LIBERTY AND NECESSITY. 583 



jects Hume's and Brown's analysis of Cause and Effect, should miss their 

 way for want of the light which that analysis affords, can not surprise us. 

 The wonder is, that the necessitarians, who usually admit that philosophic- 

 al theory, should in practice equally lose sight of it. The very same mis- 

 conception of the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity, which prevents 

 the opposite party from recognizing its truth, I believe to exist more or 

 less obscurely in the minds of most necessitarians, however they may in 

 words disavow it. I am much mistaken if they habitually feel that the 

 necessity which they recognize in actions is but uniformity of order, and 

 capability of being predicted. They, have a feeling as if there were at bot- 

 tom a stronger tie between the volitions and their causes ; as if, when they 

 asserted that the will is governed by the balance of motives, they meant 

 something more cogent than if they had only said, that whoever knew the 

 motives, and our habitual susceptibilities to them, could predict how we 

 should will to act. They commit, in opposition to their own scientific 

 system, the very same mistake which their adversaries commit in obedience 

 to theirs ; and in consequence do really in some instances suffer those de- 

 pressing consequences which their opponents erroneously impute to the 

 doctrine itself. 



§ 3. I am inclined to think that this error is almost wholly an effect of 

 the associations with a word, and that it would be prevented, by forbear- 

 ing to employ, for the expression of the simple fact of causation, so ex- 

 tremely inappropriate a term as Necessity. That word, in its other ac- 

 ceptations, involves much more than mere uniformity of sequence: it im-j 

 plies irresistibleness. Applied to the will, it only means that the givenjj 

 cause will be followed by the effect, subject to all possibilities of counter, 

 action by other causes ; but in common use it stands for the operation oi 

 those causes exclusively which are supposed too powerful to be countei]^ 

 acted at all. When we say that all human actions take place of necessitj 

 we only mean that they will certainly happen if nothing prevents; when 

 we say that dying of want, to those who can not get food, is a necessity, 

 we mean that it will certainly happen whatever may be done to prevent it. 

 The application of the same term to the agencies on which human actions 

 depend, as is used to express those agencies of natuie which are really im- 

 controllable, can not fail, when habitual, to create a feeling of uncontrol- 

 lableness in the former also. This, however, is a mere illusion. There are 

 physical sequences which we call necessary, as death for want of food or 

 air ; there are others which, though as much cases of causation as the for- 

 mer, are not said to be necessary, as death from poison, which an antidote, 

 or the use of the stomach-pump, will sometimes avert. It is apt to be for- 

 gotten 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, there- 

 fore, on which action depends, are never uncontrollable; and any given ef- 

 fect is only necessary provided that the causes tending to produce it are 

 not controlled. That whatever happens, could not have happened other- 

 wise, 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 Neces- 

 sity is to use the term in a sense so different from its primitive and famil- 

 iar 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 



