222 HUME X 



stroys responsibility ; that, as it is usually put, we 

 have no right to praise or blame actions that can- 

 not be helped. Hume's reply amounts to this, 

 that the very idea of responsibility implies the 

 belief in the necessary connexion of certain 

 actions with certain states of the mind. A person 

 is held responsible only for those acts which are 

 preceded by a certain intention ; and, as we can- 

 not see, or hear, or feel, an intention, we can only 

 reason out its existence on the principle that like 

 effects have like causes. 



If a man is found by the police busy with 

 "jemmy" and dark lantern at a jeweller's shop 

 door over night, the magistrate before whom he is 

 brought the next morning, reasons from those 

 effects to their causes in the fellow's burglarious 

 ideas and volitions, with perfect confidence, and 

 punishes him accordingly. And it is quite clear 

 that such a proceeding would be grossly unjust, if 

 the links of the logical process were other than 

 necessarily connected together. The advocate 

 who should attempt to get the man off on the 

 plea that his client need not necessarily have had 

 a felonious intent, would hardly waste his time 

 more, if he tried to prove that the sum of all the 

 angles of a triangle is not two right angles, but 

 three. 



A man's moral responsibility for his acts has, in 

 fact, nothing to do with the causation of these 

 acts, but depends on the frame of mind which 



