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Updated: June 22, 2025
This “usual method of discovery and proof,” as Bacon says, “by first establishing the most general propositions, then applying and proving the intermediate axioms according to these, is the parent of error and the calamity of every science.” Nowhere, it is believed, can a more striking illustration of the truth of these pregnant words be found, than in the method adopted by necessitarians.
Yet as if unconscious that their greatest champions were thus routed and overthrown by each other, we see hundreds of minor necessitarians still fighting on with the same weapons, perfectly unmindful of the disorder and confusion which reigns around them in their own ranks.
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.
Though they deny the existence of all power and efficacy, they still hold that human volitions are necessary; while other necessitarians ground their doctrine on the fact, that volitions are produced by the most powerful, the most efficacious motives. They are not only at war with other necessitarians, they are also at war with themselves. Let us see if this may not be clearly shown.
Day. He certainly must have evaded his own idea on that point. Is it not evident, that the house of the necessitarian is divided against itself? Necessitarians not only refute each other, but in most cases each one contradicts himself.
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.
He does not seem to entertain the shadow of a doubt, either that the definition of liberty contained in the Inquiry is that of Edwards himself, or that which is fully founded in truth. He freely concedes, that “we can do as we please,” and supposes that the reader may be startled to hear that this is “cordially admitted by the necessitarians themselves!”
He also sees, that the doctrine of necessity, as usually maintained, is liable to the objections urged against it, that “it tends to degrade the moral nature of man, and to paralyze our desire of excellence.” In making this concession to the advocates of liberty, he speaks from his own “personal experience.” The only way to escape these pernicious consequences, he says, is to keep constantly before the mind a clear and unclouded view of the true theory of causation, which will prevent us from supposing, as most necessitarians do, that there is a real connecting link or influence between motives and volitions, or any other events.
We shall not arrest the progress of our remarks in order to point out the manner in which Edwards has deceived himself by an appeal to logic rather than to consciousness, because the threefold distinction for which we contend is now admitted by necessitarians themselves.
Samuel Clarke, that “action and liberty are identical ideas;” but we will say, that the idea of action necessarily implies that of liberty; for if we duly reflect on the nature of an act we cannot conceive it as being necessitated. This consideration furnishes an easy and satisfactory solution of a problem, by which necessitarians are sadly perplexed.
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