[25] A highly esteemed literary friend, who has done me the favour of looking over these pages in manuscript, considers that what I have proved is, not that Omnipotence involves the co-existence of Freewill and Necessity, but that Omnipotence itself, although capable of possessing all things, could not possess Freewill, and that consequently Freewill cannot possibly exist—that there cannot possibly be any such thing.
Although, for reasons stated four pages back, not myself prepared to accept this view of the matter, I should cheerfully accept it if I could. The argument in the text proceeds upon the assumption that people mean something when they talk about Freewill. If, however, they have no meaning, if the phrase be a simple sound signifying nothing, of course all controversy regarding the possible co-existence of that nothing with Necessity is settled at once and for ever, while no great amount of philosophy will be requisite to induce mankind to resign themselves very placidly to the absence of that same nothing.
[26] Mill's 'Logic.' Fifth edition. Vol. ii. p. 527.
[27] Mill's 'Logic,' vol. ii. p. 504.
[28] 'S'il se fût trouvé alors (vers 1750) sur le trône un prince de la taille et de l'humeur du Grand Frédéric, je ne doute point qu'il n'eût accompli dans la société et dans le gouvernement plusieurs des plus grands changements que la Révolution y a faits, non-seulement sans perdre sa couronne, mais en augmentant beaucoup son pouvoir.'—De Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime, p. 274.
[29] Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. By James Mill. Edition of 1869, with Notes by Alexander Bain, Andrew Findlater, George Grote, and John Stuart Mill, vol. i. pp. 78 et seq.
[30] Mill's 'Logic.' 5th Edition. Vol. i. p. 377.
[31] 'There is a class of animals called Ascidians, which possess a heart and a circulation, and up to the year 1824 no one would have dreamt of questioning the propriety of the deduction, that these creatures have a circulation in one definite and invariable direction; nor would any one have thought it worth while to verify the point. But in that year M. von Hasselt, happening to examine a transparent animal of this class, found to his infinite surprise that after the heart had beat a certain number of times, it stopped, and then began beating the opposite way, so as to reverse the course of the current, which returned by-and-by to its original direction.'—Huxley's Lay Sermons, p. 95.
[32] Archimède, pour tirer le globe terrestre de sa place et le transporter en un autre lieu, ne demandait rien qu'un point qui fût ferme et immobile: ainsi j'aurai droit de concevoir de hautes espérances si je suis assez heureux pour trouver seulement une chose qui soit certaine et indubitable.—Descartes, Méditation Deuxième.
[33] Lay Sermons, xiv. 'On Descartes' Discourse;' also an article by Professor Huxley, on 'Berkeley and the Metaphysics of Sensation,' in 'Macmillan's Magazine' for June, 1871.