Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/121

 of sight, but it still remains. The argument of the modern Necessarians, contained in the treatise of Edwards, takes for granted the inconceivable hypothesis of an infinite series of derived causes; for the Divine volitions, in common with all acts of created will, are conceived as links in an endless chain of antecedents and consequents. The defenders of this necessity easily prove the self-contradiction of that counter-hypothesis, which explains freedom by means of what is virtually either an infinite series of self-determinations, or else a series which ultimately merges in a necessity that is outside of the will. But on the latter, which is the selected alternative, they virtually assert the existence of an infinite series of derived causes in the universe, in order to account for the acts of will which constitute a part of the phenomena of the universe. Now this hypothesis is in itself as inconceivable as that of the self-origination of volitions, and has besides been proved contradictory and absurd in various of the arguments in behalf of the first principles of natural theology.

The modern Necessarians, represented by Edwards, have thus failed, even by means of the accumulation of ingenious and conclusive argument which they have produced, to raise this problem, regarding responsible actions, out of the region of the insoluble. The application of the theory of causation which they have made, is sufficient for a relative explanation of the phenomena