LIBERTY AND NECESSITY. 421 



former, are not said to be necessary, as death from poison, 

 which an antidote, or the use of the stomach-pump, will some- 

 times avert. It is apt to be forgotten by people's feelings, even 

 if remembered by their understandings, that human actions 

 are in this last predicament : they are never (except in some 

 cases of mania) ruled by any one motive with such absolute 

 sway, that there is no room for the influence of any other. 

 The causes, therefore, on which action depends, are never 

 uncontrollable ; and any given effect is only necessary pro- 

 vided that the causes tending to produce it are not controlled. 

 That whatever happens, could not have happened otherwise 

 unless something had taken place which was capable of 

 preventing it, no one surely needs hesitate to admit. But 

 to call this by the name necessity is to use the term in a sense 

 so different from its primitive and familiar meaning, from that 

 which it bears in the common occasions of life, as to amount 

 almost to a play upon words. The associations derived from 

 the ordinary sense of the term will adhere to it in spite of all 

 we can do : and though the doctrine of Necessity, as stated 

 by most who hold it, is very remote from fatalism, it is pro- 

 bable that most necessarians are fatalists, more or less, in their 

 feelings. 



A fatalist believes, or half believes (for nobody is a consis- 

 tent fatalist), not only that whatever is about to happen, will 

 be the infallible result of the causes which produce it, (which 

 is the true necessarian doctrine,) but moreover that there is no 

 use in struggling against it; that it will happen however we 

 may strive to prevent it. Now, a necessarian, believing that 

 our actions follow from our characters, and that our characters 

 follow from our organization, our education, and our circum- 

 stances, is apt to be, with more or less of consciousness on his 

 part, a fatalist as to his own actions, and to believe that his 

 nature is such, or that his education and circumstances have 

 so moulded his character, that nothing can now prevent him 

 from feeling and acting in a particular way, or at least that no 

 effort of his own can hinder it. In the words of the sect 

 which in our own day has most perseveringly inculcated and 

 most perversely misunderstood this great doctrine, his cha- 



