FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 



457 



self, were in his senses ? Yet Montaigne, in support of this hypothesis, 

 has actually supposed such a fact, and has put forth the following whim- 

 sical or facetious example : " Where the mind," says he, is at the same 

 time equally influenced by two equal desires, it is certain it can never 

 comply with either of them, because a consent and preference would 

 evince a dissimilarity in their value. If a man should chance to be placed 

 between a bottle of wine and a Westphaha ham, with an equal inclina- 

 tion to eat and to drink, there could, in this case, be no possible remedy ; 

 and by the law of necessity he must die either of hunger or thirst. The 

 Stoics, therefore," continues he, " who were most rigidly attached to the 

 doctrine of fatalism, when asked how the mind determines when two ob- 

 jects of^equal desire are presented to it, or what is the reason, that out of 

 a number of crown pieces it selects one rather than another, there being 

 no motive to excite a preference, reply, that this action of the mind is ex- 

 traordinary and irregular, and proceeds from an impulse equally irregular 

 and fortuitous. But it would be better," continues Montaigne, " in my es- 

 timation, to maintain that no two objects can be presented to us so per- 

 fectly equal, but that some trifling difference may subsist, and some small 

 superiority be discoverable either in the one or the other." 



And no doubt it would be better to maintain such a position ; but, who 

 does not see that this is to give up the question ? to renounce the point 

 upon which we are at issue, and openly to confess that there does not 

 exist in the moral world the same counterpoise of cause and cause that 

 is to be perpetually met with in the natural. 



Let us confine ourselves to one more example. A cannon-ball, dis- 

 charged from the centre of a circle, and equally attracted to the north 

 and to the east, will proceed towards neither point ; but at an angle of 

 221 degrees, or immediately between the two. But is there any one, un- 

 incumbered with a strait waistcoat, who can suppose that such a rule has 

 any application to the motive powers of the mind ? who can conceive, 

 that a man starting at Blackfriar's Bridge, and having business so equally 

 urgent at Highgate and Mile-end, that he is incapable of determining to 

 which place he shall proceed first, would proceed to neither, but take a 

 I course between the two, and walk in a straight line to Hackney or New- 

 ington Green ? Yet, unless he should thus act, not occasionally, or by 

 accident, but uniformly, and at all times, there is not in the mind the same 

 law of operation, the same sort of necessity, as in matter ; but a some- 

 thing, whatever it may be, produced and designed to produce an irrecon- 

 cilable distinction ; and, in the correct language of the Epicurean phi- 

 losophers, perpetually labouring to prevent the same blind force from 

 vanquishing the one as it leads captive the other : 



' Ne mens ipsa necessura 



Inteslinum habeat cunctis in rebns agundis, 



Et devicta quasi, cogatur ferre, patiqtje.* 



Lest the naind 

 Bend to a stern necessity within, 

 And, like a slave, determine but by force. 



But we are told, that unless the moral world were thus constituted, 

 there could be no mutual confidence between man and man ; no series 

 of actions could be depended upon, and it would be impossible to distin- 



* T»e Rer. Nat. ii, 289. 

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