not been sufficiently severe, the infliction of the punishment PRECEDED the commission of the crime."* If crimes and their appropriate punishments be both the effects of the absolute decrees of God, it is certainly not more inconsistent with his justice that the punishment should PRECEDE the crimes that follow after it. SECTION VII. Of the Schemes of Free Will, and of Necessity considered as influencing Practice. 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 assertors of liberty; † as, * Article, Anne, Queen of Great Britain. † In proof of Collins's assertion, that the ancient Epicureans were advocates for man's free agency, a reference is made by him to the following lines of Lucretius. "Denique si semper motus connectitur omnis, Et vetere exoritur semper novus ordine certo, Libera per terras unde hæc animantibus extat, Per quam progredimur, quo ducit quemque voluptas; " &c. &c. Lib. 2. 1. 251. 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 names 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. "Quare in seminibus quoque idem fateare, necesse 'st, Fatis avolsa voluntas.-On this expression of Lucretius the following acute remarks are made by the French translator (M. de la Grange.) They are not improbably from the pen of the Baron D'Holbach, who is said to have contributed many notes to this edition. (Dict. Historique, Art. GRANGE.) Whoever the author was, he was evidently strongly struck with the inconsistency of this particular tenet with the general principles of the Epicurean philosophy. "On est surpris qu'Epicure fonde la liberté humaine sur la déclinaison des atomes. On demande si cette déclinaison est nécessaire, ou si elle est simplement accidentelle. Nécessaire, comment la liberté peut elle en être le résultat? Accidentelle, par quoi est elle déterminée? Mais on devroit bien plutôt en être surpris, qu'il lui soit venu en idée de rendre l'homme libre dans un systême qui suppose un enchaînement nécessaire de causes et d'effets. C'étoit une recherche curieuse, que la raison qui a pu faire d'Epicure l'apôtre de la liberté." For the theory which follows on this point I must refer to the work in question.-See Traduction Nouvelle de Lucrèce, avec des Notes, par M. de la Grange, Vol. I. pp. 218, 219, 220. A Paris, 1768. on the other side, the Stoics, who were the most popular and numerous sect among the religionaries of antiquity, were the great assertors 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." To the same purpose Edwards attempts to show (and it is one of the weakest parts of his book) that the scheme of free will (by affording an exception to that dictate of cominon sense which leads us to refer every event to a cause) would destroy the proof a posteriori for the being of God. One thing is certain, that the two schemes of atheism and of necessity have been hitherto always connected together in the history of modern philosophy: not that I would, by any means, be understood to say, that every Necessitarian must ipso facto be an atheist, or even that any presumption is afforded by a man's attachment to the former sect, of his having the slightest bias in favor of the latter, but only that every modern atheist I have ever heard of has been a Necessitarian. I cannot help adding, that by far the ablest Necessitarians who have yet appeared have been those who followed out their principles till they ended in Spinozism; a doctrine which differs from atheisin more in words than in reality. It has been objected by a most respectable writer, (the late pious and learned Sir H. Moncreiff, a great admirer both of Edwards's character and talents) to those who "without attempting to discuss Edwards's argument, set it down as nothing more than an intricate puzzle or quibble," that "if this argument be what they represent it, there must be some way to unravel the puzzle, although they have not the skill, or will not take the trouble to discover it." § To this proposition "I object, 1. Because I can see little or nothing in the argument of Edwards which has not been already completely answered by Clarke or by Reid. 2. Because the consequences to which it leads, although to the satisfaction of a few speculative men they may perhaps be evaded by means of subtile refinements and distinctions) are so directly contrary to the common feelings and judgments of mankind, as to authorize any person of plain understanding boldly to cut asunder the knot which he was unable to unloose. In looking over the article Sophisms in our elementary books of logic, I find many (such as Achilles and the Tortoise, the Liar, the Bald, the Sorites or Acervus, and various others) to which I should be much more at a loss to give a satisfactory reply, than to any thing alleged by Collins or Edwards; and yet I should think it a most unwise employment of my time to waste an hour in the refutation of any of them. Nor would I feel much mortification if I should be accused of a want of candor for neither consenting to admit the conclusion, nor to undertake the irksome task of combating the