percipient, which, by their active power received at first, produce all the changes they undergo.

While men thus wandered in the dark in search of causes, unwilling to confess their disappointment, they vainly conceived every thing they stumbled upon to be a cause, and the proper notion of a cause is lost, by giving the name to numberless things which neither are, nor can be causes.

This confusion of various things under the name of causes, is the more easily tolerated, because, however hurtful it may be to sound philosophy, it has little influence upon the concerns of life. A constant antecedent, or concomitant, of the phenomenon whose cause is sought, may answer the purpose of the inquirer, as well as if the real cause were known. Thus a sailor desires to know the cause of the tides, that he may know when to expect high water: he is told that it is high water when the moon is so many hours past the meridian: and now he thinks he knows the cause of the tides. What he takes for the cause answers his pur pose, and his mistake does him no harm.

Those philosophers seem to have had the justest views of nature, as well as the weakness of human understanding, who, giving up the pretence of discovering the causes of the operations of nature, have applied themselves to discover by observation and experiment, the rules, or laws of nature according to which the phenomena of nature are produced.

In compliance with custom, or perhaps, to gratify the avidity of knowing the causes of things, we call the laws of nature causes and active powers. So we speak of the powers of gravitation, of magnetism, of electricity.

We call them causes of many of the phenomena of nature; and such they are esteemed by the ignorant, and by the half-learned.

But those of juster discernment see, that laws of nature are not agents. They are not endowed with active power, and therefore cannot be causes in the proper sense. They are only the rules according to which the unknown cause acts.

Thus it appears, that our natural desire to know the causes of the phenomena of nature, our inability to discover them, and the vain theories of philosophers employed in this search, have made the word cause, and the related words, so ambiguous, and to signify so many things of different natures, that they have in a manner lost their proper and original meaning, and yet we have no other words to express it.

Every thing joined with the effect, and prior to it, is called its cause. An instrument, an occasion, a reason, a motive, an end, are called causes. And the related words effect, agent, power, are extended in the same vague manner.

Were it not that the terms cause and agent have lost their proper meaning, in the crowd of meanings that have been given them, we should immediately perceive a contradiction in the terms necessary cause, and necessary agent. And although the loose meaning of those words is authorized by custom, the arbiter of language, and therefore cannot be censured, perhaps cannot always be avoided, yet we ought to be upon our guard, that we be not misled by it to conceive things to be the same which are essentially different.

То say that man is a free agent, is no more than to say, that in some instances he is truly an agent and a cause, and is not merely acted upon as a passive instrument. On the contrary, to say that he acts from necessity, is to say that he does not act at all, that he is no agent, and that, for any thing we know, there is only one agent in the universe, who does every thing that is done, whether it be good or ill.

If this necessity be attributed even to the Deity, the consequence must be, that there neither is, nor can be, a cause at all; that nothing acts, but every thing is acted upon; nothing moves, but every thing is moved; all is passion without action; all instrument without an agent; and that every thing that is, or was, or shall be, has that necessary existence in its season, which we commonly consider as the prerogative of the First Cause.

This I take to be the genuine, and the most tenable system of necessity. It was the system of Spinoza, though he was not the first that advanced it; for it is very ancient. And if this system be true, our reasoning to prove the existence of a first cause of every thing that begins to exist, must be given up as fallacious.

If it be evident to the human understanding, as I take it to be, that what begins to exist must have an efficient cause, which had power to give or not to give it existence; and if it be true, that effects well and wisely fitted for the best purposes, demonstrate intelligence, wisdom, and goodness, in the efficient cause, as well as power, the proof of a Deity from these principles is very easy and obvious to all men that can rea

son.

If, on the other hand, our belief that every thing that begins to exist has a cause, be got only by experience; and if, as Mr. Hume maintains, the only notion of a cause be something prior to the effect, which experience has shown to be constantly conjoined with such an effect, I see not how, from these principles, it is possible to prove the existence of an intelligent cause of the universe.

Mr. Hume seems to me to reason justly from his definition of a cause, when in the person of an Epicurean, he maintains, that with regard to a cause of the uni

230 OF THE AMBIGUITY OF THOSE WORDS.

verse, we can conclude nothing; because it is a singular effect. We have no experience that such effects are always conjoined with such a cause. Nay, the cause which we assign to this effect, is a cause which no man has seen, nor can see, and therefore experience cannot inform us that it has ever been conjoined with any ef fect. He seems to me to reason justly from his definition of a cause, when he maintains, that any thing may be the cause of any thing; since priority and constant conjunction is all that can be conceived in the notion of

a cause.

Another zealous defender of the doctrine of necessity says, that "A cause cannot be defined to be any thing but such previous circumstances as are constantly followed by a certain effect; the constancy of the result making us conclude, that there must be a sufficient reason, in the nature of things, why it should be produced in those circumstances.”

This seems to me to be Mr. Hume's definition of a cause in other words, and neither more nor less; but I am far from thinking that the author of it will admit the consequences which Mr. Hume draws from it, however necessary they may appear to others.

CHAP. IV.

OF THE INFLUENCE OF MOTIVES.

THE modern advocates for the doctrine of necessity lay the stress of their cause upon the influence of motives.

"Every deliberate action," they say, "must have a motive. When there is no motive on the other side, this motive must determine the agent: when there are contrary motives, the strongest must prevail: we reason from men's motives to their actions, as we do from other causes to their effects: if man be a free agent, and be not governed by motives, all his actions must be mere caprice, rewards and punishments can have no effect, and such a being must be absolutely ungovernable."

In order therefore to understand distinctly, in what sense we ascribe moral liberty to man, it is necessary to understand what influence we allow to motives. To prevent misunderstanding, which has been very common upon this point, I offer the following observations.

1st, I grant that all rational beings are influenced, and ought to be influenced by motives. But the influence of motives is of a very different nature from that of efficient causes. They are neither causes nor agents. They suppose an efficient cause, and can do nothing without it. We cannot, without absurdity, suppose a motive, either to act, or to be acted upon; it is equally incapable of action and of passion; because it is not a thing that exists, but a thing that is conceived; it is what the schoolmen called an ens rationis. Motives, therefore, may influence to action, but they do not act. They may be compared to advice, or exhortation, which leaves a man still at liberty. For