If these statements be accurately examined, they will be found to resolve entirely into this identical propo sition, that the will of the criminal, being supposed to remain in the same state as when the crime was committed, he could not have willed and acted otherwise. This proposition, it is obvious, does not at all touch the cardinal point in question, which is simply this: whether, all other circumstances remaining the same, the criminal had it not in his power to abstain from willing the commission of the crime. The vagueness of Priestley's language upon this occasion must not be overlooked; the words inward disposition of mind admitting of a variety of different meanings, and in this instance being plainly intended to include the act of the will, as well as every thing else connected with the criminal action.

In the preceding strictures, I have been partly anticipated by the following very acute remarks of Dr. Magee on the definitions of volition and of philosophical liberty, prefixed to Mr. Belsham's discussion of the doctrines now under our consideration. According to Mr. Belsham, "Volition is that state of mind which is immediately previous to actions which are called voluntary." "Natural liberty, or, as it is more properly called, philosophical liberty, or liberty of choice, is the power of doing an action or its contrary, all the previous circumstances remaining the same."* "Now here," says Dr. Magee, "is the point of free will at once decided; for volition itself being included among the previous circumstances, it is a manifest contradiction to suppose the power of doing an action or its contrary, all the

aom de principe de la raison suffisante s'étend aux actions même que l'on juge indifferentes. La volonté la plus libre ne peut sans un motif déterminant leur donner naissance; car si, toutes les circonstances de deux positions étant exactement semblables, elle agissait dans l'une et s'abstenait d'agir dans l'autre, son choix serait un effet sans cause: elle serait alors, dit Leibnitz, le hasard aveugle des épicuriens. L'opinion contraire est une illusion de l'esprit qui perdant de vue les raisons fugitives du choix de la volonté dans les choses indifférentes, se persuade qu'elle s'est déterminée d'elle-même et sans motifs." - Under the head, De la Probabilité. Elements, p. 227.

*

previous circumstances remaining the same'; since that supposes the power to act voluntarily against a volition. After this," Dr. Magee justly and pertinently adds, " Mr. Belsham might surely have spared himself the trouble of the ninety-two pages which follow."*

And why have recourse, with Belsham and Priestley, in this argument, to the indistinct and imperfect recollection of the criminal at a subsequent period, with respect to the state of his feelings while he was perpetrating the crime? Why not make a direct appeal to his consciousness at the very moment when he was doing the deed? Will any person of candor deny, that, in the very act of transgressing an acknowledged duty, he is impressed with a conviction, as complete. as that of his own existence, that his will is free, and that he is abusing, contrary to the suggestions of reason and conscience, his moral liberty? †

Sometimes, indeed, when we are under the influence of a violent appetite or passion, our judgment is apt to see things in a false light; and hence a wise man learns to distrust his own opinion when he is thus circumstanced, and to act, not according to his present judgment, but according to those general maxims of propriety of which his reason had previously approved in his cooler hours. All this, however, evidently proceeds on the supposition of his free agency; and, so far from implying any belief on his part of fatalism or of moral necessity, evinces in a manner peculiarly striking and satisfactory, the power which he feels himself to possess, not only over the present, but over the future determinations of his will. In some other instances, it happens that I believe bonâ fide an action to be right, at the moment I perform it, and afterwards discover that I judged improperly;- perhaps from want of sufficient information, or from a careless and partial view

* Discourses and Dissertations on the Scriptural Doctrines of Atonement ana Sacrifice, Appendix, Vol. II. p. 180, note.

†The free will of man," says Bolingbroke, "which no one can deny that he has, without lying, or renouncing his intuitive knowledge." — Frag ments, No. XLII.

of the subject. In such a case, I may undoubtedly regret as a misfortune what has happened. I may blame myself for my carelessness in not having acquired the proper information before I acted; but I cannot consider myself as criminal in acting at that moment according to the views which I then entertained. On the contrary, if I had acted in opposition to these views, although my conduct might have been agreeable to the dictates of a more enlightened understanding than my own, yet, with respect to myself, the action would have been wrong.

If the doctrine of necessity were just, what possible foundation could there be for the distinction we always make between an accidental hurt and an intended injury, when received from another? or for the different sentiments of regret and of remorse that we experience, according as the misfortunes we suffer are the consequences of our own misconduct or not? What an al

leviation of our sufferings when we are satisfied that we cannot consider ourselves as the authors of them! and what a cruel aggravation of our miseries, when we can trace them to something in which we have been obviously to blame!

*

* Sir W. Hamilton accepts the fact of moral liberty on the evidence of consciousness; still he finds insuperable difficulties in conceiving of its possibility. In a note on Dr. Reid's definition of the liberty of a moral agent, he says: "Moral liberty does not merely consist in the power of doing what we will, but in the power of willing what we will. For a power over the determinations of our will supposes an act of will that our will should determine so and so; for we can only freely exert power through a rational determination or volition. But then question upon question remains, and this ad infinitum. Have we a power (a will) over such anterior will? and until this question be definitively answered, which it never can be, we must be unable to conceive the possibility of the fact of liberty. But, though inconceivable, this fact is not therefore false. For there are many contradictories (and of contradictories, one must, and one only can, be true), of which we are equally unable to conceive the possibility of either. The philosophy, therefore, which I profess, annihilates the theoretical problem, How is the scheme of liberty, or the scheme of necessity, to be rendered comprehensible? by showing that both schemes are equally inconceivable; but it establishes liberty practically as a fact, by showing that it is either itself an immediate datum, or is involved in an immediate datum of consciousness.