premises. Of the truths disputed in these sophisms, there is not one in my opinion more certain than that of man's free agency; a fact of which our consciousness is so complete, that we cannot even form a conception of a more perfect freedom of choice than we actually possess. On this point it has been justly and acutely remarked by M. Necker, that when we reflect upon our faculties, we can with ease imagine a * With respect to the opinions of the Sadducees and the Pharisees on man's free agency, see the notes on Mosheim's translation of Cudworth's Intellectual System, Vol. I. pp. 9, 10. In this passage Collins plainly proceeds on the supposition, that all Fatalists are of course Necessitarians (Collins states this afterwards more strongly in what he says of the Pharisees, see pp. 54, 55,) 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 connexion with the second. The Stoics themselves 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. Pp. 54, 55.—See the authorities referred to by Collins; see also the sequel of the above passage. § Life of the Reverend Dr. John Erskine. superior degree of intelligence, of knowledge, of memory, of foresight, and of every other property of our understanding; liberty is the only part of ourselves to which imagination cannot add any thing."* In Bernier's abridgment of the Philosophy of Gassendi, there are some very judicious observations on the practical tendency of the scheme of necessity; a subject on which his opinion is entitled to great weight, not only from his long residence among the followers of Mahomet, but from those prepossessions in favor of this scheme, which he may be presumed to have imbibed from his education under Gassendi. I shall quote a few of his concluding reflections. "De tout ceci jugez si j'ai sujet de croire cette doctrine si pernicieuse à la société humaine. Certainement à considérer que ce sont principalement les Mahumétans qui s'en trouvent infectés, et que c'est principalement encore parmi eux présentement qu'elle est fomentée et entretenue, je douterois presque que ce fut Î'invention de quelques uns de ces tyrans d'Asie, comme auroit peut-être un Mahomet, un Tamerlane, un Bajazet, ou quelqu'un de ces autres fléaux du monde qui pour assouvir leur ambition demandoit des soldats, qui, étant entêtés de prédestination, s'abandonassent brutalement à tout, et se précipitassent même volontiers, aux occasions, la tête la première dans le fossé d'une ville assiégée pour servir du pont au reste de l'armée. "Je sçais bien qu'on pourroit peut-être dire que cette opinion est mal prise et mal entendue par les Mahumétans; mais quoi qu'il en soit, que doit on raisonablement penser d'une doctrine qui peut si aisément être mal-prise et qui peut, soit par erreur ou autrement, avoir si étranges suites?" The scheme of free will is not liable to any such objection, inasmuch as it seems quite impossible for the most ingenious sophistry to pervert it to any pernicious purpose. Indeed, its great object is to reconcile with the conclusions of our reason those moral feelings which are so essential both to our own happiness and to the interests of society, that they have been regarded by some of the most acute as well as candid partisans of necessity as merciful illusions of the imagination, by which man is blinded to the melancholy fact of his real condition: "Nervis alienis mobile lignum!" There is good reason to believe, that the practical consequences produced by the scheme of necessity, at the time of the reformation, alarmed the minds of some very able men by whom it was at first adopted. "The Germans," says Dr. Burnet," saw the ill effects of the doctrine of decrees. Luther changed his mind about it, and Melancthon wrote openly against it; and since that time the whole stream of the Lutheran churches has run the other way. But still Calvin and Bucer were both for maintaining the doctrine; only they warned the people not to think much about them, since they were secrets that men could not penetrate into. Hooper and many other good writers did often exhort the people from entering into these curiosities; and a caveat to the same purpose was put into the article about Predestination." "Concerning the disputants themselves," says Dr. Jortin, "we may safely affirm, that the defenders of the liberty of man, and of the conditional decrees of God, have been, beyond all comparison, the more learned, judicious, and moderate men; and that severity and oppression have appeared most on the other side." § Priestley has somewhere very justly remarked, that there are some men so happily born, that no speculative theories are likely to mislead them from their duty; and of the truth of his observation, I sincerely believe that his own private life afforded a very striking example. Little stress, therefore, is to be laid on individual cases as arguments for or against the practical tendency of any philosophical dogma. The case, however, is very different with respect to observations made on so great a scale as those above quoted from Bernier