Carleton.] j^32 [February. 



freedom of action would be destroyed, if controlled by the influence 

 of motive. He says : " The determination of the Will by motive 

 cannot, to our understanding, escape necessitation. How the Will 

 can possibly be free, must remain to us under the present limitation 

 of our faculties, wholly incomprehensible. How moral liberty is pos- 

 sible in man or God, we are utterly unable speculatively to under- 

 stand, but practically the fact that we are free, is given in the con- 

 sciousness of an uncompromising law of duty." 



Descartes also thought that the solution of the question was be- 

 yond the reach of the human faculties. Mallebranche and Berkeley 

 got over the difficulty by resolving every determination of the Will 

 into the act of God. But a Professor in the University of Virginia, 

 a strenuous advocate of free will, affirms that the Will is not deter- 

 mined at all. ''It simply determines j" "is the determiner;" "that 

 a Will controlled by motive is no Will at all ;" " a caused volition is 

 no volition." It is certainly true that a Will, controlled by motive, 

 does not control itself, is not free. 



Nevertheless every one is conscious, as is the Professor himself, 

 that he acts under the control of some motive or determination of 

 his mind, and that, when under no external restraint, his actions are 

 always such as he intended they should be, as they certainly were 

 when he committed the foregoing opinion to writing. 



It is a waste of time to contend with those who are conscious that 

 they are in the wrong. In all prosecutions for offences, the guilt or 

 innocence of the accused turns upon the motive with which the act 

 was done. No man can know his motive so well as the agent him- 

 self. He acts as he thinks ; and as he thinks, so is he innocent or 

 guilty. Actions must vary with motives, and hence the diversity of 

 pursuit among mankind. Nevertheless, philosophers have labored 

 two thousand years to show there is but one uniform cause of action, 

 a free, self-acting Will, which they do not pretend can have any 

 judgment, opinion, or motive of its own, and is yet independent of 

 the motives of that mind of which it forms a part. Of all the aber- 

 rations of the human intellect, this is the most absurd. To such 

 extremities are certain writers driven, to uphold their lawless system 

 of free agency, lest it should be argued that if man be a necessary 

 agent, God who made him so would be the author of all the sin and 

 moral evil that afflicts our race. 



But if, as some divines insist, all moral and physical evils were 

 visited by act of God upon man, because of the sin of Adam ; then 

 the origin of evil is known, and no question can arise, or ought ever 

 to have arisen about it. 



