relations and dependencies of things, have borrowed these terms, for want of others. But we grow up from our cradles in a use of such phrases entirely different from this, or from the one in which they are used in the controversy about liberty and necessity. And it being a dictate of the universal sense of mankind, evident to us as soon as we begin to think, that the necessity signified by these terms in the sense in which we first learn them, does excuse persons, and free them from all fault or blame, hence our idea of excusableness or faultlessness is tied to these phrases by a strong habit, which grows up with us; or if we use the words as terms of art in another sense, yet unless we are exceeding circumspect and wary, we shall insensibly slide into the vulgar use of them, and so apply the words in a very inconsistent manner: this habitual connexion of ideas will deceive and confound us in our reasonings and discourses whenever we pretend to use the terms in that manner."-Pages 20, 21, 290, &c. "It follows that when the aforesaid terms are used in cases wherein no opposition, or insufficient will or endeavour is or can be supposed, but the very nature of the supposed case (as that of willing or choosing) excludes any such opposition, will, or endeavour, these terms are then not used in their proper signification, but quite beside their use in common speech."— Pages 21, 22. The author has, I think, in these passages, laid open the source of most of the confusion on the subject in question. For this double meaning lurking under the word necessity has been the chief reason why persons, who were guided more by their own feelings and the customary associations of language than by formal definitions, have altogether rejected the doctrine; while persons of a more logical turn, who could not deny the truth of the abstract principle, have yet in their explanations of it, and inferences from it, fallen into the same vulgar error as their opponents. The partisans for necessity have given up their common sense, as they supposed, to their reason, while the advocates for liberty rejected a demonstrable truth from a dread of its consequences; and both have been the dupes of a word. I have been the more ready to appeal to this writer's authority, because he is allowed on all hands to be one of the most strict, severe, and logical of all necessarians. What he has said on the subject of free-will, as consisting in perfect contingence, independent of all motive, or as implying an absolute beginning of action with . out any precedent determining cause might, one would imagine, have been sufficient, even if Hobbes's reasonings had not, to banish that opinion out of the world. He has followed it through all its windings, and detected it in all its varying shades, with equal patience and sagacity. He sums up the absurdities of this notion of liberty, or of mere absolute self-will, in these words: "The following things are all essential to it, viz. that an action should be necessary, and not necessary; that it should be from a cause and no cause; that it should be the fruit of choice and design, and not the fruit of choice and design; that it should be the beginning of motion and exertion, and yet be consequent on previous exertion; that it should be before it is; that it should spring immediately out of indifference and equilibrium, and yet be the effect of preponderation; that it should be self-originated, also have its original from something else; that it is what the mind causes itself, of its own will, and can produce or prevent, according to its choice, or pleasure, and yet what the mind has no power to prevent, precluding all previous choice in the affair. So that an act of the will [determining itself by its own free-will], according to their meta physical account of it, is something of which there is no idea, it is nothing but a confusion of the mind, excited by words without any distinct meaning. If some learned philosopher, who had been abroad, in giving an account of the curious observations he had made in his travels, should say, 'He had been in Terra del Fuego, and there had seen an animal, which he calls by a certain name, that begat and brought forth itself, and yet had a sire and a dam distinct from itself; that it had an appetite and was hungry before it had a being; that his master, who led him, and governed him at his pleasure, was always governed by him, and driven by him. where he pleased; that when he moved, he always took a step before the first step; that he went with his head first, and yet always went tail foremost; and this though he had neither head nor tail;' it would be no impudence at all to tell such a traveller, though a learned man, that he himself had no notion or idea of such an animal as he gave an account of, and never had, nor ever would have."-Page 281, of the Inquiry. The author seems to have hit upon the source of this erroneous account of free-will, with his usual truth of feeling. He says, almost immediately after:-" The thing which has led men into this inconsistent notion of action, when applied to volition, as though it were essential to this internal action that the agent should be self-determined in it, and that the will should be the cause of it, was probably this: that according to the sense of mankind, and the common use of language, it is so with respect to men's external actions; which are what originally, and according to the vulgar use and most proper sense of the word, are called actions. Men in these are self-directed, self-determined, and their wills are the cause of the motions of their bodies, and the external things that are done; so that unless men do them voluntarily, and of choice, and the action be determined by their antecedent volition, it is no action or doing of theirs. Hence some metaphysicians have been led unwarily, but exceeding absurdly, to suppose the same concerning volition itself, that that also must be determined by the will; which is to be determined by antecedent volition, as the motion of the body is; not considering the contradiction it implies."-Ibid, page 286. I shall proceed to state as briefly as I can my own notions of liberty and necessity, as far as they any way differ from the foregoing account. First, then, I conceive that if by necessity be |