and Burnet. || *On the subject of such sophisms as Achilles and the Tortoise, many books, we are told, were written, and various individuals are mentioned who fell into fatal diseases, or died of grief, in consequence of their fruitless endeavours to clear up the mystery. See Bayle's Dict. Art. EUCLID OF MEgara. † See Tome VIII. p. 536, et seq. Burnet on the Reformation, Part ii. p. 113. Jortin's Dissertations, p. 5. The practical influence of the scheme of necessity ought not to be judged of from the lives of its speculative partisans, but from those of persons who have been educated from their early years in the belief of it. In this point of view it might be interesting to trace the history of the immediate descendants of some of the SECTION VIII. On the Argument for Necessity drawn from the Prescience of the Deity. In reviewing the arguments that have been advanced on the opposite sides of this question, I have hitherto taken no notice of those which the Necessitarians have founded on the prescience of the Deity, because I do not think them fairly applicable to the subject; inasmuch as they draw an inference from what is altogether placed beyond the reach of our faculties, against a fact for which every man has the evidence of his own consciousness. Some of the advocates, however, for liberty have ventured to meet their adversaries even on this ground; in particular, Dr. Clarke, in his Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, and Dr. Reid, in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Both of these writers have attempted to show, with much ingenuity and subtilty of reasoning, that, even although we should admit the prescience of God in the fullest extent in which it has ever been ascribed to Him, it does not lead to any conclusion inconsistent with man's free agency. On their speculations on this point I have no commentary to offer. The argument for necessity, drawn from the Divine Prescience, is much insisted on both by Collins and Edwards; more especially by the latter, who, after insisting at great length on "God's certain foreknowledge of the volitions of moral agents," undertakes to show, that "this foreknowledge infers a necessity of volition as much as an absolute decree." Mr. Belsham, on this as on other occasions, rises above his predecessors in the boldness of his assertions. "The principal argument in favor of moral necessity, and the insurmountable objection against the existence of philosophical liberty in any degree, or under any restrictions whatever, arises from the prescience of God. Liberty and prescience stand in direct hostility to each other. A philosopher, to be consistent, must give up one or the other. Upon the whole, the advocates for philosophical liberty are reduced to the dilemma either of denying the foreknowledge of God, and thus robbing the Deity of one of his most glorious attributes, or of admitting that God is the author of evil, in the same sense, and in the same degrees, in which this doctrine is charged upon the Necessitarians."† On this argument, I shall make but one remark, that, if it be conclusive, it only serves to identify still more the creed of the Necessitarians with that of the Spinozites. For if God certainly foresees all the future volitions of his creatures, he must, for the same reason, foresee all his own future volitions; and if this foreknowledge infers a necessity of volition in the one case, how is it possible to avoid the same inference in the other? Mr. Belsham seems to have been not unaware of this inference; but shows no disposition on account of it to shrink from his principles. "It is always to be remembered, that the prescience of an agent necessarily includes predestination, though that of a spectator may not. It is nonsense to say, that a Being does not mean to bring an event to pass, which he foresees to be the certain and inevitable consequence of his own previous voluntary action." + I have already mentioned the attempt of Clarke and others to show that no valid argument against the scheme of free will can be deduced from the prescience of God, even supposing that prescience to extend to all the actions of voluntary beings. On this point I must decline offering any opinion of my own, because I conceive it as placed far beyond the reach of our faculties. It is sufficient for my purpose to observe, that, if it could be demonstrated, (which, in my opinion, has not yet been done,) that the prescience of the volitions of moral agents is incompatible with the free agency of man, the logical inference would be, not in favor of the scheme of necessity, but that there are some events, the foreknowledge of which implies an impossibility. Shall we venture to affirm, that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place, as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to? Does not such a proposition detract from the omnipotence of God, in the same proportion in which it aims to exalt his omniscience? most zealous advocates for necessity. If the principles which they have advanced