Motives do not act upon it simply, or absolutely; but according to the dictates of the understanding or the bias of the will. At one time we yield to any idle inclination that happens to prevail, and at others resist to the utmost the strongest motives. That is, the mind is itself an agent, one chief determining cause of our volitions. It is on the view taken by the mind of motives, on our disposition to attend to or neglect them, to compare and weigh them, that their effect depends. But the necessarians have always delighted to illustrate the operations of the mind in volition by referring to the impulse communicated by one billiard-ball to another, or to different weights in a pair of scales. Both which illustrations are as little applicable as possible, because in neither of them is there supposed to be the least activity of action; that is, the least capacity to resist or increase or alter the impressed force in the thing acted upon. That is, the mind in these similes is requisite as a merely passive agent, by which I mean a thing perfectly indifferent and nugatory, a mere cypher without any character of its own, that is neither good nor bad, neither deserving of praise nor blame; a cameleon, colourless kind of thing, the sport of external impulses and accidental circum VOL. I. Q stances, or of a necessity in which it has itself no share. Thus the responsibility of the mind has been taken from it, and transferred to outward circumstances, and all characters in themselves rendered alike indifferent. This is the necessary consequence of abstracting the influence of motives from the mind on which and by which they act. I prefer exceedingly to the modern instances of a couple of billiardballs, or a pair of scales, the illustration of Chrysophus, the stoic in Cicero, who says, "Ille igitur qui protrusit cylindrum dedit ei principium motionis, volubilitatem autem non dedit: sic visum objectum imprimet quidem et quasi signabit in animo suam speciem, sed assensio erit in potestate nostrâ." That is, suppose I push against a heavy body; if it be square it will not move: if it be cylindrical it will. What the difference of form is to the stone, the difference of disposition is to the mind. In fact, the necessarians, to maintain this doctrine of the nullity of second causes, have been forced to consider every thing as a succession of simple impulses passing from hand to hand so that there being no fixed point, no resting-place for the imagination, we are perpetually obliged to shift the cause from one object to another: every thing has to be ac counted for, and referred back to some thing else, and in this ceaseless whirl of fleeting causes all ideas of power or agency seem to slide from under us. Lest the mind should prove refractory to the laws ascribed to it, they thought it most prudent to deprive it of all activity and power of resistance. They were very absurdly afraid that without this their whole scheme might be overturned, as if though the mind were freed from being the servile drudge of external impulses, it would not still follow the bent of its own nature. The above distinction will, I conceive, set the mind free from one of the shackles imposed on it by the necessarians, namely, that imbecility, helplessness, and indifference, which they have superadded to the regular connexion of cause and effect, though it makes no essential part of it. The mind, according to the advocates for free-will, is a perfectly detached, unconnected, independent cause: according to the necessarians, it is no cause at all neither branch of the antithesis is true. 2. According to the definition of liberty above given, freedom, that is free agency, is applicable to mind as well as to matter. Free will does not, because will does not, belong to it. By a free agent, I understand, with Hobbes, one that is not hindered from acting according to his natural or determinate bias. The body is free when it can obey the impulse of the mind; so also a billiard-ball might be said to be free while it is not fixed to the table, or hindered from being impelled by the stroke of the mace. In the same sense, the water, as Mr Hobbes observes, is said to descend freely along the channel of the river, while no obstacle intercepts its progress. But though necessarians allow liberty to the body, and to inanimate things, they deny that it is in any sense applicable to the mind or will. |