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Updated: May 13, 2025
"But," remarked Henry, "suppose there were no memory, and men did forget their acts, they would remain just as responsible for them as now." "Precisely; that is, not at all," replied the doctor. "You don't mean to say there is no such thing as responsibility, no such thing as justice. Oh, I see, you deny free will. You are a necessitarian." The doctor waved his hand rather contemptuously.
Descartes met the argument of the necessitarian, not by exposing its fallacy, but by repelling the conclusion of it on extraneous grounds. “This was to cut the Gordian knot,” says Leibnitz, who was himself a necessitarian, “and to reply to the conclusion of one argument, not by resolving it, but by opposing to it a contrary argument; which is not conformed to the laws of philosophical controversy.” The reply of Leibnitz to Bayle is clearly open to the same objection.
But let me insist upon it, that the first and the all-important inquiry is, “What is truth?” This is the only wise course; and it is the only safe course for the necessitarian. For no system, when presented in its true colours, is more gloomy and appalling than his own.
Let the necessitarian prove his assumption, let him make it clear that God could not foreknow future events unless they are necessitated, and he will place in the hands of the sceptic the means of demonstrating, with absolute and uncontrollable certainty, that God does not foreknow all future events at all, that he does not foresee the free voluntary acts of the human mind.
I had formed an opinion by no means favourable to the innocence of Mr. Jean Desmarais; and I took especial care that the Necessitarian, who would only have thought robbery and murder pieces of ill-luck, should undergo a most rigorous examination. I remembered that he had seen me put the packet into the escritoire; and this circumstance was alone sufficient to arouse my suspicion.
What his political opinions may actually have been is open to doubt; it has often been asserted that he was a Liberal, or even a Radical; and, if we are to believe Robert Owen, he was a necessitarian Socialist. His relations with Owen the shrewd, gullible, high-minded, wrong-headed, illustrious and preposterous father of Socialism and Co-operation were curious and characteristic.
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.
Thus the necessitarian seems to be fairly caught in his own toils, and entrapped by his own definition and arguments.
Tillotson argues at great length, but it would be rather difficult to understand which side of the question he adopts on this momentous subject; whether he is a Necessitarian, or among the opposers of Fatalism.
We think we might here leave the stupendous sophism of the necessitarian; but as it has exerted so wonderful an influence over the human mind, and obscured, for ages, the glory of the moral government of God, we may well be permitted to pursue it further, and to continue the pursuit so long as a fragment or a shadow of it remains to be demolished. Section IV.
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