onderful that such men as a Leibnitz, an
Edwards, and a Chalmers, should, in their zeal to maintain a favourite
dogma, commit so great an oversight, and so grievously deceive themselves?

Section VI.

The attempt of Edwards to establish free and accountable agency on the
basis of necessity--The views of the younger Edwards, Day, Chalmers, Dick,
D'Aubigne, Hill, Shaw, and M'Cosh, concerning the agreement of liberty and
necessity.

The great metaphysician of New-England insists, that his scheme, and his
scheme alone, is consistent with the free-agency and accountability of
man. But how does he show this? Does he endeavour to shake the stern
argument by which all things seem bound together in the relation of cause
and effect? Does he even intimate a doubt with respect to the perfect
coherency and validity of this argument? Does he once enter a protest
against the doctrine of the Stoics, or of the materialistic fatalists,
according to which all things in heaven and earth are involved in an
"implex series of causes?" He does not. On the contrary, he has stated and
enforced the great argument from cause and effect, in the strongest
possible terms. He contends that volition is caused, not by the will nor
the mind, but by the strongest motive. This is the cause of volition, and
it is impossible for the effect to be loose from its cause. It is an
inherent contradiction, a glaring absurdity, to say that motive is the
cause of volition, and yet admit that volition may, or may not, follow
motive. This is to say, indeed, that motive is the cause, and yet that it
is not the cause, of volition; which is a contradiction in terms.(25) So
far from saying anything, then, to extricate the volitions of men from the
adamantine circle of necessity, he has exerted his prodigious energies to
fasten them therein.

Hence the question arises, Has he left any room for the introduction of
that _freedom of the mind_, which it is the great object of his inquiry to
establish upon its true foundations? The liberty for which he contends,
is, after all his labours, precisely that advocated by Hobbes and Collins,
and no other. It is a freedom from co-action, and not from necessity. But
he is entitled to speak for himself, and we shall permit him so to do:
"The plain and obvious meaning of the word _freedom_ and liberty," says
he, "in common speech, is the _power_, opportunity, _or advantage, that
any one has, to do