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doctrine and precept makes the perfect sermon; and we have enough of these at home, without importations.

SIR,

C.

Aug. 20th, 1825. No speculative doctrine perhaps has been more frequently misunderstood, and more grossly perverted, than that of philosophical necessity. By the generality of persons, and even by those who pride themselves on the superiority of their intellectual faculties, it is at once, without reasoning on the subject, pronounced to be devoid of foundation; while by another class, though confessing their inability to answer the arguments in its favour, it is not less vehemently condemned, on account of the supposed consequences to which its admission would give rise. Two of the latest publications on this contested point have been written by eminent members of our two English Universities. The "Essay on Human Liberty," by Dr. Milner, the late President of Queen's College, Cambridge, and Dean of Carlisle, is one of the most impartial, and, at the same time, one of the clearest and best written argumentative treatises to be found in the language. Nothing can be fairer than the statement of the arguments on both sides of the question; and nothing can, generally speaking, be more conclusive than the reasoning in favour of the necessurian doctrine. I certainly cannot speak in the same terms of the other publication to which I allude, entitled An Inquiry into the Doctrines of Necessity and Predestination in Four Discourses, &c," by Dr. Copleston, the present Provost of Oriel College, in the sister university. The author is unquestionably a man of great learning and talent, and has evinced a degree of versatility in their application not very frequently witnessed. Classical criticism, political economy, and metaphysics, which have obviously no intimate relation to each other, have all exercised this writer's skill, though with very far from equal success. In this last work, however, he is considered by his admirers at Oxford and at Edinburgh, as meriting the thanks of every friend to religion, and as having treated the subject in a masterly manner. From this opinion

I differ most widely; and I think that his reasoning can afford satisfaction to no one who is really acquainted with the topic in controversy. Dr. Copleston does not attempt to invalidate the direct proof of the doctrine

he disputes, but denies its truth from two consequences, which he imagines would inevitably follow from its general adoption. On the supposition of its truth, he affirms that motives would cease to operate, and inactivity would universally prevail. This constitutes his first objection. The second consequence which he deduces from it, and which, if well founded, would justly excite still greater alarm, is the extinction of all moral principle. And since (he proceeds to argue) the necessarian himself admits that to effect the belief of this doctrine, considerable exercise and improvement of reason are required, his theory involves this absurdity, that in exact proportion as our understandings are strengthened and improved, all the ends and purposes of our being would be counteracted. The learned author regards this method of reasoning as differing from any hitherto adopted, but as both of the objections on which his argument is founded have been repeatedly advanced, I can perceive no semblance of novelty, except perhaps in the form which he has given to his conclusion. Though, like many who have preceded him in the same path, he has completely failed in establishing the positions on which his inference depends, it may be useful to observe the method he has pursued in persuading himself that he has proved his point.

He maintains, that if men were really convinced that every thing in the universe is fixed and preordained, they would soon cease to act, and would consider every effort as a fruitless attempt to alter the course of nature. The two grand motives of hope and fear, he avers, could no longer operate, and mankind would desist from exerting their faculties as soon as they entertained a belief that whether they were indolent or active, the order of things would remain the same. But, in point of fact, he asserts that those who profess to hold

* Dis. II. p. 47.

these tenets do not conform to them; and that necessarians and fatalists act in the common affairs of life precisely like libertarians, and consequently in opposition to the theory they have undertaken to defend. Hence Dr. C. infers, that " upon the hypothesis of fatalism, every step we advance in knowledge we recede from utility, and in the same proportion as we become wiser, we become less fit and less disposed to fulfil the purposes of our being."

