198:—
Necessity! thou mother of the world!
He who asserts the doctrine of Necessity means that, contemplating the
events which compose the moral and material universe, he beholds only an
immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effects, no one of which
could occupy any other place than it does occupy, or act in any other
place than it does act. The idea of necessity is obtained by our
experience of the connection between objects, the uniformity of the
operations of nature, the constant conjunction of similar events, and
the consequent inference of one from the other. Mankind are therefore
agreed in the admission of necessity, if they admit that these two
circumstances take place in voluntary action. Motive is to voluntary
action in the human mind what cause is to effect in the material
universe. The word liberty, as applied to mind, is analogous to the word
chance as applied to matter: they spring from an ignorance of the
certainty of the conjunction of antecedents and consequents.
Every human being is irresistibly impelled to act precisely as he does
act: in the eternity which preceded his birth a chain of causes was
generated, which, operating under the name of motives, make it
impossible that any thought of his mind, or any action of his life,
should be otherwise than it is. Were the doctrine of Necessity false,
the human mind would no longer be a legitimate object of science; from
like causes it would be in vain that we should expect like effects; the
strongest motive would no longer be paramount over the conduct; all
knowledge would be vague and undeterminate; we could not predict with
any certainty that we might not meet as an enemy to-morrow him with whom
we have parted in friendship to-night; the most probable inducements and
the clearest reasonings would lose the invariable influence they
possess. The contrary of this is demonstrably the fact. Similar
circumstances produce the same unvariable effects. The precise character
and motives of any man on any occasion being given, the moral
philosopher could predict his actions with as much certainty as the
natural philosopher could predict the effects of the mixture of any
particular chemical substances. Why is the aged husbandman more
experienced than the young beginner? Because there is a uniform,
undeniable necessity in the operations of the material universe. Why is
the old statesman more skilful than the raw politician) Because, relying
on the necessary conjunction of motive and action, he proceeds to
produce moral effects, by the application of those moral causes which
experience has shown to be effectual. Some actions may be found to which
we can attach no motives, but these are the effects of causes with which
we are unacquainted. Hence the relation which motive bears to voluntary
action is that of cause to effect; nor, placed in this point of view, is
it, or ever has it been, the subject of popular or philosophical
dispute. None but the few fanatics who are engaged in the herculean task
of reconciling the justice of their God with the misery of man, will
longer outrage common sense by the supposition of an event without a
cause, a voluntary action without a motive. History, politics, morals,
criticism, all grounds of reasonings, all principles of science, alike
assume the truth of the doctrine of Necessity. No farmer carrying his
corn to market doubts the sale of it at the market price. The master of
a manufactory no more doubts that he can purchase the human labour
necessary for his purposes than that his machinery will act as they have
been accustomed to act.
But, whilst none have scrupled to admit necessity as influencing matter,
many have disputed its dominion over mind. Independently of its
militating with the received ideas of the justice of God, it is by no
means obvious to a superficial inquiry. When the mind observes its own
operations, it feels no connection of motive and action: but as we know
‘nothing more of causation than the constant conjunction of objects and
the consequent inference of one from the other, as we find that these
two circumstances are universally allowed to have place in voluntary
action, we may be easily led to own that they are subjected to the
necessity common to all causes.’ The actions of the will have a regular
conjunction with circumstances and characters; motive is to voluntary
action what cause is to effect. But the only idea we can form of
causation is a constant conjunction of similar objects, and the
consequent inference of one from the other: wherever this is the case
necessity is clearly established.
The idea of liberty, applied metaphorically to the will, has sprung from
a misconception of the meaning of the word power. What is power?—id
quod potest, that which can produce any given effect. To deny power is
to say that nothing can or has the power to be or act. In the only true
sense of the word power, it applies with equal force to the lodestone as
to the human will. Do you think these motives, which I shall present,
are powerful enough to rouse him? is a question just as common as, Do
you think this lever has the power of raising this weight? The advocates
of free-will assert that the will has the power of refusing to be
determined by the strongest motive; but the strongest motive is that
which, overcoming all others, ultimately prevails; this assertion
therefore amounts to a denial of the will being ultimately determined by
that motive which does determine it, which is absurd. But it is equally
certain that a man cannot resist the strongest motive as that he cannot
overcome a physical impossibility.
