Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn,
Kind nature the embryo blossom shall save;
But when shall spring visit the mouldering urn!
Oh, when shall it dawn on the night of the grave!
Indeed, the natural evidences of a future state were never conceived by any reasonable defender of the doctrine, to be of themselves satisfactory and conclusive.[70] They were never deemed of more value than to produce a probable expectation of a state of future rewards and punishments, and they are certainly contradicted by the known facts relating to the origin, the growth, and decline of the human faculties. Bishop Porteus has collected these arguments, and stated them with as much force as his moderate abilities would permit; but by far the best summary of what has been urged on this as well as on almost every important question of morals and metaphysics, will be found in Mr. Belsham’s Elements of the Philosophy of Mind. An excellent compendium, by a gentleman, to whom next to Mr. Lindsey, Dr. Priestley appears to have been more attached than to any other.
[70] Dr. Priestley in his observations on the increase of infidelity published at Northumberland, has a passage which would seem to intimate that a future state might be clearly made out by the light of nature (p. 59, 60) but this is certainly inadvertency, and by no means conformable to his constant, deliberate, sentiments on that subject as expressed particularly in his Institutes.
The SECOND part of the Disquisitions on Matter and Spirit, contains a discussion of the long contested and confused question of Liberty and Necessity.
Dr. Priestley is right in his opinion that this question was not understood by the ancients, nor perhaps before the time of Hobbes: Long ago it appeared to me, that the only writer among the schoolmen who had touched upon it, was Bradwardine in his Book De causà Dei, which I regret that I have no opportunity of consulting here. Many of his observations are extracted by Toplady in his treatise on Liberty and Necessity, and in his life of Zanchius; but Toplady like Edwards, did not completely understand the question; they connected the doctrine of necessity with all the bigotry of Calvinism.
Hobbes in his Leviathan, and in his reply to Bramhall on liberty and necessity in his Tripos, first truly stated the subject, and shewed that the question was, not whether we can do what we will, but whether the will itself, (i. e. choice, preference, inclination, desire, aversion,) is not inevitably determined by motives not in the power or controul of the agent.
Hartley’s book, however, shews, or rather leads to the conclusion, that these motives are twofold, ab extra and ab intra. The action depending on the compound force of the motives ab extra, and the physical state of the animal organs at the moment. For the latter is frequently of itself an immediate cause of voluntary action.