Page:A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (Foote).djvu/49

 or any of the more subtle animals, nor the actions of children, which are allowed by the advocates of Liberty to be all necessary. I shall only ask these questions concerning the last. To what age do children continue necessary agents, and when do they become free? What different experience have they when they are supposed to be free agents from what they had while necessary agents? And what different actions do they do from whence it appears that they are necessary agents to a certain age, and free agents afterwards?

 

II. A second reason to prove man a necessary agent is because all his actions have a beginning. For whatever has a beginning must have a cause, and every cause is a necessary cause.

If anything can have a beginning which has no cause, then nothing can produce something. And if nothing can produce something, then the world might have had a beginning without a cause; which is not only an absurdity commonly charged on Atheists, but is a real absurdity in itself.

Besides, if a cause be not a necessary cause, it is no cause at all. For if causes are not necessary causes, then causes are not suited to, or are indifferent to effects; and the Epicurean System of chance is rendered possible; and this orderly world might have been produced by a disorderly or fortuitous concourse of atoms; or which is all one, by no cause at all. For in arguing against the Epicurean system of chance, do we not say (and that justly) that it is impossible for chance ever to have produced an orderly system of things, as not being a cause suited to the effect; and that an orderly system of things which had a beginning, must have had an intelligent agent 