You indeed mean well; but do you not perceive that on your own principles all your zeal and eloquence must necessarily have an opposite effect from what you intend? My affections not being in correlation with these subjects, the more you urge them, the more intense becomes my sense of the most disagreeable, or my positive refusal; and this, my good friends, by a necessity which holds us all alike in an inevitable and ever-during chain.
It is plainly impossible to escape from this conclusion, and yet maintain the philosophy. All efforts of this kind, made by appealing to the common sentiments of mankind, we have seen are self-contradictory. It will not do to press forward the philosophy until involved in difficulty and perplexity, and then to step aside and borrow arguments from another system which is assumed to be overthrown. There is no necessity more absolute and sovereign, than a logical necessity.[3]
XVIII. The cardinal principles of Edwards’s system in the sections we have been examining, from which the above consequences are deduced, are the three following:
1. The will is always determined by the strongest motive.
2. The strongest motive is always “the most agreeable.”
3. The will is necessarily determined.
I shall close this part of the present treatise with a brief examination of the reasoning by which he endeavours to establish these points.
The reasoning by which the first point is aimed to be established, is the general reasoning respecting cause and effect. Volition is an effect, and must have a cause. Its cause is the motive lying in the correlation of mind and object. When several physical causes conflict with each other, we call that the strongest which prevails and produces its appropriate effects, to the exclusion of the others. So also where there are several moral causes or motives conflicting with each other, we call that the strongest which prevails. Where a physical cause is not opposed by any other force, it of course produces its effect; and in this case we do not say the strongest cause produces the effect, because there is no comparison. So also there are cases in which there is but one moral cause or motive present, when there being no comparison, we cannot affirm that the volition is determined by the strongest motive: the doing of something may be entirely agreeable, and the not doing of it may be utterly disagreeable: in this case the motive is only for the doing of it. But wherever the case contains a comparison of causes or of motives, it must be true that the effect which actually takes place, is produced by the strongest cause or motive. This indeed is nothing more than a truism, or a mere postulate, as if we should say,—let a cause or motive producing effects be called the strongest. It may be represented, also, as a petitio principii, or reasoning in a circle,—since the proof that the will is determined by the strongest motive is no other than the fact that it is determined. It may be stated thus: The will is determined by the strongest motive. How do you know this? Because it is determined. How does this prove it? Because that which determines it must be the strongest.[4]
Edwards assumes, also, that motive is the cause of volition. This assumption he afterwards endeavours indirectly to sustain, when he argues against a self-determining will. If the will do not cause its own volitions, then it must follow that motive is the cause. The argument against a self-determining will we are about to take up.
2. The strongest motive is always the most agreeable. Edwards maintains that the motive which always prevails to cause volition, has this characteristic,—that it is the most agreeable or pleasant at the time, and that volition itself is nothing but the sense of the most agreeable. If there should be but one motive present to the mind, as in that case there would be no comparison, we presume he would only say that the will is determined by the agreeable.