The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the
established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion. Reward
and punishment must be considered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives
which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandonment of
any given line of conduct. Desert, in the present sense of the word,
would no longer have any meaning; and he who should inflict pain upon
another for no better reason than that he deserved it, would only
gratify his revenge under pretence of satisfying justice? It is not
enough, says the advocate of free-will, that a criminal should be
prevented from a repetition of his crime: he should feel pain, and his
torments, when justly inflicted, ought precisely to be proportioned to
his fault. But utility is morality; that which is incapable of producing
happiness is useless; and though the crime of Damiens must be condemned,
yet the frightful torments which revenge, under the name of justice,
inflicted on this unhappy man cannot be supposed to have augmented, even
at the long run, the stock of pleasurable sensation in the world. At the
same time, the doctrine of Necessity does not in the least diminish our
disapprobation of vice. The conviction which all feel that a viper is a
poisonous animal, and that a tiger is constrained, by the inevitable
condition of his existence, to devour men, does not induce us to avoid
them less sedulously, or, even more, to hesitate in destroying them: but
he would surely be of a hard heart who, meeting with a serpent on a
desert island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury,
should wantonly deprive it of existence. A Necessarian is inconsequent
to his own principles if he indulges in hatred or contempt; the
compassion which he feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of
injuring him: he looks with an elevated and dreadless composure upon the
links of the universal chain as they pass before his eyes; whilst
cowardice, curiosity, and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to
the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and
rejected the delusions of free-will.
Religion is the perception of the relation in which we stand to the
principle of the universe. But if the principle of the universe be not
an organic being, the model and prototype of man, the relation between
it and human beings is absolutely none. Without some insight into its
will respecting our actions religion is nugatory and vain. But will is
only a mode of animal mind; moral qualities also are such as only a
human being can possess; to attribute them to the principle of the
universe is to annex to it properties incompatible with any possible
definition of its nature. It is probable that the word God was
originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known
events which men perceived in the universe. By the vulgar mistake of a
metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man,
endowed with human qualities and governing the universe as an earthly
monarch governs his kingdom. Their addresses to this imaginary being,
indeed, are much in the same style as those of subjects to a king. They
acknowledge his benevolence, deprecate his anger, and supplicate his
favour.
But the doctrine of Necessity teaches us that in no case could any event
have happened otherwise than it did happen, and that, if God is the
author of good, He is also the author of evil; that, if He is entitled
to our gratitude for the one, He is entitled to our hatred for the
other; that, admitting the existence of this hypothetic being, He is
also subjected to the dominion of an immutable necessity. It is plain
that the same arguments which prove that God is the author of food,
light, and life, prove Him also to be the author of poison, darkness,
and death. The wide-wasting earthquake, the storm, the battle, and the
tyranny, are attributable to this hypothetic being in the same degree as
the fairest forms of nature, sunshine, liberty, and peace.
But we are taught, by the doctrine of Necessity, that there is neither
good nor evil in the universe, otherwise than as the events to which we
apply these epithets have relation to our own peculiar mode of being.
Still less than with the hypothesis of a God will the doctrine of
Necessity accord with the belief of a future state of punishment. God
made man such as he is, and than damned him for being so: for to say
that God was the author of all good, and man the author of all evil, is
to say that one man made a straight line and a crooked one, and another
man made the incongruity.
A Mahometan story, much to the present purpose, is recorded, wherein
Adam and Moses are introduced disputing before God in the following
manner. Thou, says Moses, art Adam, whom God created, and animated with
the breath of life, and caused to be worshipped by the angels, and
placed in Paradise, from whence mankind have been expelled for thy
fault. Whereto Adam answered, Thou art Moses, whom God chose for His
apostle, and entrusted with His word, by giving thee the tables of the
law, and whom He vouchsafed to admit to discourse with Himself. How many
years dost thou find the law was written before I was created? Says
Moses, Forty. And dost thou not find, replied Adam, these words therein,
And Adam rebelled against his Lord and transgressed? Which Moses
confessing, Dost thou therefore blame me, continued he, for doing that
which God wrote of me that I should do, forty years before I was
created, nay, for what was decreed concerning me fifty thousand years
before the creation of heaven and earth?—Sale’s “Prelim. Disc. to the
Koran”, page 164.