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It taketh beginning from an agent, and not from the action of an agent. This distinction, though so clearly founded in the nature of things, is always overlooked by the logic of the necessitarian. They might well adopt the language of Bacon, that the subtilty of nature far surpasseth that of our logic.
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.
It clearly seems, that if it proves anything in favour of necessity, it proves everything for which the most absolute necessitarian can contend. Accordingly, a distinguished Calvinistic divine has said, that if our volitions be foreseen, we can no more avoid them “than we can pluck the sun out of the heavens.”
You are in error, says the necessitarian to his opponents, in denying that motive, and in affirming that mind, is the efficient cause of volition.
The school of the necessitarian is, in reality, a house divided against itself; and that, too, in regard to the most vital and fundamental point of its philosophy. There seems to be one exception to the truth of this general remark: for there is one scheme or definition of liberty, in which many, if not most, of the advocates of necessity have concurred; that is, the definition of Hobbes.
Thus, the “feeling of liberty,” as he calls it, is resolved into an illusory judgment, and the scheme of necessity is exhibited in all its adamantine strength. “It seems impossible,” says he, “for reason to consider occurrences otherwise than as bound together by the connexion of cause and effect; and in this circumstance consists the strength of the necessitarian system.”
It is not here, it is not on the physical, it is rather on the moral side, that the stumbling-block is lying; in that excuse for evil and for evil men which the necessitarian theory will furnish, disguise it in what fair-sounding words we will.
But alas! the increasing dimness, ending in the final want of the idea of this all-truths- including truth of the Tetractys eternally manifested in the Triad; this, this is the ground and cause of all the main heresies from Semi-Arianism, recalled by Dr. Samuel Clarke, to the last setting ray of departing faith in the necessitarian Psilanthropism of Dr. Priestley. Ib. p. 41-2, &c.
The necessitarian contends that “volition, or an act of the mind, is the effect of motive, and that it is subject to the power and action of its cause.” The advocate of free-will replies, If we must suppose an action of motive on the mind to account for its act, we must likewise suppose another action to account for the action of motive; and so on ad infinitum.
Such, as we have seen, are the inevitable logical consequences of this boasted scheme of necessity. But we have clearly shown, we trust, that the grand demonstration of the necessitarian is a sophism, whose apparent force is owing to a variety of causes:—First, it seeks out, and lays its foundation in, a false psychology; identifying the feelings, or affections, and the will.
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