In the first place, this writer confounds the doctrine of Necessity, as it is explained by its ablest modern advocates, with that of Fatalism, which so commonly prevailed among the ancients, and is still professed by the followers of Mahomet. As far, however, as his reasoning is applied to the former, I have no hesitation in calling it mistaken and nugatory. From the confidence reposed by the learned preacher in the objections he has urged, we might almost infer that they had never been answered. Why, I would ask, are we to suppose that the foreknowledge of the Deity must interfere with the activity of man? For, admitting the events of futurity to be pre-ordained by infinite wisdom, yet to us they are contingent;-not contingent in an absolute sense, because we contend that what is foreseen is inevitably fixed; but they are so concealed from our confined views, and limited faculties, that we are unable to decide which among the possible incidents of human life will actually take place. That one of two opposite events will happen is certain; but as a human agent is entirely ignorant which of them is predetermined, that circumstance ought not to affect the formation of his plans: and since he must have observed that he who employs the means is more likely to secure the end than he who neglects them, it would evidently be the height of folly to remain inactive. The Mahometan, when he rushes to battle, believes, and in my apprehension rightly believes, that his fate is fixed beforehand; but as he cannot absolutely know what that fate will be, and as experience might have taught him, that the man who avoid unnecessary danger has a better prospect of escaping than he who is indifferent about the matter, he ought

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to perceive the absurdity of not using every mode of self-defence consistent with duty and honour. In the case of shipwreck, though it is pre-ordained beyond all doubt which part of the crew will be saved, and which will not, does the persuasion of this truth justify inertness, or does it render the exertions of every individual for selfpreservation in the slightest degree less requisite? The creed of the necessarians, when properly understood, inculcates no such practice. On the contrary, it condemns inactivity and despondency, not merely in situations of peril, but in any circumstances, as alike hostile to our present and our future welfare, and as inconsistent with the fundamental principles on which the doctrine is founded. No change in the physical world can take place without an adequate cause; and no wish or design formed in the human mind can be accomplished without the adoption of active means.

With respect to the other leading objection against Necessity, that it must be destructive of all accountability and moral principle, Dr. Copleston, like most other writers on the same side of the question, betrays great confusion of ideas. He confounds physical with moral necessity; and frequently so intermingles acknowledged truths with mere assumptions, as to impose upon the reader who is unaccustomed to these speculations. He sets out with observing, that "Praise and blame, reward and punishment, uniformly imply that we think the party who is the object of them might have acted otherwise."* This assertion I must beg leave to deny; and whatever may be the popular opinion, the implication here stated is altogether unfounded. Reward and punishment, praise and blaine, ought to be proportioned, and will be so under the Divine government, to the voluntary observance or violation of duty, that is, to the tendeucy of the disposition from which the action arises to produce happiness or misery. The power of the agent to have acted otherwise, so far from being requisite to constitute moral worth, would, as interfering with the efficacy of motives, destroy its very essence. Dr. C. thus concludes the

* Dis. I. p. 20.

passage to which I have referred: "And as soon as it is discovered that he acted under compulsion, we no longer measure the action by the standard of duty."* If the term compulsion is here employed in its usual acceptation, the assertion is perfectly true; but it is evident that Dr. C. conceives that an action which is necessary cannot be voluntary, not aware, perhaps, that the moral necessity which he so vehemently opposes does in fact imply the consent and exercise of the will. We affirm, with as much confidence as he does, that no action can merit either praise or blame unless it be voluntary, but its being voluntary is perfectly consistent with its being necessary. This point, I believe, not unfrequently embarrasses persons who have studied the subject but superficially. Every act which is conformable to the will of the agent, (presupposing his intellects to be in a sound state), will be acknowledged, I imagine, to be a voluntary act; but as the will is governed by motives and dispositions which, under the same circumstances, inva riably operate in the same manner, the volition is said to be necessary, and the agent could not possibly act otherwise than he does. There is no compulsion in the case, but a natural series of antecedents and consequents. The circumstances in which a man is placed give rise to certain motives. These motives unavoidably influence his will, and the action follows the exertion of the will, precisely as any other effect follows its cause. Without freedom of the will, in the popular sense of the words, we admit that morality can have no existence; and this freedom we likewise contend is an essential property of human nature. Where there is no physical impediment, nothing can be more obvious than that every man may act as he pleases, and may freely follow his own choice. Not satisfied with this concession, Dr. Copleston wishes to establish that the will itself is under our power, and that the operation of motives is dependent on ourselves. The futility of these pretensions has been so often shewn, that I will not occupy the reader's time by a repetition of the arguments; and I will

* Dis. I. p. 21.

only observe, that moral responsibility admits of but one rational explanation. He whose volitions invariably produce actions which tend to promote the ultimate happiness of himself and others, is deserving of praise and reward; while he whose conduct proceeds from principles of an opposite nature, as justly merits blame and punishment.

