Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/234

224 destiny of our species, and at the same time to carry ourselves still deeper into the philosophy of human consciousness.

To do good and sin not, is the great end of man; and, accordingly, we find him at his first creation stored with every provision for well-doing. But that this is his great end can only be admitted with the qualification that it is to do good freely; for every being which is forced to perform its allotted task is a mere tool or machine, whether the work it performs be a work of good or a work of evil. If, therefore, man does good by the compulsion of others, or under the constraining force of his own natural biases, he is but an automaton, and deserves no more credit for his actings than a machine of this kind does; just as he is also an automaton if he be driven into courses of evil by outward forces which he cannot resist, or by the uncontrollable springs of his own natural framework. But man will be admitted, by all right thinkers, to be not a mere automaton. But then, according to the same thinkers, man is a created being; and, therefore, the question comes to be, how can a created being be other than an automaton? Creation implies predetermination, and predetermination implies that all the springs and biases of the created being tend one way (the way predetermined), and that it has no power of its own to turn them into any other than this one channel, whatever it may be. How, then, is it possible for such a being to do either good or evil freely, or to act