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Updated: September 25, 2025
But the habit being acquired of ascribing not only substantive existence, but real and efficacious agency, to the abstract entities, the consequence was that when belief in the deities declined and faded away, the entities were left standing, and a semblance of explanation of phaenomena, equal to what existed before, was furnished by the entities alone, without referring them to any volitions.
It may come into competition with another similar system, and be displaced by it. An interest that has dominated our minds for a time, and controlled our desires and volitions, may readily give place to different choices.
It is this that distinguishes us from the brutes. In sensation, cognition, and intellection, in our instincts and volitions, as far as they are truly human, thought is a constant element. To insist upon thought in this connection with history may, however, appear unsatisfactory.
If a man is found by the police busy with "jemmy" and dark lantern at a jeweller's shop door over night, the magistrate before whom he is brought the next morning, reasons from those effects to their causes in the fellow's "burglarious" ideas and volitions, with perfect confidence, and punishes him accordingly.
We are aware that some are unwilling to acknowledge the efficiency of any "second causes," and seek to resolve all events, even such as are brought about by the volitions of men, into the will of God, as the only Agent in Nature.
The feelings and emotions, the volitions and ideas which are suggested by the vegetables and fruits, the animals and the flowers, are not without importance for the success in the market.
The generalization which belongs to himself, and in which he had not, to the best of our knowledge, been at all anticipated, is, that every distinct class of human conceptions passes through all these stages, beginning with the theological, and proceeding through the metaphysical to the positive: the metaphysical being a mere state of transition, but an indispensable one, from the theological mode of thought to the positive, which is destined finally to prevail, by the universal recognition that all phaemomena without exception are governed by invariable laws, with which no volitions, either natural or supernatural, interfere.
And the purpose of all and each of these moralists precludes the theory of free-will i.e., the theory that our volitions are self-originating and unpredictable. III. We must consider next the Stoical theory of Happiness, or rather of the Good, which with them was proclaimed to be the sole, indispensable, and self-sufficing condition of Happiness.
From these two sources may be derived a knowledge of the character of the Deity, and of our relation to him as moral beings; and the man is left entirely without excuse who fails to direct to them his most earnest attention, and to make the impressions derived from them the habitual rule of his volitions, and the guide of his whole character.
But though these opinions are often held by the same persons, they are two very different opinions, and the confusion between them is the eternally recurring error of confounding Causation with Fatalism. Because whatever happens will be the effect of causes, human volitions among the rest, it does not follow that volitions, even those of peculiar individuals, are not of great efficacy as causes.
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