machines. But it seems that man also has "a faculty of
will, and so is capable of volition or choice."(134) Yes, he can _act_.
Now this language means something according to the system of nature; but
what does it mean according to the system of necessity? It merely means
that the human mind is susceptible of being necessitated to undergo a
change by the "power and action of a cause," which the advocates of that
system are pleased to call an act. They never hint that we are not
machines, because we have any power by which we are exempt from the most
absolute dominion of causes. They never hint that we are not machines,
because our volitions, or acts, are not as necessarily produced in us, as
the motions of a clock are produced in it. Now, if this scheme were true,
there would be no such things as acts or volitions in us: all the
phenomena of our minds would be passive impressions, like our judgments
and feelings. When they speak of the will, then, which is capable of
volitions, or acts, they deceive by using the language of nature, and not
of their false scheme.

Section VII.

The scheme of necessity originates in a false method, and terminates in a
false religion.

This system, as we have seen, has been built up, not by an analysis of the
phenomena of the human mind, but by means of universal abstractions and
truisms. It takes its rise, not from the facts of nature, but from the
conceptions of the intellect. In other words, instead of anatomizing the
world which God has made so as to exhibit the actual plan according to
which it has been constituted, it sets out from certain identical
propositions, such as that every effect must have a cause, and proceeds to
inform us how the world _must_ have been constituted. This "usual method
of discovery and proof," as Bacon says, "by first establishing the most
general propositions, then applying and proving the intermediate axioms
according to these, is the parent of error and the calamity of every
science." Nowhere, it is believed, can a more striking illustration of the
truth of these pregnant words be found, than in the method adopted by
necessitarians. They begin with the universal proposition, that every
effect must have a cause, as a self-evident truth, and then proceed, not
to examine and discover how the world is made, but to demonstrate how it
_must_ have been constructed. This is not to "interpret," it is to
"anticipate" nature.