sity, which now is, has existed from eternity, and has travelled Against this terrific and incredible conception, the 'Aváyên of L the Greek tragedians, place the theory of power, or causation, which I have endeavoured here to develop. Consider power really as such, that is, as exerted with freedom,—not as caused, but as causing, not as merely transmitted, but originating afresh in every act. Replace mind as a distinct existence by the side. of matter; restore personality, or self, as the most fundamental and the most frequently repeated of all our conceptions; and thus dethrone this blind spectre of Fate, and replace a conscious Deity on the throne of the universe. Volition is necessarily followed by the act, and thus we gain the idea of the necessary connection between cause and effect; but that this act propagates itself, or produces, by its own inherent energy, another event in the external universe, is what we have no evidence of whatever, either by sensible observation, or in the world of consciousness. Matter is essentially inert and passive, and for this reason, among others, we say that every change in its state must have a cause; or that mind, the only true energy or source of power with which we are acquainted, must be operating on it from without or within. We do not find that agency in an antecedent physical event; and it is not true that one event is at the same time, or in two consecutive instants, both effect and cause, or produced by one phenomenon, and producing another. Power, or efficient agency, is needed at each step; and to find whence it comes, we must look to mind or person, that is, to an agency not caused, or necessary, but voluntary. That favorite metaphor, of a chain of causes and effects, when literally construed, has no meaning; it is contradictory, for it affirms and denies the existence of active power at each link. That mental phenomena take place in succession, and therefore that each volition is invariably preceded by motives, desires, and beliefs, is a circumstance that need not perplex our argu ment. The relation between the motives and the act is that of mere sequence in time, not accompanied by any consciousness of power exerted; while the relation between the volition and the act, as in the case of forced attention, is truly causative, the consciousness of effort or exertion being perfectly distinct. To say that the motive causes the action is to make the will inoperative altogether, or non-existent. Whatever may be the operation of motives, they operate on the man, or on self; whatever may be the nature of the action, it is not the motives which act, but the man acts. We must not lose sight of the absolute indivisibility of person, and the consequent fact, that what are called the separate faculties of mind are but different and successive states, or conditions of being, of the same individual. There is no will, but only the man willing, no motive, only the man contemplating various objects of desire. Now two successive states of the same substance do not cause each other; we might as well say, that the heat of a bar of iron, when just withdrawn from the fire, causes its subsequent coldness after it is exposed to the air. One state precedes the other, but does not cause, or necessitate, the other. If a lump of matter changes its state, if from a solid it becomes a liquid, or assumes a new color or a new shape, we look for the cause of this change to something existing out of the substance itself, and operating upon it from without. We do so, from our intuitive perception of the fact, that it is incapable of acting on itself, or, in other words, of changing itself. But if incapable of acting on itself, how can we suppose that it is capable of acting on something else? If it cannot change itself but through the intervention of a foreign cause, how can it change the state of another substance? We deny, then, that one physical event ever depends on another of a similar character; and Fichte's long chain of causes, from the displacement of a grain of sand up to the creation of a world, drops asunder at every link. In the world of consciousness, moreover, since there is often no external event to which a particular change or determination of the will can be attributed, the necessarian, in seeking for a cause of the phenomenon, is obliged to look to an antecedent state of the man himself,- that is, to a motive, a preexistent or concomitant longing or desire. He thinks to make out his theory, then, by saying, that the strongest motive causes the change, or, in other words, determines the will. But as the mind or person is absolutely single, and only exhibits itself under different phases, or as variously employed, the motive means nothing but the man himself wishing for some object; and the determination of the will means nothing but the same person acting. The assertion, that the motive determines the will, therefore, is only an abstract statement of the fact, that the man wishing determines the man acting, or that the will determines itself, which is precisely the theory of the advocate for human freedom. The necessarian theory is absurd, for it assigns an abstraction as the cause of a reality. LECTURE VI. THE ARGUMENT FOR FREE AGENCY CONTINUED: REASONING FROM EFFECT TO CAUSE. THE two theories of causation, which I endeavoured to develop in the last Lecture, terminate respectively in the system of Spinoza, which is atheistic fatalism, and in that of free-will, which ascribes all action to mind or person, and therefore attributes all changes that take place in the universe, except those which are caused by man, to the immediate agency of the Deity. I attempted to prove that these two theories are the only ones with which we need concern ourselves, for they alone are logical, consistent, and complete. No compromise is possible between them. Take the doctrine of necessity in its mildest and most liberal form, as expounded by those who shrank from the awful consequences that Spinoza deduced from it, and it will not be difficult to show that it is partial and inconsequent; the premises on which it rests, as we might expect from the demonstrative character of the reasoning employed, leading either to universal conclusions, or to no conclusions at all. Either matter is capable of efficient causation, or it is not; either one physical event causes or necessitates another, by its own inherent power or energy, in which case every thing is necessary, and the chain of Fate extends from the fall of an atom up to the throne of God, or else one event merely precedes another in the order of time, and has no causal connection with it whatever, both the antecedent and the consequent being independently produced by a power operating on them from without, that is, by the agency of mind. Thus Spinozism actually affords a proof of the doctrine that is diametrically opposed to it, for it is the reduction of the opposite of that doctrine to an absurdity. Spinozism in itself is utterly incredible and absurd, no sane man ever having actually believed it, or entertained it in any way except as a mere exercise of the intellect, the fanciful scheme of a hypothetical universe, in which abstractions are taken for realities and assumptions for facts. I endeavoured to show further, that the argument in support of this monstrous system, being a mathematical one, needs to be complete and certain in all its parts, so that if a breach be anywhere made in it, the whole fabric must fall. To prove the falsity of any one doctrine that is really involved in it is to disprove the whole system. Observe, then, at how many points it is refuted by the principles which we have already established by independent evidence. First, it begins with the assumption, that every physical event is caused, or necessitated, by the antecedent physical event; while it is now admitted on all hands, that we never have discovered, and never can discover, between two physical events any necessary union whatever. Secondly, the system requires us to believe that there is no distinction between mind and matter, but that thought and extension are attributes of the same substance; while it has been proved that personality is essentially distinct from materiality, and that the acts of the will do not belong to the same class with changes in matter, so that reasoning from the latter to the former is wholly fallacious; they have not even any qualities in common. Thirdly, Spinoza denies that there is any such thing as active power, and teaches that every event is necessarily produced by the inherent passivity, so to speak, of all objects, there being nowhere an agent, a mover, or a primal source of power; while it has been shown that in the phenomena of will there is a consciousness of effort or exertion, which is a direct perception of original, and not of merely transmitted power. Fourthly, a cardinal point in the system is a denial of the freedom of the will, and the consequent |