen into the error of identifying the sensibility with the will; thus reducing his doctrine to an unassailable truism.

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 termsefficient 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.

Mary's subdued and led him captive. The impression produced on him was expressed in the formula that primitive Christianity might have been corrupted into Popery, but that Protestantism never could. For a moment he hung in the wind. He might have been one of the earliest of Broad Churchmen. He might have been a Utilitarian and Necessitarian follower of Mr. J.S. Mill.