Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/173

Rh against his conclusions. For a given or compulsatory existence can never be free in any of its acts. It can merely serve to conduct the activity transmitted to it from other quarters; and the peculiar inflections, whatever these may be, whether to evil or to good, which it may appear to give to that activity, cannot be owing to any original or underived power it possesses, but must depend upon its natural construction, just as a prism has no power in itself to refract this way or that the rays of light which pass through it, but is determined to this refraction by the particular angles into which, without being consulted, it was at first cut by the hand of its artificer. In point of fact, the activity of such a being is no activity at all, but pure passivity; for a derivative act is not properly action, but passion. In merely receiving and passing on an act, a creature is not an agent, but a patient. Such a creature, bringing nothing original into the field, cannot, in any sense, be said either to operate or co-operate. All its doings being derivative, are done for it or necessitated; therefore it is free in nothing, and, by the same consequence, must remain devoid of morality and responsibility.

The usual reasoning on this subject, therefore, being utterly fatal to the cause of Human Liberty, we have endeavoured, in the foregoing chapter, to lay the groundwork of a new line of argument; the only argument by which, in our opinion, the conclusions of the Necessitarian can be met and disproved.