is essentially distinct from matter, as it is indivisible, and has the consciousness of activity, or of power in action; while matter is infinitely divisible, and can only be acted upon; its inertness, or passive submission to any forces that are applied to it, having no internal force wherewith to resist them, is in truth the only reason for believing that all its changes of state are necessary. We say that the movements and changes of matter are inevitable or necessary, because we perceive that matter has no power to act of itself, so that it must be operated upon from without; and we derive this belief of power of some sort as essential to action from the phenomena of consciousness. If it were not from observing, that within the proper domain of the will no act takes place unless preceded by a volition, that is, by a consciousness of effort, we never could have arrived at a knowledge of the law of causality, namely, that every event must have somewhere an efficient cause. Now it is the vice of Spinoza's system, that it ignores the idea of power altogether; every thing is caused, nothing causes; every thing is moved, nothing moves; power is transmitted, as it were, from one event to another, each one being compelled or necessitated by that which preceded it, and in its turn compelling its consequent, and yet this power, thus transmitted, and thus enforcing the law of necessity, has its origin nowhere. We pursue its fleeting shadow through a series of events, but can never overtake it, for the series is infinite. The powder exploded because the spark fell upon it; the spark fell, because the flint excuded it from the steel; the flint and steel were struck together by the action of a man, this action being the result of a volition, and this volition being necessarily determined by certain antecedent emotions and beliefs, these states of mind being inevitably consequent on certain sensations, and these, again, on some preceding physical events; - and so we proceed, tracing the chain once more through the world of matter, then perhaps again to a conscious mind, and so on to infinitude. Nature, then, according to Spinoza's system, is not only infinite in extent, but eternal; strictly speaking, nothing ever began to be, and creation is but a dream. The power, or neces

sity, which now is, has existed from eternity, and has travelled down to us through an infinite series of events, never relaxing its iron grasp, never varying in intensity or diminishing in strength, a blind and unconscious God.

Against this terrific and incredible conception, the 'Aváyên of 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.

We

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. 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 preëxistent 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