Again he says:— "To conceive a free act is to conceive an act which heing a cause, is not in itself an effect; in other words, to conceive an ab

SECTION IV.

OF NECESSITY,

OF THE SCHEMES OF FREE WILL, AND
CONSIDERED AS INFLUENCING PRACTICE.

I. Tendency of the Scheme of Necessity to Pantheism and Atheism.] Collins, in his inquiry concerning hu

solute commencement. But is such by us conceivable?" According to him, in order to be a free agent it is not enough that a person is the cause of the determination of his own will; he must not be "determined to that determination." "But is the person," he asks, "an original undetermined cause of the determination of his will? If he be not, then he is not a free agent, and the scheme of necessity is admitted. If he be, in the first place, it is impossible to conceive the possibility of this; and, in the second, if the fact, though inconceivable, be allowed, it is impossible to see how a cause undetermined by any motive can be a rational, moral, and accountable cause. There is no conceivable medium between fatalism and casuism; and the contradictory schemes of liberty and necessity themselves are inconceivable. For as we cannot compass in thought an undetermined cause, — lute commencement, the fundamental hypothesis of the one; so we can as little think an infinite series of determined causes, - of relative commencements, the fundamental hypothesis of the other. The champions of the opposite doctrines are thus at once resistless in assault, and impotent in defence. Each is hewn down, and appears to die under the home-thrusts of his adversary; but each again recovers life from the very death of his antagonist, and, to borrow a simile. both are like the heroes in Valhalla, ready in a moment to amuse themselves anew in the bloodless and interminable conflict.

-

an abso

The doctrine of moral liberty cannot be made conceivable, for we can only conceive the determined and the relative. As already stated, all that can be done is to show, -1st. That, for the fact of liberty, we have, immediately or mediately, the evidence of consciousness; and, 2d. That there are, among the phenomena of mind, many facts which we must admit as actual, but of whose possibility we are wholly unable to form a notion. I may merely observe, that the fact of motion can be shown to be impossible, on grounds not less strong than those on which it is attempted to disprove the fact of liberty; to say nothing of many contradictories, neither of which can be thought, but one of which must, on the laws of contradiction and excluded middle, necessarily be. This philosophy - the Philosophy of the Conditioned has not, however, either in itself, or in relation to its conse quences, as yet been developed."-Hamilton's edition of Reid's Works, Essays on the Active Powers, Essay IV. Chap. I.

Kant comes to substantially the same conclusions. In his Critic of Pure Reason, under the head of "the antinomy of pure reason in his "Transcendental Dialectic," he treats of liberty and necessity as constituting one of the "contradictions of transcendental ideas," both the "thesis" and the "antithesis" being demonstrable. Afterwards, in his Critic of Practical Reason, he maintains the fact of liberty as a corollary of the fact of moral obligation. — ED.

man liberty, after endeavouring to show that "liberty can only be grounded on the absurd principles of Epicurean atheism," observes, that "the Epicurean atheists, who were the most popular and most numerous sect of the atheists of antiquity, were the great asserters of liberty;* as, on the other side, the Stoics, who were the most popular and numerous sect among the religionists of antiquity, were the great asserters of fate and necessity. The case was also the same among the Jews as among the heathens.† The Sadducees, who were esteemed an irreligious and atheistical sect, maintained the liberty of man. But the Pharisees, who were a religious sect, ascribed all things to fate or to God's appointment; and it was the first article of their creed, that Fate and God do all; and consequently, they could not assert a true liberty, when they asserted a liberty together with this fatality and necessity of all things." +

* In proof of this assertion, that the ancient Epicureans were advocates for man's free agency, Collins refers to Lucretius, Lib. II. v. 251 et seq. But it is to be observed that the liberty here ascribed to the will is nothing more than the liberty of spontaneity, which is conceded to it by Collins, and indeed by all necessitarians, without exception, since the time of Hobbes. Lucretius, indeed, speaks of this liberty as an exception to universal fatalism; but he nevertheless considers it as a necessary effect of some cause, to which he gives the name of clinamen, so as to render man as completely a piece of passive mechanism as he was supposed to be by Collins and Hobbes. The reason, too, which he gives for this is, that, if the case were otherwise, there would be an effect without a cause. — - Ibid., v.

284.

† With respect to the opinions of the Sadducees and the Pharisees on man's free agency, see Cudworth's Intellectual System, with Mosheim's Notes and Dissertations, translated by Harrison, Book I Chap. I. § 4 According to Josephus, the Pharisees held "that some things, and not all, were the effects of fate, but some things were left in man's own power and liberty." ·Antiq. Jud., Lib. XIII. Cap. V. Sect. 9.

In this passage, as in others, Collins plainly proceeds on the supposition, that all fatalists are of course necessitarians; and I agree with him in thinking, that this would be the case if they reasoned consequentially. It is certain, however, that a great proportion of those who have belonged to the first sect have disclaimed all connection with the second. The Stoics themselves, notwithstanding what is said above, furnish one very remarkable instance. I do not know any author by whom the liberty of the will is stated in stronger and more explicit terms than it is by Epictetus, in the first sentence of the Enchiridion. Indeed, the Stoics seem, with their usual passion for exaggeration, to have carried their ideas about the freedom of the will to an unphilosophical extreme.