is notion of necessity with terror, while others
do not fear it at all? Has not Carlyle somewhere said that a belief
in destiny is the bias of all earnest minds? 'It is not Nature,' says
Fichte, 'it is Freedom itself, by which the greatest and most
terrible disorders incident to our race are produced. Man is the
cruellest enemy of man.' But the question of moral responsibility here
emerges, and it is the possible loosening of this responsibility that
so many of us dread. The notion of necessity certainly failed to
frighten Bishop Butler. He thought it untrue even absurd--but he did
not fear its practical consequences. He showed, on the contrary, in
the 'Analogy,' that as far as human conduct is concerned, the two
theories of free-will and necessity would come to the same in the end.

What is meant by free-will? Does it imply the power of producing
events without antecedents?--of starting, as it were, upon a creative
tour of occurrences without any impulse from within or from without?
Let us consider the point. If there be absolutely or relatively no
reason why a tree should fall, it will not fall; and if there be
absolutely or relatively no reason why a man should act, he will not
act. It is true that the united voice of this assembly could not
persuade me that I have not, at this moment, the power to lift my arm
if I wished to do so. Within this range the conscious freedom of my
will cannot be questioned. But what about the origin of the 'wish'?
Are we, or are we not, complete masters of the circumstances which
create our wishes, motives, and tendencies to action? Adequate
reflection will, I think, prove that we are not. What, for example,
have I had to do with the generation and development of that which
some will consider my total being, and others a most potent factor of
my total being--the living, speaking organism which now addresses you?
As stated at the beginning of this discourse, my physical and
intellectual textures were woven for me, not by me. Processes in the
conduct or regulation of which I had no share have made me what I am.
Here, surely, if anywhere, we are as clay in the hands of the potter.
It is the greatest of delusions to suppose that we come into this
world as sheets of white paper on which the age can write anything it
likes, making us good or bad, noble or mean, as the age pleases. The
age can stunt, promote, or pervert pre-existent capacities, but it
cannot create them. The wor