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That blame is not to be imputed to actions occasioned by physical necessity, no one has ever ventured to deny; but this writer, with little discrimination, extends the remark to moral necessity. "If the necessity," he observes, “be not absolute, or physical, but depending on moral causes almost equally powerful, we still acquit the agent of responsibility, as in the case of soldiers performing their military duty, or the mere executioners of laws or decrees, however severe." Without stopping to shew the irrelevancy of these two cases, which is sufficiently obvious, there is one circumstance which alone affords an ample refutation of the preacher's position, and that is, the influence of habit. One of the most striking examples of moral necessity is the habit of intoxication. After long-continued indulgence, it is known to be almost irresistible; and it will scarcely be disputed by our learned academic, that the more inveterate the passion, the less is it in the power of the unhappy victim to refuse compliance.

But according to the system of this zealous libertarian, in proportion as the moral inability to act otherwise increases, the culpability of the agent is diminished; that is to say, the more criminal the conduct of the individual, the more unjust must we regard the application of blame and punishment. The value of this argument, which is briefly stated in Dr. Milner's Essay, ought to be properly estimated by a writer so fond of the reductio ad ̃ubsurdum, as the Oxford divine.

But where, it will be asked, can be the justice of punishing any individual for deeds which, as the necessarian contends, he could not avoid in the precise situation in which he was placed? For no other reason, we reply, can this treatment be deemed equitable, than because punishment

Dis. I. p. 21.

will be productive of good; or, in other words, because it tends to reform evil habits, and must in the course of time effect a total change in the disposition and will. Every consistent necessarian, therefore, ought to acknowledge (though there are many of this persuasion who do not) that the infliction of punishment which is not corrective, is nothing less than positive injustice and wanton cruelty. The learned provost dwells with great complacency on what he alleges to be another unfavourable circumstance against his opponents,-that, in point of fact, they never act up to their principles, and that, however tenacious of their theory, they always treat men as free agents in the common concerns of life. But here, as on numerous other occasions, the writer confounds the two senses in which the term liberty is understood; for while we deny that a man could have acted otherwise than he has done, supposing the previous circumstances to remain unaltered, we assert that he is perfectly free to act in strict conformity with his choice. With more justice may we retort the charge of inconsistency on the libertarians, as no persons deviate more from their theoretic opinions in all that relates to the education of the young, and to the general system of moral discipline. It is certainly not a little singular, that on points so intimately connected with human happiness, their practice, generally speaking, coincides with that of the most rigid necessarians.

Dr. Copleston then proceeds to express his astonishment "how opinions so unreasonable and extravagant could ever acquire an ascendency over the human mind ;" and he endeavours to account for the paradox, as he terms it, by two considerations,_on which he places peculiar stress. The first cause of the reception of the necessarian system he avers may be traced to the inaccurate use of language, and ignorance of its principles. It is extraordinary, however, that instead of having recourse to the writings of the best modern authors on the subject, he should select his principal example from the ancient defenders of the doctrine of Fate; and that in answering a sophism of the Stoics he should imagine that he is refuting the creed of the Necessarians.

When the present advocates of necessity introduce this celebrated argument of the fatalists as a bulwark in their defence, it will be time enough to examine how far Dr. C. has succeeded in his plan of demolition. He animadverts in a note on one or two expressions of Jonathan Edwards, which I think are liable to objection his making use of the technical terms on another account, and that is, from of scholastic logic in describing the operations of the Divine Mind: but the great leading arguments of that powerful reasoner he has not attempted to invalidate, and to this hour they remain unanswered. I by no means wish to dispute the propriety of some of Dr. C's. remarks on the terms certain, probable, possible, and others of a similar nature; but his application of them is very inadequate to solve the difficulties inseparable from his view of the question. Few writers perhaps have been more inaccurate in their modes of expression than our Oxford libertarian; and with a great parade of precision, he is perpetually confounding the popular with the philosophical freedom of the will, and constantly argues from the fatality of the ancients against the necessity of the moderns.

