appear in all their force, and perhaps magnified by the evil consequences of their vice and folly, they are ready to think that they might at the time have thought and acted as they now think and act; but this is a fallacious feeling, and arises from their not placing themselves in circumstances exactly similar." We are elsewhere told by Mr. Belsham, that the popular opinion, that in many cases it was in the power of the agent to have chosen differently, the previous circumstances remaining exactly the same, arises either from a mistake of the question, from a forgetfulness of the motives by which our choice was determined, or from the extreme difficulty of placing ourselves in immagination in circumstances exactly similar to those in which the election was made." And still more explicitly and concisely in the following aphorism:-"The pretended consciousness of free-will amounts to nothing more than forgetfulness of the motive.”* To the same purpose Dr. Priestley has expressed himself. "A man, when he reproaches himself for any particular action in his past conduct, may fancy that, if he was in the same situation again, he would have acted differently. But this is a mere deception; and if he examines himself strictly, and takes in all circumstances, he may be satisfied that, with the same inward disposition of mind, and with precisely the same views of things that he had then, and exclusive of all others that he has acquired by reflection since, he could not have acted otherwise than he did."†

If these statements be accurately examined, they will be found to resolve entirely into this identical proposition, that the will of the criminal, being supposed to remain in

* Elements, pp. 278, 279, 306.

t Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity, p. 99.

The very same view of the subject has been lately taken by Laplace, in his Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités. "L'axiome connu sous le nom 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.

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 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?

* Elements, p. 227.

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

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 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, accord

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

ing as the misfortunes we suffer are the consequences of our own misconduct or not. What an alleviation 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 possi bility 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."

Accord

an

Again he says:"To conceive a free act is to conceive an act which, being a cause, is not in itself an effect; in other words, to conceive an absolute commencement. But is such by us conceivable?" ing 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," 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, - an absolute 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.

"The doctrine of moral liberty cannot be made conceivable, for we

SECTION IV.

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

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

*

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 consequences, 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.

* 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.