causation, not
only among the thoughts and feelings generally, but among the wishes and
volitions of the soul."(41)

Now here is the question, How can the soul be self-active,
self-determined, and yet all its thoughts, and feelings, and volitions,
have producing causes? How can it be free and independent in its acts, and
yet under the dominion of efficient causes? How can the law of causation
reign in all the states of the mind, as it reigns over all the movements
of matter, and yet leave it as free as was the Creator when nothing beside
himself existed? In other words, How is such a scheme of necessity to be
reconciled with such a scheme of liberty? The author replies, We are not
bound to answer such a question(42)--nor are we. As we understand it, the
very idea of liberty, as above set forth by the author, is a direct
negative of his doctrine of necessity.

But although he has taken so much pains to dissent from his necessitarian
brethren, and to advocate the Arminian notion of free-will, Mr. M'Cosh,
nevertheless, falls back upon the old Calvinistic definition of liberty,
as consisting in a freedom from external co-action, in order to find a
basis for human responsibility. It may seem strange, that after all his
labour in laying the foundation, he should not build upon it; but it is
strictly true. "If any man asserts," says he, "that in order to
responsibility, the will must be free--that is, free from physical
restraint; free to act as he pleases--we at once and heartily agree with
him; and we maintain that in this sense the will is free, as free as it is
possible for any man to conceive it to be." And again: "If actions do not
proceed from the will, but from something else, from mere physical or
external restraint, then the agent is not responsible for them. But if the
deeds proceed from the will, then it at once attaches a responsibility to
them. Place before the mind a murder committed by a party through pure
physical compulsion brought to bear on the arm that inflicts the blow, and
the conscience says, here no guilt is attachable. But let the same murder
be done with the thorough consent of the will, the conscience stops not to
inquire whether _this consent has been caused or no_."(43) Thus, after all
his dissent from Edwards, he returns precisely to Edwards's definition of
the freedom of the will as the ground of human responsibility; after all
his strictures upon "necessitarians of the first order," he falls ba