482 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



neither is any such mysterious compulsion now sup- 

 posed, by the best philosophical authorities, to be 

 exercised by any cause over its effect. Those who 

 think that causes draw their effects after them by a 

 mystical tie, are right in believing that the relation 

 between volitions and their antecedents is of another 

 nature. But they should go farther, and admit that 

 this is also true of all other effects and their antece- 

 dents. If such a tie is considered to be involved in 

 the word necessity, the doctrine is not true of human 

 actions; but neither is it then true of inanimate ob- 

 jects. It would be more correct to say that matter is 

 not bound by necessity than that mind is so. 



That the free-will philosophers, being mostly of the 

 school which rejects Hume's and Brown's analysis of 

 Cause and Effect, should miss their way for want of 

 the light which that analysis affords, cannot surprise 

 us. The wonder is, that the necessarians, who usually 

 admit that philosophical theory, should in practice 

 equally lose sight of it. The very same misconception 

 of the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity, which 

 prevents the opposite party from recognising its truth, 

 I believe to exist more or less obscurely in the minds 

 of most necessarians, however they may in words 

 disavow it. I am much mistaken if they habitually 

 feel that the necessity which they recognise in ac- 

 tions .is but uniformity of order, and capability of being 

 predicted. They have a feeling as if there were at 

 bottom a stronger tie between the volitions and their 

 causes : as if, when they asserted that our will is go- 

 verned by the balance of motives, they meant some- 

 thing more cogent than if they had only said, that 

 whoever knew the motives, and our habitual suscep- 

 tibilities to them, could predict how we should will to 

 act. They commit, in opposition to their own philo- 