be just, particularly those they have laid down on the influence of education, the moral characters of their pupils should, or rather must, be exemplary in no common degree. * Elements, p. 302. It is a circumstance not a little curious in the history of the human mind, that, while men have been in all ages impressed with this irresistible conviction of their own free agency, they have nevertheless had a proneness not only to admit the prescience of God in its fullest extent, but to suppose that there is a fatal and irresistible destiny attending every individual. Traces of this opinion occur in every country of the world of which we have received any account. We meet with it among the sages of Greece, and among the ignorant and unenlightened natives of St. Kilda. The following Arabian tale, which I quote from the late Mr. Harris, will place the import of the doctrine I now allude to in a more striking light than I could possibly do by any philosophical comment. "The Arabians tell us," says this author, "that as Solomon (whom they supposed a magician from his superior wisdom) was one day walking with a person in Palestine, his companion said to him, with horror, What hideous spectre is that which approaches us? I don't like his visage. Send me, I pray thee, to the remotest mountain of India.' Solomon complied, and the very moment he was sent off, the spectre arrived. Solomon,' said he, how came that fellow here? I was to have fetched him from the remotest mountain of India.' Solomon answered, ANGEL OF DEATH, thou wilt FIND him there.' The general prevalence of fatalism among unenlightened nations is the obvious effect of the insidious lessons inculcated by their religious instructers. The chief expedient employed by the priesthood in all rude countries for subjecting the minds of the people, is to impress them with a belief that it is possible, by the study of auguries, of omens, or of judicial astrology, to gratify that misguided curiosity which disposes blind mortals anxiously to tear asunder the merciful veil drawn by Providence over futurity. "Wherever superstition," says Dr. Robertson, "is so established as to form a regular system, this desire of penetrating into the secrets of futurity is connected with it. Divination becomes a religious act; and priests, as the ministers of Heaven, pretend to deliver its oracles to man. They are the only soothsayers, augurs, and magicians, who possess the sacred and important art of disclosing what is hid from other eyes." t Between this creed and that of an inevitable fate or destiny, the connexion is necessary and obvious; and hence in every false religion the scheme of fatalism may be expected to form not only an essential, but the fundamental article. The inconsiderable influence which this theological dogma (a dogma, too, peculiarly calculated to affect and even to overwhelm the imagination) has always had in stifling the sentiment of remorse on the commission of a crime, affords a demonstrative proof of the impotence of such scholastic refinements when opposed to the feelings of nature, on a question concerning which these feelings form the only tribunal to which a legitimate appeal can be made. That a criminal, in order to alleviate the pang of remorse, may have sometimes sought for relief in this doctrine, is far from being improbable; but no man ever acted on this belief in the common concerns of human life; and, indeed, some of its most zealous partizans have acknowledged, (particularly Lord Kames,) that, were it to prevail universally as a practical principle, the business of the world could not possibly go on. In the ancient Stoical system (as I have already observed) the doctrine of fatalism, and that of man's free agency, were both admitted as fundamental articles of belief. By fate," says Mrs. Carter," the Stoics seem to have understood a series of events appointed by the immutable counsels of God, or that law of his providence by * The following remark of M. Ancillon upon the difference between the Mahometan doctrine of destiny, and that which prevailed upon the same subject among the Ancient Greeks, appears to me just and important. "Il y a une grande différence entre le destin des Orientaux, surtout depuis que Mahomet a fait, d'une doctrine généralement repandue avant lui, un article de foi, et le Polythéisme Grec. Le Grec lutte contre le destin, et tout en succombant sous sa force, il fait preuve de liberté le Mahumétan se résigne en aveugle avant l'événement; lors même qu'il agit, il agit en homme à qui l'action ne servira de rien. Le premier murmure contre ce pouvoir, et le supporte avec impatience; le second s'en félicite parce qu'il dispense de l'activité. Les Grecs plaçoient la force aveugle dans le destin; et la pensée qui lui résiste, et qui le combat, dans l'homme; chez les Mahumétans la force aveugle est dans l'homme; cette force n'est qu'une force passive, et la pensée est dans le destin."-Essais Philosophiques, par Frederick Ancillon, tom. premier, pp. 150, 151. Paris, 1817. History of America, Book iv. |