for the admission of the necessarian The second cause which he assigns system, is the pride of the human mind in refusing to believe that the foreknowledge of God may co-exist with the contingency of events. He contends, that since each of these of the other, we ought not to withtruths can be proved independently hold our assent, because to our finite apprehensions they appear incompatible, and that we must therefore ever regard them not as contradictions, but

as

apparent incongruities.* Other method of evading a difficulty which writers have adopted nearly the same they are evidently afraid to encounter; but to any person not biassed by the prejudices of education and habit, it would not appear more preposterous to affirm that a figure may be rectilinear and curved at the same time, than to maintain the co-existence of prescience and contingency. Were there no favourite system to be supported, it would be admitted without

* Dis. II. p. 70.

a moment's doubt that the truth of the one proves the falsehood of the other. We may safely allow indeed, with Dr. C., that an event does not happen because it was foreseen, and that it is in no degree whatever influenced or affected by foreknowledge; but we certainly do maintain that it could not be foreseen unless it after wards really takes place. To the assertion of Jonathan Edwards, that "infallible foreknowledge may prove the necessity of the event foreknown, and yet not be the thing that causes the necessity," Dr. C. replies, that infallible foreknowledge proves nothing, unless when the Being possessing this foreknowledge declares that an event will happen, and that even then it does not prove its necessity. But this writer ought to be aware that it is not the futurity but the certainty of an event from which we infer its necessity.

It is evident from the explicit lan guage of these Discourses that the author entertains no doubt respecting the omniscience of the Deity, comprehending an intuitive knowledge of the past, the present, and the future, Now knowledge in the human mind undoubtedly proves the reality of the subject of that knowledge. We cannot strictly know any event to have happened, unless it actually has happened. We cannot be assured of the present existence of any object in nature which does not truly exist. And since the omniscience of God implies an infallible knowledge of the future, as well as of the past and present, it is clear that whatever he foresees, that is, the subject of his foreknow. ledge, must take place with absolute certainty; and from this certainty of the event we justly infer its necessity. For admitting, as we must, that the Supreme Being infallibly knows all the causes and effects in the universe, all the antecedents and consequents, then if any other effect could take place than that which actually does take place and is foreseen, it would follow that the same cause might produce different effects which have no necessary connexion with it. Opposite effects might proceed from the same cause; and if this is not a glaring contradiction, it would be difficult to say what is. In short, it seems impossible to deny that unless an event be necessarily dependent on its cause,

it could not be foreseen. But what, let me also ask, is a contingent event but one which either may or may not happen? And how can it be foreknown to happen when it is known, at the same time, that it may not happen? In truth, a grosser solecism in reasoning cannot be conceived than that which is displayed in the attempt to prove the possibility of foreknow, ing a contingent event.

The necessarian system, however, is also established by arguments wholly independent of that which is derived from the prescience of the Deity; and that reasoning which, however forcible it may possibly be in other respects, omits all notice of those arguments, must be regarded as extremely defective. But even supposing for one moment that the doctrine of free-will were as truly susceptible of independent proof as our opponents allege, and as we maintain to be the case with necessity, yet if the one is found to be irreconcileable with the usual and legitimate notions of the Divine foreknowledge, while the other is shewn not only to be compatible with it, but to derive from it an additional and most powerful evidence, there can be no room for hesitation to which of these opposing doctrines a dispassionate inquirer ought to yield his assent.

The two last of Dr. Copleston's Discourses are employed in applying the principles before explained to the Calvinistic tenet of Predestination; but as my object was merely to shew the futility of his objections against the truth of the necessarian doctrine, I shall not pursue his reasoning on that part of the subject. It is a remarkable circumstance, however, that he has laid himself open to attack even where we might have supposed him to be most secure. Adopting the sentiments of Archbishop King, who contends that the attributes ascribed to the Deity must be understood merely in an analogical sense, he has called forth an able opponent, to whom we are indebted for a satis factory exposure of the dangerous consequences of such a concession to our belief in the moral qualities of the Supreme Being. Though Mr. Grinfield coincides with the Provost of Oriel on the main subject of dispute, yet on the particular point discussed in the Vindicia Analogica, the de

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