404 INDUCTION. 



incredible. If Malebranche had not believed in an omnipotent being, he would 

 have held all action of mind on body to be a demonstrated impossibility.* 



A doctrine more precisely the reverse of the Volitional theory of causation 

 cannot well be imagined. The volitional theory is, that we know by intuition 

 or by direct experience the action of our own mental volitions on matter ; that 

 we may hence infer all other action upon matter to be that of volition, and 

 might thus know, without any other evidence, that matter is under the govern- 

 ment of a divine mind. Leibnitz and the Cartesians, on the contrary, maintain 

 that our volitions do not and cannot act upon matter, and that it is only the 

 existence of an all-governing Being, and that Being omnipotent, which can 

 account for the sequence between our volitions and our bodily actions. When 

 we consider that each of these two theories, which, as theories of causation, 

 stand at the opposite extremes of possible divergence from one another, invokes 

 not only as its evidence, but as its sole evidence, the absolute inconseivability 

 of any theory but itself, we are enabled to measure the worth of this kind of 

 evidence : and when we find the Volitional theory entirely built upon the asser- 

 tion that by our mental constitution we are compelled to recognise our volitions 

 as efficient causes, and then find other thinkers maintaining that we know that 

 they are not, and cannot be such causes, and cannot conceive them to be so, 

 I think we have a right to say, that this supposed law of our mental constitu- 

 tion does not exist. 



Dr. Tulloch (pp. 45-7) thinks it a sufficient answer to this, that Leibnitz 

 and the Cartesians were Theists, and believed the will of God to be an efficient 

 cause. Doubtless they did, and the Cartesians even believed (though Leibnitz 

 did not) that it is the only such cause. Dr. Tulloch mistakes the nature of the 

 question. I was not writing on Theism, as Dr. Tulloch is, but against a par- 

 ticular theory of causation, which if it be unfounded, can give no effective sup- 

 port to Theism or to anything else. I found it asserted that volition is the 

 only efficient cause, on the ground that no other efficient cause is conceivable. 

 To this assertion I oppose the instances of Leibnitz and of the Cartesians, who 

 affirmed with equal positiveness that volition as an efficient cause is itself not 

 conceivable, and that omnipotence, which renders all things conceivable, can 

 alone take away the impossibility. This I thought, and think, a conclusive 

 answer to the argument on which this theory of causation avowedly depends. 

 But I certainly did not imagine that Theism was bound up with that theory ; 

 nor expected to be charged with denying Leibnitz and the Cartesians to be 

 Theists because I denied that they held the theory. 



* In the words of Fontenelle, another celebrated Cartesian, " les philosophes 

 aussi bien que le peuple avaient cru que Y&me et le corps agissaient re'ellement 

 et physiquement Tun sur 1'autre. Descartes vint, qui prouva que leur nature 

 ne permettait point cette sorte de communication veritable, et qu'ils n'en pou- 

 vaient avoir qu'une apparente, dont Dieu e*tait le Me"diateur." (Euvres de 

 Fontenelle, ed. 1767, torn. v. p. 534. 



